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How to prevent multiple pages on the same topic / keywords from competing with each other in serps?
Posted by on April 17, 2021 at 3:18 pmI’m building a new site and am wondering about structure and how to prevent related keywords from competing with each other in the serps?
I have 6 topics I’d like to rank for, each topic has about a dozen related kws (that I’d also like to rank for).
Let’s say these are my kws:
Happiness (= topic)
How to eat for happiness
Happiness coach
Happiness supplements
Happiness online program
…– Wouldn’t they all compete for the term happiness? Is this an issue? How do I prevent this?
– Does it make more sense to write 1 really long article targeting all the kws?
– If not, how do I structure my site for optimal serp performance? -
4 Replies
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Don’t over think it.
I doubt they would compete, google is pretty smart. If they were to compete, it’s better being 2 of the top 10 on SERP than only one.
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Most likely, non of them will end up in the top 10 for the main keyword („happiness“). So for now you can ignore this „problem“.
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I think in a way SEO’s overthink “cannibalization”. I feel like it was more of a thing 7 years ago. Those pages should be unique enough to answer the user’s intent. Using your example if a user is searching “What supplements will make me the happiest” your subpage would be retrieved but if they search for “Do certain foods make people happier?” your how to eat for happiness page would be retrieved.
In the last 2-3 years I have really started to dig into linguistics to help when optimizing sites. It’s great to know what words mean, how they relate to each other and to really try to understand the user. Again as SEOs we tend to overthink everything and look too much into stuff.
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>How to prevent multiple pages on the same topic / keywords from competing with each other in serps?
Lets break this question into two. So, considering:
1) How to prevent multiple pages on the *same topic* from competing with each other in serps?
Combine them or keep the best and eliminate the rest.
2) How to prevent multiple pages on the *same keywords* from competing with each other in serps?
By creating unique intent. In other words, a page should address one purpose.
Back to your questions:
>Wouldn’t they all compete for the term happiness? Is this an issue? How do I prevent this?
If a user searches for the term “happiness”, they all will surely compete with each other. But, generally, a user supplements with an *intent*, like “how to live life happily” or “listen happy music online”. So, you see, the search results depend on the intent. Hence, you must create a topic to address a particular search intent. This will help you in ranking.
>Does it make more sense to write 1 really long article targeting all the kws?
W.R.T your particular scenario, it’s better you write separate articles addressing a particular intent.
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