SEO for compound word derivatives

[Jon_KS]

Our company offers services for nonprofit organizations and we are finding that "non profit" and "nonprofit" are both used very frequently in search queries.

I suspect Google will treat the two variations similarly but am looking for something more concrete than my anecdotal experience.

• How does Google treat compound words that are commonly searched for as multiple words?
• Any suggestions on resources or tests to find a concrete answer for "nonprofit"?

[RDK]

Google makes semantic level query assumptions by default now- that's part of the function that allows google to suggest queries as you type.  To address your question more directly, it depends on the individual terms and whether or not Google is giving complete, partial, or no equivalence to those terms.  Non-profit and nonprofit are treated nearly the same in organic ranking- the top results are identical and the remaining results have more variance. You can experiment with this idea and you'll see some of this phenomena.

As for "concrete evidence"- you aren't going to get it.  You should study the results of your individual terms' rankings because that's exactly what Google did to weight potential results... at least, it's a part of what they did.  They have a vast army of "raters" that look into the relevance of query/results and assign a value to the search engine's success/lack of success.  In the end, a load of data is collected in various categorically-structured groups of search terms. Are they using the data attached to these unique categories to craft a more relevant set of results?  I don't know if they are, but I find it hard to believe they flush all of that expensive data down the drain just to use an umbrella algorithm to spit out all query results.

In the end, I think you'll find that worrying about the minor difference between the two is wasted time if you're looking for a concrete answer.  To avoid the pitfall, stick to a single convention on each individual page, but vary the convention from page to page.  When you search one or the other, watch how Google bolds the alternate terms in the list of results..  Compare the 1st page results of the two alternate terms..  are you seeing a pattern? With the other components of SEO on-track, it effectively won't matter at all.