Weird question, but I was wondering if Google will notice a hyphen. Lets say that I found a phrase that is being searched frequently, and has no competition. I'm making this up, but what if my phrase is "home furnishings couch". What if I used "home furnishings-couch"? Would it be the same?
yes i think that they see that as the same and you must consider that there are f.e. 100 people searching 'home furnishings couch' and that 0 or a few people will search 'home furnishings -couch'
And if you just try doing a Google search you will find that "home furnishings-couch" gets 1,050 results, while "home furnishings couch" gets 505,000 results. And remember, if you accidentally place a space before the hyphen you are asking Google to leave pages that contain the word couch out of the results. (And that yielded 20.8 million results)