Is it best to condense 2 similar category pages?

[yatesandcojewelers]

After reading Rand's great article about building Seo focused pages to serve topics, not keywords (http://moz.com/blog/topics-people-over-keywords-rankings-whiteboard-friday ) I started looking at my site.

Question:  I have 2 very similar category pages, orginally built to go after similar but different keyword terms.

For example, one is:  domain.com/blue-rings.html  and the other is domain.com/blue-bands.com.  (bridal jewelry)  "Blue" is just a hypothetical type.

At one time I could rank for "blue-rings" and "blue-bands".  But with google changes, I think it's better to focus on a general term, right?  Not set up similar pages, with same product, for very similar keywords.

I'm thinking that having these 2 pages could be actually hurting, as they are competing with each other.

Any recommendations?

Thanks folks!

Ron

[Asjad]

Hi Ron,

I agree With You as I think there is no Point creating two different pages for a Singe Product.

You should Create One highly optimized page for a Product and Focus on getting it Ranked.

Hope it helps.

[DougRoberts]

Interestingly if you have a play with Google Trends you'll find that Google interprets "wedding rings" as a product category and when you enter "wedding bands" it give you the option of the Wedding Rings" category. This might be a hint that Google sees things a particular way.

Interestingly, I just did a search for "wedding bands" and noticed that while the serp was dominated with pages offering wedding bands (ring), the top result for me was offering wedding musics/DJs etc.

If you're building pages to target synonyms with exactly the same products/content then I suspect this is unlikely to be helping you significantly.

You've got some data though - look at your analytics and see which category pages organic search traffic is landing on and how that traffic is performing conversion wise. look at the category your visitors and navigating to and if you've got site search, what's their preferred term?

Think also how duplicate categories may be confusing your vistors once they arrive on your site.

Also consider if there are any other factors such as the your location, and demographic of your target audience.

[yatesandcojewelers]

Thank you for your help!  Much appreciated.

[yatesandcojewelers]

Thanks Doug.

I agree having basically duplicate categories with same products is confusing to customers.  In your opinion, by removing one of the category pages would it give a potential boost to the remaining category page?

[DougRoberts]

It's hard to say but I've seen examples where removing duplicate categories has improved the strength of the ones that remain. It does depend on the architecture/internal links on your site, what if any external deep links you may have and making sure any removed categories are correctly 301'd to the category that you keep.

I've also seen examples where it's made no difference at all.

If you've got as whole bunch of categories in your navigation I've also seen improvements in engagement by putting these categories in popularity order (Google Analytics can tell you which categories are the most popular). Make the ones that people are looking for easy to find. If you've got the traffic, it can be worth testing.