Human Behaviour in Search – plural vs. singular matters
18. Apr, 2009 
14 Comments
I’m writing this post because I read a very interesting post on human behaviour in search at Vastplanet Blog by Michael Vorel, and wanted to add my 2c. When my 2c became 5c, I thought it best to write it here rather than in the comments over there.
In the post, Michael talks about whether people search in the plural (eg. “cars”), or the singular (eg. “car”).
In his post, Michael summarises with
“In summary, most people are singular in nature and go to Google to solve an individual problem or inquiry.”
My initial reaction to this was that it was wrong, because in my own experiences with Adwords I found that plurals was getting higher search volume than singulars.
So I did a bit of research using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and found that we were both right.
Plural vs singular in the USA
In the USA, just over two times as many people use the singular over the plural in the case of “cars” vs “car”.
number of searchs of car vs cars in the usa
Plural vs singular in the UK
In the UK, almost three times as many people use the plural over the singular in the case of “cars” vs “car”.
Number of searches of car vs cars in the UK
Plural vs Singular in Australia
In Australia, we are very close to the UK and almost three times as many people use the plural over the singular in the case of “cars” vs “car”.
Number of searchs of car vs cars in Australia
“Oil painting” vs “Oil paintings”
Adwords went down for maintenance before I could check on the numbers for this search, but I want to throw another spanner in the works here and suggest that search volume alone is not enough to base a decision on. Your conversion rate should be taken into account as well, and profit should be the driving factor.
In the example of oil painting vs oil paintings. I’m making guesses here, but if I was selling oil painting supplies, or lessons on how to do oil paintings, my conversion rate would be higher for “oil painting” than “oil paintings”. The reason is that “oil painting” can also be searched as a verb, as well as a noun, and would be popular among people looking for help with their oil painting skills.
Summary
I think Michael already touched on the main point for us as internet marketers to take away from this.
“However, unless you check you may be buying ads in the wrong place!”
Peoples preferences of plural vs singular will vary greatly between different industries, and even different countries and cultures.
As an internet marketer, we can take away what we already knew – do your testing for each campaign. Find the most profitable words, and go for that.
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Enjoyed the post Luke and thank you for the Australia references as that was really interesting. Since I wrote the post I have done further research using many tools (google insight, adwords, 3rd party tools) that helps support the analysis. I uncovered that its very important to understand what the intention of that person is. For example a user may be looking for; a car for themselves, a car for the family or just car research. Really depends on your intention and thanks again for posting.
You’re 100% right , plural searches can make/break a SEO or PPC campaign when it comes to the volume of searches. And as you mentioned, the plural version usually does get a significantly lower number of searches. So far what i’ve been working towards, there’s a 30% difference ,and the way pages are ranked are very different.
Great post luke , I think the keywords nature depends on the demographics and adwords is not an accurate tool to reach any decision about the human nature
I never knew there was so much difference using singular and plural versions of a keyword. Also it’s funny how the UK and US can’t “agree” on what’s term gives the most hits. This really brings in some thoughts on demographics in a PPC campaign.
useful for me thanks for sharing
@Michael agreed =) thanks for coming and commenting.
@GoogleBusinessKit yeah, though I think what these examples show is that each keyword people search differently, and like Michael says, its a lot based on intent.
Thanks for the comments everyone
I find that users tend to make their keyword searches plural becuase in their mind they are expecting multiple results. Of course this does not apply to searches based on questions such as “How to ….”.
I had a problem with my PPC campaign where the plural word got more searches, but the singular of the word actually converted the best. It was so weird because it was counter-intuitive for the keyword I was promoting on. I’m so glad that I had tracking in place because I would have never caught this otherwise. Maybe you should also do a study on keyword conversion as it relates to plurality.
Jessica, thanks for sharing. That’s another great example
This is really very important if one is going to work on adwords otherwise it would be just a waste of time with no results. I was really thinking about a adword campaign and I got to be careful on what I choose for the keyword after reading this, thanks for sharing your experince.
This is not only important in the adwords arena, but also in organic search. I’ve been able to SEO for plural terms alot easier than singular terms. The problem with doing that however is that the traffic rates on plural terms is usually less than that of the single verb or noun.
This is something you’ll need to take into account when doing adwords advertising and organic SEO.
Those are pretty interesting results. Thinking it about it here, I’m not sure I can pinpoint why the U.S. search results would be different than other English-speaking countries. Any hypothesis?
In any event, I think it’s wise to use Google Keywords before you get started to understand what the predominant term is.
To be honest I’ve got no idea why the results vary. The first problem in coming up with a hypotheses is that we don’t know how accurate the google counts are. I would be interested to see some research on this topic though.
This is really interesting research. You don’t realize how big of a difference it can be in traffic between singular and plural. The good thing is that for less competitive keywords, you can usually rank pretty closely for both the plural and single version.