To answer a question most SEO copywriters have asked, the first thing to take into consideration is what target visitors are searching for. If the majority are searching in the plural then you should target plural words. Yet, often things are not as cut and dried as this and in a real setting chances are searches in the singular and plural will be about the same, so you are left with the same question.
The next step is to ask yourself why visitors search for one and not the other and this may boil down to a simple fact that they are either looking for one item or more than one, for instance nobody would search for a shoe, they would search for shoes, but they would search for a laptop.
If the only consideration is the “s†or “es†then it is probably best to target the plural as often the singular is contained in it, so you will automatically be targeting both the singular and the plural at the same time.
Getting outranked
Yet what happens when it is more than the addition of an “s†or “es†? in this case you can target either and still get results as most major search engines are intelligent enough to identify the relationship that singular and plural share and they know that often when people search in the plural they can still get value from sites that target the singular, yet it holds true that if a visitor searches in the plural the sites that are targeting in the plural will a higher hit rate than the ones that target in the singular.
But you can get around this and turn things in your favour if you work harder on your inbound links, especially in terms of quality and quantity.
Singular is more effective
Search Engine Optimisation web copy that targets the singular is more effective and this is for a host of reasons, the first being that the more specific the keyword is the fewer websites there are targeting it and you will rank quicker.
Search engine results on generic keywords are dominated by large conglomerations plus internet users are stating to take cognisance of the fact that when they search using a specific string they are apt to find their information quicker and get better results. Customers that know what it is they want to find are using more specific searches, so by targeting specific keywords you are attracting a better quality of traffic will help with your conversion rate.
You are better off targeting specific keyword phrases in your SEO web copy and Meta tags, using strings of keywords instead of only one keyword. For example, instead of targeting the word “accountants†you could target “tax accountants in London†.
If you have to target a generic keyword such as “accountant†it might be best to start with targeting the keyword phrase first as it contains the generic keyword and you end up targeting both at the same time. As you site grows in importance you will begin ranking for the single generic word too and eventually will start ranking highly for “accountants†.
