Can I optimize two different pages with very similar keywords without hurting SEO?

[Scratch_MM]

Hi there,

I have often heard that you cannot have multiple pages rank for the same keyword. My question here is more about long tail keywords who have the same keyword phrase repeated on different pages.

For Example:

I have two webpages with different content.

I want to have one page (Homepage) rank for the more generic term such as "innovation management" and another supporting page rank for "innovation management software".

Will Google see these two different webpages as competing? Should I avoid repeating the more general term in the phrase?

Has anyone ever seen your SEO results decline when doing this? I don't  believe this is duplicate content since the pages hold completely different copy and assets but I am not sure if the repeating phrase in the title tags will flag anything to the search engines.

[Bragg]

The way you laid it out, this would not be a duplicate content issue and search engines would view them as two different pages. You're targeting two different terms with unique content for each page.

It's expected that some internal pages will have some compound keyword crossover with the home page.

[firstconversion]

It depends. If you do this badly you will cause yourself problems. It may also take twice the work to make 2 different pages rank

As these 2 are so similar, I personally would get the single homepage to rank for both

S

[Bragg]

I think it's hard to make that assumption. Maybe they're an "innovation management" company that provides services and software.

Yes, I agree that the home page can target more than one term but segmenting keywords out into hyper-relevant long tail content pages can only help. Potentially, both those pages can rank for the same term.