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Ecommerce or E-commerce as a Keyword?
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I have done a good bit of research but am not sure which word to focus on. I feel that the trend is moving towards no hyphen but I do not have any data to justify that other than google trends. Here is the research I found:
Google Trends says ecommerce is more popular
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=e-commerce%2C%20ecommerce&cmpt=qGoogle Adwords Keyword tool says e-commerce:
e-commerce has 33,100 monthly search volume
ecommerce has 14,800 monthly search volumeWhat do you think, will ecommerce overtake e-commerce in the future monthly search volumes?
Ecommerce or E-commerce?
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While I definitely think e-commerce over ecommerce, I bet ecommerce is typed in more. It could just be me, but I never use hyphens in search.
For our site, we rank pretty close for attorney and lawyer keyword phrases, and those two synonyms are more different than e-commerce and ecommerce. So, either way, I bet you'll be fine. I would be curious to see your rankings vs conversions though. I'd bet ecommerce would rank higher, because I think that will be typed more, but I bet e-commerce would convert better, because that strikes me as the professional term.
Just my personal take, sorry I don't have any hyphen data for you.
Good luck,
Ruben
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Simple answer is Both.
Having variations of your keyword on a given page will help with rankings for both keywords. I assume (we all know what happens when we do this) Google will consider these synonyms and after I did the following search strings www.google.com/search?q=e-commerce&pws=0 and then google.com/search?q=ecommerce&pws=0 I think my assumptions are correct. There is a mix of e-commerce and ecommerce in the both SERPs. That being said, I would have both variations on my page. It should natuarally be linked to both ways and with co-citations working in SERPs, it won't really matter. If you just "built" links to your page with one version, that won't be very natural. I personally would add e-commerce a few times and ecommerce a few times (if appropriate).
On a personal level, I think of e-commerce not ecommerce.
Google on Synonyms: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/helping-computers-understand-language.html
Matt Cutts on Variations of Words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpnnXt7CHMU
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