Googles Search Intent – Plural & Singular KW’s

[Webpresence]

This is more of a ‘gripe’ than a question, but I would love to hear people’s views.

Typically, when you search for a product using the singular and plural versions of the keyword Google delivers different SERPs.

As an example, ‘leather handbag’ and ‘leather handbags’ return different results, but surely the search intent is exactly the same?

You’d have thought Google was now clever enough to work this out.

We tend to optimise our webpages for both the plural and singular variations of the KW’s, but see a mixed bag of results when analysing rankings.

Is Google trying to force us to create a unique webpage for the singular version, and another unique webpage for the plural version? This would confuse the visitor, and make no sense.. the search intent is the same!

How do you combat this problem?

Many thanks in advance.

Lee.

[Moreleads]

Google wants us to believe they are presenting results based on intent and not keywords. In adwords google doesn´t even let us target singulars and plurals directly anymore and keyword search data is presented equal for both.

In practice i see however that a lot is still based on keywords, your example is one of them.

I think both have a similiar, if not same intent, so creating seperate pages doesn´t make sense in my opinion, we usually try to use these variations in the page content as some pages are able to rank for both.

[Alick300]

Hi Lee,

I use same page for both variation though I always try to optimize plural (it is just my view).

Please check these two old threads but still valid.

https://moz.com/community/q/singular-vs-plural-seo

https://moz.com/community/q/singular-and-plural-noun-keywords

Thanks