For yonks, I've not had any concerns about putting plurals of the main relevant nouns: i.e. "cottages" in addition to the singular form throughout my HTML.
I hadn't given plurals much thought, to be honest. If I had thought about it, I probably would have sprinkled "cottages" more liberally throughout and especially in heading lines and meta-description, thinking that "cottages" is what most prospective guests would search for.
Today, I did a bit of digging and discovered a few things (most of which I should have known really):
- When your search term includes a noun, Google automatically returns results for both singular and plural forms.
If you put your singular noun in quotes, then Google will only find pages relevant for the singular (although the pages may also contain the plural).
If you search for: Argyll "cottage" -cottages, then your pedantic quest is rewarded by seeing pages that contain "cottage" but not "cottages".
So, where does that leave me? Should I avoid having "cottages" in my page? Or is it very unlikely that guests would either know how or bother to exclude the plural when searching?