Talking of curious things, keywords for Google Ads aren’t always what they seem.
This conclusion was reached when I was searching for goods in transit insurance, as you do. The reason for this enlightenment was that one of the most consistent and highly ranked adverts in my searches was “cheap GIT insurance”. Is there a message in there? Or is it some kind of new insurance policy for single people before they go out on a first date?
Meanwhile, also illuminating was the separate finding that fewer than a third of people in the UK bother with punctuation when creating online content. In a highly unscientific experiment with the search term “employer’s liability insurance” only 13,900 web pages and online documents were found with this phrase. The grammatically incorrect “employers liability insurance” netted 39,000 results.
As if to further question the teaching of English in schools, “employer’s liability insurance” retrieved 114,000 results when the search was conducted web-wide. Conversely, almost as many pages, 105,000, were found with “employers liability insurance”.
The conclusion for website owners must be that it’s better to repeat the same phrase with and without an apostrophe in their embedded keyword phrases and text and put up with pedantic nitpickers.
The demise of written English also appears to hold true in other ways. Take the word timepiece, which most dictionaries usually say is one word. Taking heed of this advice will put you in a minority within search engine results as timepiece gathers up 39,000 results while time piece manages 192,000 and time-piece with a hyphen only 31,000.
Makes you think we should go back through our sites with the fine tooth comb and put back some of what we pulled out as presumably this trend is not confined just to those creating content but also to those searching.
