I am working on a site and see some search traffic for both plural and singular of some keyword phrases. I am thinking I will be better off with plural as search algorithm will always be able to derive a singular but might not know how to pluralize something like "car loan" but can easily derive a singular from "car loans". If you have any successes or failures with the plurals, please pass it along.
http://trends.google.com is a good place to compare the difference in search volume for the plural and non-plural form, then a competiton analysis can help you decide which would be easier and yield better results. Usually optimizing for the non-plural version will allow you to rank well for the plural version as well.
I usually see the plural and singular close to each other in Google Trends but SERPs seems to be a different story, rank well for one and you don't always rank well for the other. I am just having trouble figuring out how an alogrithim could sort out whether to make "cars loan" or "car loans" or whether it should be pluralized at all. Thanks for the insights.
I always optimize for the singular form of a word. The reason behind it is that the singular word is in the plural and not the other way around. car is in cars cars is not in car So basically the way I see it you are optimizing for both using the singular, it's always worked for me at least.
I think plural matters, just one question; if some one looking for cosmetic surgeon in California, what they will prefer to search "cosmetic surgeons in California" or "cosmetic surgeon in California"?
personally, I use plurals for searching. Noticed the same among my friends. If you're optimizing your site, don't bother so much with onpage factors. Focus on the inbound anchor text. This is easy to accomplish when using tnx.net
well i optimize both singular and plural terms of my target KWs to maximize the exposure/visibility on SERPs.. but i think that singular terms are much competitive than the plurals