Does google see the keyword "e cig" and "e-cig" as the same word? on MOZ it shows that they have a totally different amount of search quarries.

[smokingllc]

does google see the keyword "e cig" and "e-cig" as the same word? on MOZ it shows that they have a totally different amount of search quarries.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

There's a really easy way to find out.  Type e-gig into google and then if the results have ecig in bold in the meta descriptions then google considers it to be the same word.

This is HUGE for my niche which is dentistry.  I recently made an article about dental crowns and wondered should I call them dental 'caps' because it says in another of the tools I use that more people search for dental 'caps' than dental 'crowns'.  In fact they are slightly different things but lo and behold, google sees them as the same thing because there's caps in bold when I type crowns and crowns in bold when I type caps.

Rankbrain is getting smarter and smarter and Gary from google I think released a video about punctuation and compound words.  So 'six year old', 'six-year-old' and '6 year-old' and '6-year old' are good ones to test it out on.  You can see what google thinks are the same.  Likewise using TM and R after words doesn't matter.

So if you write an article for E-cig and then another for Ecig they are going to cannibalise or internally compete with one another.  I had the same problem with '6 month smiles' and 'six month smiles'.  The best solution is to use the words interchangeably and write at the level of your audience and write NATURALLY.  Google is getting really smart and you need to forget the semantics and get down to writing detailed and really readable content that people want to spend time reading.

There are some great tools like 'Answer the public' and 'LSI graph' that can also help you find other words people are using.  they scrape from google so all the results are just what rankbrain and google is thinking right now.

[JohnMondt]

I would look at the research before I do anything. Try looking them both up on Google and comparing what you get. For example, when I look up "e cig" vs. "e-cig", I get different results. Some of them are the same, but I also see unique sites in one against the other.

The search volume is where you should focus as well. Make sure that both receive significant search volume that is worth your time. If nobody is searching one variation, there is no point in optimizing for it. Best of luck to you mate!

[JamieCMF]

I usually find the best way to check is by Googling them both and comparing the results.

Hyphens and special characters often confuse tools that show volume, so they're shown as different entities but in practice Google usually knows that the two variations mean the same thing and so usually turn up the same results.