Do hyphenated searches impact SEO?

[davidbenjamin]

Something I recently considered was whether a hyphen in a search term would effect the results that come up. For example, Is there a difference between using 'i-phone' and 'i phone' as anchor text? Some of my search results seem similar but do show some slight differences.

Can anyone shed light on the matter?

[TomRayner]

Technically, they are treated as separate terms, but because they are likely to be closely semantically linked you won't see any drastic variations.

If you go into the Keyword Planner tool, you can see that for that iphone example you get different search volumes for "iphone" and "i-phone".  Therefore Google does recognise them as separate search terms.

However, in 95% of cases I'd say, a hyphenated version of a keyword or keywords is more often than not showing the same search intent from a user.  Therefore, Google will do its best to serve up similar search engine results.  With the algorithm being as sophisticated as it is, it can make this connection in most instances.

[davidbenjamin]

Thanks, Rob.

I did notice the search volumes are the same. And it is true that the searches are very close. With Semantic update this may become even closer as they are the same in reality.

It crossed my mind though that there may be a benefit of choosing 'i phone' over 'i-phone' as people are less likely to type in a hyphen rather than not, especially on mobile. Every little helps.