Research plurals and singulars

Some people search Google and co for goods and services using plurals, others use singular words and phrases.

Here’s an example. Say you sell bathrooms. One of your most popular search terms might be bathroom suites. But it’s also worth finding out how many potential customers search for bathroom suite.

If your main competitors are busy fighting over a singular key word or phrase, focusing on the plural alternative – and vice versa – can give you a useful competitive edge in the search engine results pages.  

When planning the redesign of my website I included primary keywords and phrases in my file names.

These were words and phrases that were also relevant to – and repeated within – each page’s content, title and description.

Doing so appeared to pull my site higher in Google almost immediately. Within a week or so I’d popped up on page two.

A few weeks later, to maximise my file names’ effectiveness, I separated the words within each with an underscore. I’d heard that this helps search engines recognise each word as distinct. eg copywriting_brighton.html rather than copywritingbrighton.html or copywriting-brighton.html.

Putting underscores into my url file names appeared to give my site another boost, bringing it onto Page one of Google the following week for a couple more of my key search terms.

I know this isn’t rocket science. But it’s a relatively simple aspect of SEO that’s often overlooked. If you name your files sensibly it won’t rocket your site to the top of Page 1 of Google the next day from a standing start, but it could make a real difference.

TIP: Don’t forget to write 301 redirects for the pages you rename!