How Plural Keywords Impact Search Intent For Ecommerce [Data Study]

How does the use of single and combined keywords affect the search intent and results? Lydia conducted a unique data analysis study to select keywords for e-commerce queries.

HIGHLIGHTS

1. The intent your page intends to serve should determine which version of the keyword will be used.
2. Obviously, category pages can benefit from using combination keywords, as they are intended to help customers find products they might want to buy.
3. Product pages should use single keywords.
4. Changing the grammatical number of target keywords can completely change their meaning, so we cannot yet fully automate this decision.
5. Most of the time, you can expect to rank for both the singular and plural versions of your target keywords on the same page.

When SEO experts try to optimize content, they have a choice: Should I choose singular or plural as my primary keywords? Can I rank for both versions of a keyword on the same page, or do I need a new version?

After working in the SEO industry for over a decade, I've had to make this choice hundreds of times, and I've learned which option works best.

You can make these choices on a case-by-case basis by analyzing each keyword individually, but sometimes you need to make these choices in bulk.

If you're designing content for a large e-commerce site, you'll need to decide which versions of your keywords will be used on product detail pages (PDPs) and category pages.

What we know about aggregated keywords and search intent.

Over the course of my career, I've noticed a pattern: individual keywords are often informational, while grouped keywords are part of a buyer's business research journey.

This is very evident in SaaS, B2B, and other classic content marketing areas.

As a senior SEO manager at Sanity, I know that a user searching for “headless CMS” is likely looking for clarification, while someone searching for “headless CMS” is looking for buyer options.

If you're shopping online and trying to decide which product to buy, you're more likely to find [men's shirt] than [men's shirt]. But if you're searching for [Zara Slim White Shirt], your intention is likely to transact, and you're ready to buy.

Google doesn't always know this. If it thinks people are looking for more than one option or haven't yet refined what they do, it will offer some potential pages for product categories.

It takes a very detailed search query to view a product detail page, such as selecting a brand and model, searching for a specific product, or tapping into a viral trend.

Navigational searches, where users are trying to get to a specific location or find out how to get to a physical location, are usually single keywords. Brand names are usually singular too – you would never search for [Facebooks], you would search for [Facebook].

From an automated SEO perspective, this means that individual keywords indicate more vague intent, while aggregated keywords are more likely to be part of a user's business search journey.

This intuition is shared by many SEO professionals, and it has become a standard best practice in ecommerce.

Single keywords are typically used on product detail pages, while group keywords are displayed on category pages.

I decided to analyze the data to see if our collective best practices are supported by facts – and I hope to create a data-driven standard to help us choose these practices. Which version of each keyword should be used as the base version for different types of pages? , and whether or not we can arrange for both.

It should be noted that some keywords are collective in nature. Things like “the yellow laces of Dr. Martin's shoes” would never appear as vocabulary, so these examples were excluded from the study.

Analysis of the top 1000 keywords on Amazon

I explain the methodology of this analysis.

I pulled the top 1,000 searched keywords on Amazon, determined whether they were singular or plural, and paired them with their counterparts.

When keywords did not have a singular or plural counterpart, I removed them from the database, leaving me with a total of 607 keywords.

This shows that for the top 60% of keywords used daily on Amazon, marketers have to choose whether they want to optimize for individual or group keywords. So it is very important to make the right decision.

I then used Semrush data to rank search intent, search engine results page (SERP) features, and URLs for each keyword in Google results for US desktop searches.

All measurements were done using Semrush, including SERP occurrence and search intent. (Full disclosure: I got Simrush data for free. It pays to have a connection.)

The data was analyzed again on November 22 and June 2023 to provide final results.

Keyword intent analysis

Statistics show that single keywords dominate most search results, with the exception of ads.

The only keywords are:

• 65% more likely to have informed intent.
• 46% more likely to have transaction intent.
• And 27% more likely to have navigational intent.

The only case where multiple keywords won was commercial, and even then, the difference was only 5%.

Could this indicate that single keywords are more ambiguous?

This is certainly a hypothesis that the data seems to support, as individual keywords are 23% more likely to have multiple targets than combined keywords.

As consumers research and learn about their needs and the products that meet them, they can refine their searches, but in the early stages, search intent can be very deep.

SERP similarity analysis

Fifty percent of the time, the SERP results for the singular and plural versions of a keyword will share seven to nine URLs — and 5% of the time, these SERP results are exactly the same because the intent of the plural and singular keywords often overlaps.

SEO professionals worry about whether to use single or collective keywords for URLs, but most of the time, we shouldn't think too much about it – you should rank for both keywords on the same page.

However, in another 5% of cases, URLs are not shared. This may be because the plural and singular versions have completely different meanings in these examples.

For example, think of a basketball (the game) and basketballs (the thing you need to play the game) – or switches (how the lights work) and switches (the Nintendo console). If you search for one, you'll be surprised to find results for the other.

Words that change their meaning when they change from singular to plural are called aliases or heteroglossias. While the spelling is the same in both forms, these words have different meanings in the singular and plural. For example:

“Leave”: In its singular form, “leave” often refers to leaving from somewhere. As for the plural form, “leaves,” it refers to more than one leaf of a tree or plant.

“Wind”: In the singular, “wind” is the movement of air. In the plural form, "air" can refer to different things, such as different types of air, or it can be used metaphorically.

However, this type of semantic change in English is relatively rare, hence the low incidence.

Based on the data, the best practice is to look at where singular and plural keywords should overlap. This means your brand may rank the same for both, or you may see a slight difference in rankings between collective and single keywords.

The data I analyzed in November 2022 looked a little different. Here, only 2% of searches have no shared URLs, and 50% of single and plural keywords have 8 to 9 shared URLs.

Eight percent of SERP results for single and plural keywords were the same, down from 5% in June. This may signal to Google that there are other differences in search intent between plural and singular searches, but it's too early to tell.

As Google builds out its AI offerings, including Search Generative Experience (SGE), and moves more toward a model where users can make purchases directly from their searches, understanding different intents when differences in keywords is key.

Understanding intent at scale will become key for e-commerce marketers, and intent will be central.

Analyze SERP features

You've seen how often SERP features appear in multiple and single searches. The results seem consistent with what we've seen so far, suggesting a broader range of search intent for individual keywords and more commercially focused intent for combined keywords.

Information cards often appear with individual alternatives, and people also ask. This makes sense because these properties are consistent with the information type query.

Related searches are the SERP feature that has the biggest difference between collective and single keywords. The overall results were 12.85% more popular.

In my experience, users refine their search during business search when they learn about the product, and Google tries to make that journey easier.

Multiple SERPs also appear to be more prevalent for popular products, which also suggests that multi-keyword searches are more commonly associated with commercial intent.

On the other hand, indented results are more common in single searches, which may indicate greater ambiguity in intent. We may see indented results because Google does not know the correct page for the query and is trying to provide alternative content.

What does this mean for your ecommerce SEO strategy?

Data supports SEO best practices: aggregated keywords form part of the commercial research phase, while individual keywords are more vague in purpose and can be used for informational, navigational, or transactional purposes.

• The intent your page intends to serve should determine which version of the keyword will be used.
• Obviously, category pages can benefit from using combination keywords, as they are intended to help customers find products they might want to buy.
• Product pages should use single keywords.
• Changing the grammatical number of target keywords can completely change their meaning, so we cannot yet fully automate this decision.
• Most of the time, you can expect to rank for both the singular and plural versions of your target keywords on the same page.
• Intention is complex, and can evolve over time. It seems that Google's tendency to differentiate SERPs more over time between collective and single keywords needs to be taken into account.