OK, consider this a mild rant.I was reading a website a while back and ran across this sentence: “You’ll love our 100% satisfaction wooden tables guarantee.”I rolled my eyes.Then I shook my head.If you were talking to someone who called on the phone about the wooden tables you make, you would say to them, “Oh, by the way, you’ll love our wooden tables guarantee?”Certainly not!You’d said, “You’ll love our wooden table guarantee.”Why then, do people feel it’s OK to incorrectly use plurals and singulars in the name of SEO copywriting?
This person was optimizing the page for the term “wooden tables” and got lazy.He wanted to talk about his/her guarantee and evidently couldn’t stop for a minute to think of a correct way to phrase the sentence.What would it have taken?Just this:You’ll love the guarantee we give on all our wooden tables.
Let’s take a minute and look at how you can rework sentences for plural and singular key terms.
You’ll find a staggering selection of glass tiles. [plural]
You’ll find a staggering glass tile selection to choose from. [singular]
Party clowns are available for hire at your child’s birthday… [plural]
When you’re looking to hire a party clown for your child’s birthday… [singular]
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Book Mexico cruises leaving from Ft. Lauderdale today. [plural]
Book a Mexico cruise leaving from Ft. Lauderdale today. [singular]
See? Most of the time going from plural to singular is just a matter of moving the search term to a different part of the sentence or inserting the word “a.” With a little practice, you’ll be able to do these in your sleep and you won’t have childish-sounding copy like the poor guy who makes wooden tables 🙂
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This is one of the most difficult aspects of SEO. To develop copy that ranks for both singular and plural words without disrupting my copy. It’s one of those challenges that I love about writing. It’s also one of the things that drives me nuts when I read copy by others that forces the issue.
Many people have a hard time with that. And you’re right.. it is VERY annoying to read when it’s done incorrectly 🙂
Isn’t it best to always go for the plural? Because there is “table and tables in tables” however only “table in table ie no tables in table” if you understand what I mean.
So for me it makes good website building, seo, copywriting sence to (mostly) always go for plurals.
I could be wrongs!
Good article by the way.
Plurals do contain the singular form of the words, Steve. And, in theory, it would be a good idea to just use plurals. But in reality, when you test this with lots of different search terms, you’ll see that singular terms and plural terms pull up entirely different ranking results. Using your example of table/tables. Go to Google and type in the word table and write down the 1st 5 results. Now type in the word tables and do the same. They won’t be the same sites.