In my work as a writer for a search engine optimisation company, I understand the importance of keywords and, how enriching the copy of an article or website landing page can mean the difference between a great top 10 ranking and a virtually invisible one. After all – isn’t that the basis of my work? But, just how important is my decision of choosing between a singular or plural of my keyword when optimising my page and, further, how important is the faithful use of those keywords in my link articles? Last month when doing our regular ranking reports for our clients we found a slightly disturbing result. For one particular client, their rankings in the SERP’s for a particular phrase – let’s say for arguments sake “holidays in Turkey” - was at a lovely position in the top ten. However, for the phrase “holiday in turkey” they were off the Richter scale at a miserable 84. It got me thinking. How important is it to a) Optimise for plurals or singulars or both; and b) Stick to it faithfully in my KEC (keyword enriched copy) and link articles? Because Google uses stemming, it is perfectly capable of automatically offering up results for both the plural and singular of a keyword. However what happens to the positioning of your page in the SERPS based on whether you optimise for either singular OR plural? So just what should we be basing our decisions on which keywords to use in our SEO strategy? Should we work under the premise that research has shown that plural keywords are searched for far more frequently than singular; or should we work on the premise that we can just use either because Google simply ignores the difference; or should we always be optimising for both? As in many SEO issues, there seems to be a lot of chat and not too much resolution on this issue, but after digging a little deeper I found some fairly definitive research to suggest that optimising for both the plural and singulars of keywords really DOES matter. Just like in my own shock discovery, one researcher found that 42% of sites that appeared in the top ten Google search results for the plural version of a keyword did not appear in the top ten for the singular keyword. He went on to say that 14% of sites’ listings for the singular version of a keyword were over 20 places lower than for the plural version. Based on this particular expert’s findings, he went on to provide evidence that in terms of volume, an SEO strategy that optimised both singular and plural keywords would attract over twice as many search visitors as a strategy focused only on singular keywords. I also found several other studies which found that found that optimising for only singular or only plural seriously impacted the amount of search volume for a particular keyword. Not wanting to rely entirely on other people’s research I did some of my own. I typed in various phrases in their singular and plural versions and took screenshots of the first page of Google to compare. There was indeed a huge variation in the results. Although some companies’ positions had only changed marginally, there were some that didn’t show up on even the next page. (When I viewed the source of a few pages that had still remained in the top five but that had dropped slightly for one phrase, most were optimised for at least some version of both) So, from I can see, we should definitely be optimising for BOTH singular and plurals of the key phrases we choose. By choosing and using both in our meta tags and KEC, it not only makes our link article writing easier, it should also increase the volume of searches we attract. So rather than just hoping for the best and simply assuming that Google knows what we mean AND knows what the user means, why not hedge your bets and spell it out. And for the sake of an S, I think that it’s a pretty good argument!