Single Character Difference Part 2: Mother’s Day

Earlier, we saw how the keyword research results on KeywordSpy came up for St. Patrick’s Day. Now let’s look at another ambiguously spelled holiday—Mother’s Day.This day, just like other days, brings a promise of profit, especially for people who want to give the special woman in their lives a token of appreciation. Of course there are the traditional players such as Amazon and eBay. But we can also expect a lot of specialty stores either bidding on the keyword on PPC, or optimizing for it on SEO.

This is Mother’s Day 2009: wherein even in the midst of a recession, spending for Mom is still a time-honored tradition. And online commerce takes a huge chunk of that homemade apple pie of mother-honoring merchandise.

Without further ado, let us make the Mother’s Day-keyword research connection. For this day, there are three common variations of the word that pop up: “mothers”, “mothers’” and “mother’s”. Just like in our earlier example, where the apostrophe is placed could determine how it will pop up in searches.

For example let’s take a look at the KeywordSpy research results of “mothers day”:

From our keyword research, we can see that it gave us vague numbers for the keyword metrics. We also see that it only gives us two PPC results, which is surprising since Mother’s Day can be a fairly profitable holiday.

Now let’s take a look at “mothers day”, without the apostrophe:

In this keyword research, we find that people bid more on just Mothers Day. It could be that probably cause it’s easier to punch into the keyboard than that with an apostrophe.

Now let’s look at the alternative spelling for Mother’s Day—“Mothers’ Day”.

This is somehow because the use of Mother’s is more prevalent than Mothers’. The probable reason? It has been a notorious mistake that the apostrophe is inserted in the word itself even when it refers to more than one person, so the spelling variation “Mothers’” may not be as lucrative an investment, even if it is more correct than “Mothers Day”.

This sample keyword research is, of course, a mere experiment on our part, and should not reflect the situation as a whole. But as a KeywordSpy client, we may have helped you shed light on market strategies for keywords. The focal point? Apostrophes can be a factor.

On that note, I would also to greet my mother a nice and warm Mother’s Day. Yes, even SEO, PPC and SEM Specialists can be sentimental creatures themselves, even in the cutthroat arena they tread through.