When the Plural has more traffic, but the singular makes much more sense. What to do?
-
Hey everyone! This is actually the first time I ever posted a question here on MOZ! Guess I was (still am) embarrassed by being an SEO Noob!
That being said, I really have to get some input on this matter and i was wondering if you guys might be able to help.
I'm optimizing a page for a wedding venue in Portugal. Currently, according to google trends the Plural - Venues for weddings, scores considerably better than the Singular, Venue for weddings(this was researched in Portuguese written terms of course). Despite this, i'm leaning towards an optimization for the Singular term, because the plural seems to un-natural to fit in the content, or title. I managed to fit the Plural in the description but i've read that it hasn't influenced rank directly for a while.
Currently my title tag reads: Venue for Weddings | Name of the Venue. I really can't find anyway that it makes sense to me in the Plural... and i feel like if i was a user, i would rather click on the singular term cause it just makes a lot more sense. But my opinion is most probably biased by the fact that i understand that using the plural term will be solemnly an SEO effort to rank higher for a term that has more average searches per month.
My question is: In the current state of search algorithms, will an optimization for the singular term, still get me some rank on the plural key phrase?
Let me know what you think about this please, and thank you in advance for your time.
Most Respectfully,
Martim Coutinho dos Santos
-
Consider creating a page on your site for both terms. Weddings are a big deal for people and ultimately, they are going to book a venue that they love and relate to. If you have a great venue, you shouldn't be afraid to list a few other venues (perhaps not your primary competitors) that are good alternatives. Perhaps you could even make a referral arrangement with them and earn some income from people who book their venues from your page.
- Your home page could target the singular, Wedding Venue term - and of course highlight your venue.
- An additional page would be created to highlight the plural, Venues for Weddings, and the content would focus on the Top Venues in your city.
It's a great chance for you to highlight what is special about your venue and deliver value to the searchers of either term.
-
I have stopped thinking about singular and plural. Stopped a couple years ago.
Now I just word my title tags like the average person talks, trying to say something that makes 'em click... and then deliver the best content possible when they land.
Title tags are still really important but google, I believe, will favor natural language and good content way over keyword stuffin' and optimizin'.
-
Ha, yeah. This job would be so easy if only clients weren't a factor. The ones that listen are always the ones that have more success.
Good luck convincing your client. Keep your cool, it can be frustrating when clients force you to let them shoot themselves in the foot. This is because once their foot is bleeding, they're going to blame you for the pain.
-
Thanks for the quick answer!
I really get what you're saying and share your opinion! I think the user's POV is always the best when it comes to this kind of decisions. Unfortunately, the client doesn't think the same cause someone told him that "Venues" is "da bomb" because it has the most searches per month.. And here in Portugal people still think that SEO is just supposed to get you on the first page, and it stops there. Clients don't want to know about traffic conversion, they just care if they rank higher than their "neighbor".. My guess would be that this is a common issue with clients in this industry, but again, I'm still an SEO Noob
Hopefully and with some patience and educating i can make him see what he really needs to be concerned about!
Once again, many thanks for taking the time to answer!
Respectfully,
Martim Santos
-
Imagine you are a user. If you're searching the singular, you're probably looking for a SERP with websites of single venue locations to browse through. If you were searching the plural, you're probably looking for websites that aggregate, list, rank or otherwise provide you with a predetermined group of venues. So, if you are a single venue trying to rank for "venues" you're always going to struggle against those sites that naturally use the plural.
With that said, yes, optimizing for a singular will usually give you some juice for the plural as well, but not as much. If you're starting from scratch, I would recommend going for the lower competition, more relevant key term first.
And remember, more traffic doesn't always mean more results. Targeting keywords without the proper searcher intent is going to get you traffic that doesn't convert.
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
-
Does using a reverse proxy to make a subdomain appear as a subdirectory affect SEO?
Using a reverse proxy only makes it appear that a subdomain is really a subfolder. However, links in the end remain the same. Does this have any negative (or positive) impact on SEO? Does it make it difficult from the blog's (subdomain's) sitemap or robots.txt file to be properly read by search engines?
Technical SEO | | rodelmo41 -
Internal duplicated content on articles, when is too much?
I have an automotive rental blog with articles that explain the pros of renting a specific model. So in this articles the advantages of rental versus the buying of a new model. This advantages are a list with bullets like this:
Technical SEO | | markovald
Rental | Buy new car
Rental:
Free car insurance
Free assistance
etc.
Buy new car
You have to pay insurance
You have to pay assistance
etc. etc. I want to do this because i want to make all articles like landing pages...
This "advantages box" have 100 characters. The general length of articles on my blog is 500/600 characters. So i have an average of 15/20% internal duplicated content on all my articles. Is this bad for seo? Any alternatives?0 -
How much time for re-indexing ?
I was just checking Google Webmaster tools and I found 102 duplicate title pages. Just fixed them all now.
Technical SEO | | monali123
Shall I re-submit the site map again or how do we tell Google about the changes and then how much time does it take for them to clear SERPS cache and re-index re-count ?0 -
How long does it take for traffic to bounce back from and accidental robots.txt disallow of root?
We accidentally uploaded a robots.txt disallow root for all agents last Tuesday and did not catch the error until yesterday.. so 6 days total of exposure. Organic traffic is down 20%. Google has since indexed the correct version of the robots.txt file. However, we're still seeing awful titles/descriptions in the SERPs and traffic is not coming back. GWT shows that not many pages were actually removed from the index but we're still seeing drastic rankings decreases. Anyone been through this? Any sort of timeline for a recovery? Much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bheard0 -
Is it a good idea to make 301 from a site which you know google has banned certain keywords for to a new site with similar content
Here is a short question re. 301. I read Dovers article on how to move an old domain to a new one. Say you have been a little inexperienced regarding linkbuilding and used some cheap service in the past and you have steadily seen that certain keywords have been depreciating in the SERP - however the PR is still 3 for the domain - now the qustion is should you rediect with a 301 in .htaccess to a new domain when you know that google does not like certain keywords with respect to the old site. Will the doom and gloom carry over to the new site?
Technical SEO | | Kofoed0 -
Is there any evidence that using Google Site Search will help your ranking, speed of indexing, or traffic?
I am considering using Google Site Search on our new site. I was told... "We have also seen a bump in traffic for sites when using Google Site Search because Google indexes the site more often (they claim using the paid Google Site Search has no effect on search rankings but we have also seen bumps in rankings after using it so that may just be what they have to say legally)." Is there any evidence of this? Would you recommend using Google Site Search? Thanks David
Technical SEO | | DavidButler710 -
Traffic has dropped from my site.
Hello, I never had amazing traffic, but during the last week my site seems to have almost dropped of search engines. Nothing drastic has changed during this time that I can see would have caused this. The site is http://www.comparebestodds.com Does any one have any ideas that can help? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jwdesign0 -
SEO advice when making a mobile site
Hi there, I'm current working on a site that is optimized for SEO and doing quite well in the rankings. We have noticed a big increase in mobile users to the site (mainly iOS and Android), so we have no started planning a mobile site as well. Do you guys have any recommendations we should keep in mind before we get started? One thing I'm still not sure of is whether we should aim to preserve all urls and cloak the pages (show mobile version to iOS and Android, and desktop version to everyone else) OR make a separate site for the mobile version (mobile.domain.com)? Would either solution affect the other? Regards,
Technical SEO | | KennethDreyer
Kenneth0