Do Spaces and Dashes matter that much to google for keywords?

So i am building a shopify site and one of the words i want to rank for is "ejuice". I used M o z keyword explorer and typed in "ejuice" and it shows it gets 30k a month times searched. Then I typed in e-juice and it shows it only gets 3k a month. So in my eyes I want to target and include ejuice in my meta descriptions and page titles.

The problem i am having is when I type into google "strawberry ejuice" it says "Showing results for Strawberry e-juice."

So does this mean that google doesn't like ejuice and prefers e-juice and that I should target that words since it won't display results for ejuice anyways? Even though it is searched more often then e-juice?

You should just target the more common monthly searches then. Besides, people generally just type without dashes so its better to stick with no dashes. Unless it's required.

Google used to treat a "-" as a space.

They may still do, I haven't done much testing of it recently.

grnugroho said:

You should just target the more common monthly searches then. Besides, people generally just type without dashes so its better to stick with no dashes. Unless it's required.

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Thanks for your input, that is what i was thinking too since people are too lazy and don't want to type the dash.