To hyphenate or not to hyphenate?

[JCN-SBWD]

Quick question: does Google differentiate between terms that correctly include a hyphen (such as "royalty-free") and those that are incorrect ("royalty free")?

I ask because the correct term "royalty-free"(with a hyphen) receives far less monthly traffic for the same term without the hyphen (according to Moz):

Term | Estimated traffic
"royalty free music" | 11.5-30.3K
"royalty-free music" | 501-850

If Moz views the terms separately then I'd guess that Google does too, in which case the best thing to do for SEO (and increased site traffic) would be to wrongly use "royalty free" without the hyphen. Is that correct?

[Stramark]

you could always search in Google and compare the ranking of the page. If the same url's get there in the same order = no difference. If there is a difference you could consider using some variation on your site.

Most easy: use what you consider to be right en build great content. Google will find this very small difference out.

[konet]

Not trying to play it an expert.

From my experience, writing "royalty-free music" in your website will rank you for both "royalty-free music" and "royalty free music".

The opposite is not always true but i'm saying that having in mind forms such as "webhosting" and "web hosting". For instance, writing "webhosting" won't necessarily rank me as high as "web hosting" would.

Weird thing is that one particular SEO tool suggested us the use of the "webhosting" form too apart from "web hosting" (which is quite odd for English speakers). Of course, when we tested it out, it didn't work well in the rankings .

Don't know if your case with a dash will work though.

So in such cases i always tend to use the most searched form.