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
-
Can I safely block my product listing from search? Does it even make sense?
Hi, I've an ecommerce website with more than 50k urls and only 10% or so are getting crawled regularly by Google.
Technical SEO | | GhillC
Product listing pages represent roughly 80% of these 50k pages. Trying to improve this, I was thinking to remove altogether all (most?) of my product listing from search (via Robot.txt) to keep only the product pages themselves and the product categories. My organic situation since Jan 2019:
Users: 2,300,000 (of which 9% are visiting product listing pages)
Page views: 8,000,000 (of which 5% are product listing pages). Am I about to unleash armageddon (or more like harakiri) on my website by doing so or actually get Google to crawl much more relevant resources (product pages, product categories, blog content and so on)? Thanks,
G0 -
Organic Traffic Dropped By Half
My company website (https://factoryexpodirect.com/) organic traffic is dropped in March 2017 and after that it never recovered. I am not sure what is the reason. Can anyone help me out to figure out the reason.
Technical SEO | | christmaslaserlights0 -
How can i make Google to consider my News pages
How can i make Google to consider my News pages as News and place them in the Google News section? Is there some syntax i need to mention in all my news pages?
Technical SEO | | AlexisWithers0 -
Is it detrimental to make a site wide change from .html to .shtml (all pages)?
We have an established website with decent domain authority. My developer inherited the site from another developer and is recommending that we convert all pages from the .html to the .shmtl From an SEO perspective, would this hurt us? Also, if this is not an issue, would updating the canonical help us, or does the canonical setting only deal with the "www." vs. "non-www"? Any insights will be appreciated greatly. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
Don't reach to make our site back in rankings
My URL is: http://tinyurl.com/nslu78 Hi, I really hope someone can help because my site seems to be penalized since last year now. Because we were not SEO experts but doctors and wanted to do things in a white hat way so we have given our SEO strategy (on-site and off-site) to the best US SEO agencies and now we are penalized. We was ranking on the 1st page with 15 keywords and now we don't even are in the first 10 pages. I know that our sector is suspicious but we are a real laboratory and our site is 100% transparent. I understand that a lot of people can think that we are all the same but this is not true, we are not a virtual company that don't even show their name or address, we show name, address, phone number, fax, email, chat service, VAT number everything so please help us. We have spent 3 months analysing every paragraph of google guidelines to see if we were violating some rule such as hidden text, link schemes, redirections, keyword stuffing, maleware, duplicate content etc.. and found nothing except little things but maybe we are not good enough to find the problem. In 3 months we have passed from 85 toxic links to 24 and from 750 suspicious links to 300. we have emailed, and call all the webmasters of each site several times to try to delete as many links as possible.We have sent to google a big excel with all our results and attempts to delete those badlinks. We have then sent a reconsideration request explaining all the things that we have verified on-site and off-site but it seems that it didn't worked because we are still penalized. I really hope someone can see where the problem is.
Technical SEO | | andromedical
thank you0 -
Questionable Referral Traffic
Hey SEOMozers, I'm working with a client that has a suspicious traffic pattern going on. In October, a referral domain called profitclicking.com started passing visits to the site. Almost, in parallel the overall visits decreased anywhere from 35 to 50%. After checking out profitclicking.com more, it promises more traffic "with no SEO knowledge". The client doesn't think that this service was signed up for internally. Regardless, it obviously smells pretty fishy, and I'm searching for a way I can disallow traffic from this site. Could I simply just write a simple disallow statement in the robots.txt and be done with it? Just wanted to see if anyone else had any other ideas before recommending a solution. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kylehungate0 -
Could getting referral traffic from SEO moz damage your rankings?
Buon Giorno from OS grid reference SE404481 Having just read Googles https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487 disavow contnet something troubled me... Is it a possibility you could damage the page rank of a site if you add its url in these posts. Put another way if I added a url pointing to a specific site would googles radar detect the source as SEO and penalise the site in some way? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
How much of a hit to changing urls?
Hi, We have a few pages that from an SEO perspective have poor URLs. We are planning on changing them (and 301 redirecting) the old page to the new page. I heard in the past, this can temporarily negatively impact your SERP rank etc. Since the old URLs are bad, even if there is a temporary negative hit, changing them in the long run it is better, but curious if anyone has any experience on what to expect.
Technical SEO | | NicB10