Plurals, Active Verbs, etc.

Posted By: elsiedee ()
Posted On: 2007-Dec-16 22:55

Hello,

I'm a new member and a relative newcomer to the whole SE / SEO world - have been doing lots and lots of reading on these forums and have learned an amazing amount already - thank you all for sharing your knowledge and experiences!

Right now I've several campaigns up and running on Google, Yahoo, and MSN - all are getting impressions and clicks and I'm happy with the current performance (had very low expectations, to be honest).

However, I've a couple of questions that I haven't seen addressed here (or if they are, I completely missed them and apologize for duplication):

1. Plurals - how do the search engines treat plurals? If one of my words / phrases is "construction consultant," then should I have a separate phrase for "construction consultants"? Or should I just use "construction consultants" and assume that that will catch both searches on the singular and the plural? Do these differ from search engine to search engine?

2. Active verbs - along the same lines, how do the search engines treat active verbs? Using my original "construction consultant" phrase, should I also have "construction consulting"?

3. Assuming that the search engines treat plurals differently (better to have both the singular and the plural) do you recommend setting-up a separate ad group for the plurals or just to integrate them into the main group of a campaign?

Many thanks in advance, Laura


Posted By: tudi ()
Posted On: 2008-Jan-06 16:29

Here's my tip:

If you do a search on Googlefor "construction consultant" you will get roughly 200k results. If you search for the plural, you will get 390k results. The reason is that plurals include singulars (in this case anyway) so that's extra coverage.

However, I would suggest you optimize for both keywords, to alternate things.


Posted By: sugarfree ()
Posted On: 2008-Feb-04 23:49

Wow this is so helpful!