Ecommerce or E-commerce as a Keyword?

[Manseo]

I have done a good bit of research but am not sure which word to focus on.  I feel that the trend is moving towards no hyphen but I do not have any data to justify that other than google trends.  Here is the research I found:

Google Trends says ecommerce is more popular
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=e-commerce%2C%20ecommerce&cmpt=q

Ngram says e-commerce
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ecommerce%2Ce-commerce&year_start=1990&year_end=2013&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cecommerce%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ce%20-%20commerce%3B%2Cc0

Google Adwords Keyword tool says e-commerce:
e-commerce has 33,100 monthly search volume
ecommerce has 14,800 monthly search volume

What do you think,  will ecommerce overtake e-commerce in the future monthly search volumes?

Ecommerce or E-commerce?

[DarinPirkey]

Simple answer is Both.

Having variations of your keyword on a given page will help with rankings for both keywords.  I assume (we all know what happens when we do this) Google will consider these synonyms and after I did the following search strings www.google.com/search?q=e-commerce&pws=0 and then google.com/search?q=ecommerce&pws=0 I think my assumptions are correct.  There is a mix of e-commerce and ecommerce in the both SERPs.  That being said, I would have both variations on my page.  It should natuarally be linked to both ways and with co-citations working in SERPs, it won't really matter.  If you just "built" links to your page with one version, that won't be very natural.  I personally would add e-commerce a few times and ecommerce a few times (if appropriate).

On a personal level, I think of e-commerce not ecommerce.

Google on Synonyms: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/helping-computers-understand-language.html

Matt Cutts on Variations of Words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpnnXt7CHMU

[KempRugeLawGroup]

While I definitely think e-commerce over ecommerce, I bet ecommerce is typed in more. It could just be me, but I never use hyphens in search.

For our site, we rank pretty close for attorney and lawyer keyword phrases, and those two synonyms are more different than e-commerce and ecommerce. So, either way, I bet you'll be fine. I would be curious to see your rankings vs conversions though. I'd bet ecommerce would rank higher, because I think that will be typed more, but I bet e-commerce would convert better, because that strikes me as the professional term.

Just my personal take, sorry I don't have any hyphen data for you.

Good luck,

Ruben