Should I optimise our products for Singlular and Plural?
-
I know this is an age old quesion, however i have read many posts that all have differing views. As a compnay we sell towels and bathrobes. All our products can be searched for in there singluar and plural, each getting in some cases unique traffic, however both would lead to somone looking to buy.
So the question in my case, if i am optimising pages for towels, should I also optimse title tags, meta descriptions and so on for the singluar as well? The luxury with most of our keyword phrases is that they can be incorperated nicely into descriptions in both plural and singluar.
-
So I am best of finding some phrases that are more targetd and going to pull in traffic with a higher conversion rate than wasting time on terms that as you say are going to near on impossible to rank for. Having said that top spot in the UK only has a DA of 43.
I think i'll focus on the terms that are more targeted rather than spending time optimising for keywords that are going to be tough to rank well for.
We do have a big update to teh site that going to give us functionality and something over the competition that will allow us to go after wholesale orders online which opens a massive door across many markets.
-
Presumably if I optimise for "buy towels" or "Bathroom Towels" There is still the possibility that i will rank well for towels/ towel I guess?
It's all relative. I define "ranking well" as appearing in the top 5 search results for a given keyword. For the most part, if you do not rank on the first page, you may as well not exist. There are exceptions. If you can attract 1% of the search volume for a term with a million searches per month, that is 10k hits which is a significant amount of traffic. You might gain that traffic with your position on page 2 of SERPs.
When I examine the results for "towel" and "towels" in Google.com, I see the Wiki result on the first page of both searches. The results are filled with very well known brands: target, macy's, amazon, home depot, bed bath and beyond, pottery barn, etc. The first result which does not have "towel" in the domain name that also does not have a DA of 8x+ is on the 3rd page. In order for you to reach the first page of SERPs you will frankly need to have a very well designed site, exceptional content, and earn links from quality sources.
-
OK, so looking at towel/ towels, towel is more aimed at information sources (wikipedia etc) so I am better to optimise for towels. Presumably if I optimise for "buy towels" or "Bathroom Towels" There is still the possibility that i will rank well for towels/ towel I guess?
-
In order to decide which form of the keyword is best, you need to perform keyword research. There are many factors involved.
Using Google's Keyword Tool you can gain a rough idea of the traffic for each keyword.
Towel = 1,500,000 monthly searches in Google.com US
Towels = 1,220,000
Bathrobe = 368,000
Bathrobes = 246,000
So the initial data indicates the singular versions would be best. But you need to go much further in your research. The next question is where would your optimized page appear in search results? It may be better to appear higher in SERPs for a result with lower traffic then the other way around.
With respect to your title tags, yes it is very important they are included in your optimization efforts. The meta description is not a ranking factor so your goal is to choose whatever text you feel will offer the best click-through-rate.
You should also consider a searcher's intent. A keyword such as "buy towels" is likely to have a much higher conversion rate then simply "towels".
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
WooCommere Canonical links relating to products and subscriptions
Hello, Thanks for taking the time to have a read of this, I'm not quite sure of the best way to address this issue. I have a WooCommerce site with Products and Subscriptions, i.e subscribe to buy the product monthly. Because of the way WooCommerce works these are effectively two different pages, for example: https://formnutrition.com/plant-based-nutrition/form-superblend-plant-based-vegan-protein/ and https://formnutrition.com/plant-based-nutrition/superblend-protein-subscription/ Since the second is just a Subscription of the first (Product) it's basically exactly the same content. I'm not sure if I should make the canonical link of the Subscription point to the Product? I would prefer that customers find the Product first and don't want Google to think this is duplicate content. On the other hand it's not strictly duplicate content as they are two different things? Is there any advice or best practice on how to handle this? Many thanks, Damian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | damo_form0 -
Automatically check if URL has been optimised?
Hi guys, I have a massive list of URLs and want to check if the primary keyword for each URL has been optimised. I'm looking for something similar to Moz on-page grader which grades the URL and primary keyword with a single metric e.g. grade a, b, c However, Moz doesn't offer an API to pull this score automatically. I was wondering does anyone know of any tools which you can access their API to do something like this? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Keyword Stuffing because of the product names
Hi Moz community, Since I have many products in most of my pages which have the targeted keyword in the product name I get the "Keyword Stuffing" error. Is it really considered as "Keyword Stuffing" by Google? In addition to the products, I have some texts containing the targeted keyword for the page and this makes the number of keywords used in a page even higher. Thank you for your answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onurcan-ikiz0 -
Related products & SEO
My company has a comprehensive set of historical images and text - hosted separately on a free museum site - it's currently displayed on our main site as an iframe. I realize the iframe brings no SEO juice to the site - but we are updating our site - and thinking of bringing the images and text to our site. I'm wondering if this could help or hurt us - the historical information is about "boat widgets" and we sell "car widgets" - could a lot of information about "boat widgets" dilute our "car widgets" seo ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasErb0 -
Product Pages & Panda 4.0
Greeting MOZ Community: I operate a real estate web site in New York City (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Of the 600 pages, about 350 of the URLs are product pages, written about specific listings. The content on these pages is quite short, sometimes only 20 words. My ranking has dropped very much since mid-May, around the time of the new Panda update. I suspect it has something to do with the very short product pages, the 350 listing pages. What is the best way to deal with these pages so as to recover ranking. I am considering these options: 1. Setting them to "no-index". But I am concerned that removing product pages is sending the wrong message to Google. 2. Enhancing the content and making certain that each page has at least 150-200 words. Re-writing 350 listings would be a real project, but if necessary to recover I will bite the bullet. What is the best way to address this issue? I am very surprised that Google does not understand that product URLs can be very brief and yet have useful content. Information about a potential office rental that lists location, size, price per square foot is valuable to the visitor but can be very brief. Especially listings that change frequently. So I am surprised by the penalty. Would I be better off not having separate URLs for the listings, and for instance adding them as posts within building pages? Is having separate URLs for product pages with minimal content a bad idea from an SEO perspective? Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can recover from this latest Panda penalty? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
How to rank product pages?
Hi guys, Please advice me on something improving my product pages ranking. We are doing well for head terms, categories but not ranking for product pages. We have issues with product pages which I am think is hard to tackle. For instance we have duplicate products (different colors), duplicate content internally (colors) and from manufacturer websites. Product pages linked from sub-category i.e. Home > Category > Sub-Category (20 per page) using pagination for next 20 and so on. Product pages linked internally via widgets that says other Similar products, featured products etc. Another issue with our product pages is that we are using third party reviews platform and whenever users add reviews to product pages this platform creates an hyperlink to different anchors which is not relevant to product. Example - http://goo.gl/NUG652 Can somebody please give some advice on how to improve rankings for product pages. writing unique content for thousands of pages is not possible. Even our competitor not writing unique content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webmaster_SEO0 -
Product Vartiations
I was having a discussion with someone (who doesn't work in SEO) today and they asked the question why don't you have seperate pages for product sizes? I answered with the line "it would make the site huge" but I have been giving it some thought and I was wondering what others think. The scenario is that you have a polo shirt in black, white and blue and in sizes small, medium and large which gives 9 variations (small black, medium black etc). Currently we have one page for each product with the variations available for selection. Would keeping the current system and having links to a seperate pages be a good or bad thing? So in the above example we would have the main page and then links to each of the variation pages. So what do you think - good or bad? Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve250 -
Ok to use rich snippets for same product on multiple pages?
I am developing a new set of pages for a series of products which exist on separate sub domains linked to the root domain. The product pages on the sub domains have rich snippets; review count, review score etc. The new pages im building out are for the same products though on the root domain and with different content. Im not comfortable marking those pages up with rich snippets too given they will have the same review counts, scores etc though would like to if its viable? Any thoughts/opinions? Thanks, Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0