One landing page or many?

[Mekounko]

I can not understand which is the best way to target similar keywords. Do the best way is create landingpage for each long tail keyword landing page or better one but with all included keywords?

On the siste i have landingpages:

1. 1. Metal doors
2. 1.2. Steel doors for private houses
3. 1.3. Metal doors for flats
4. 1.4 Metal doors for technical rooms

and so on. In Latvian language it sounds ok.

Some time ago for other sites it worked good but now it just does not work. I see google meses these results up and seo performance is bad.

Can you suggest correct structure?

Thanks

[Attain-Design]

Hi,

Firstly, I would have 'Doors' as a main page either in the navigation or in a dropdown. I'm assuming that this is a main product/service you provide?

Using 'Doors' as the URL, you could use 'Metal Doors' as the H1 with multiple and closely related H2's which are naturally optimised without forcing your keywords in.

For example,

H1 - Metal Doors
H2 - Metal Doors for Flats & Technical Rooms
H2 - Steel Doors for Private Houses

You wouldn't need a landing page for all of those search terms since it's achievable to rank for them from the one page.

[Mekounko]

Thanks you. I just see in when i do many similar landing pages google don't know what to show in results.

[MichaelC-15022]

Really, there has been a fairly radical change in how Google measures relevance of a page against a given keyword.  A year or more ago, you'd have been better off making separate landing pages for each of those terms, putting the target term in the page title, H1 heading, body text, ALT text on an image, etc. etc.

Whether it's the new RankBrain piece of the algo or something else--it seems that Google is no longer as laser-focused on the page title having the EXACT words in it that were in the search term.   Google appears to be able to identify the topic that a page is about by looking at the words on the page and how those words co-occur on other pages on the web.

As an example, my travel site has a page on it that I very carefully tuned for the term "best time of year to visit tahiti".  So that's the page title, H1 heading, etc. etc....all the usual stuff.  That page now ranks #3 for "tahiti weather", which is SUPER competitive, despite not having "weather" in the page title.  I think it's only on the page maybe once, in fact.  But, the page content talks about storms, precipitation, temperature, seasons, etc. etc.  So, even though I'm telling Google that the page is about "the best time of year to visit Tahiti", Google is able to look at all that content and understand that really, it's about weather in Tahiti.

Long-winded story, I know.  But I am indeed going somewhere with this...

I'd recommend having a single page targeted at "metal doors", then work all of the other terms into the page content, using subsections and H2's as Attain Design has suggested above.

I'd go a step further, though.  Do a search for "metal doors", and look at the top 20 or 30 pages in the results.  Look at the subtopics those pages discuss.  Are they talking about locking mechanisms?  Corrosion resistance?  Insulation R-values?  You're looking for other aspects of the core topic that you can add to your page to make it a more thorough discussion of the topic.

The theory I've seen as to how Google is doing this relevance is this:  they're looking at a set of pages (maybe the top 100?) that they currently rank well for a given topic, and looking at the fairly rare OTHER terms that are showing up on at least some of those 100 pages.  As an example, let's say a given term occurs on 90 of those 100 pages--that's a clue that if a page is supposed to be about topic X, and it does NOT have that term on it, it's probably a pretty poor page for that topic.  Now, let's say we're looking at a term that occurs on 15 out of those 100 pages--that's probably a subtopic term that only the best pages...the most thorough pages on that topic...will have.  If the term occurs on just 1 or 2 of those pages--well, that's probably an anomaly.

[Mekounko]

Thanks you for really good explanation. I was not doing seo for 2 years and i see many things changed.

Only what confuses me is i don't like big texts in page that is the reason i tried to split them in different landing pages. (page is not finished) I need to add pictures and technical information for each of these items.

People do not like huge texts

One way how to reduce texts is set them in drop dawn topics like here https://meko.lv/metala-durvis/metala-durvis-kapnu-telpam

How do you think is it ok to do it in such way?

[MichaelC-15022]

It seems that both people and Google like bigger pages better.  See this study that found the average number of words on the page for pages in the top 10 results for something like 20,000 keywords was over 2000 words per page!

This article from SEL is also worth a read, and talks more about conversions etc.

And yes, I think the expand/contract approach is fine.  Another good option is to divide the page into tabs (but have all the content present in the HTML), and then only show the content for the currently selected tab.  Be sure however that all of the content is technically visible (i.e., not with a style of display:none) when the page initially loads.  You can then use something like the JQuery document ready function to THEN walk the tabs and hide all but the top one when the page is done loading.

[Mekounko]

Thanks Michael!  I thought i do something wrong but now i am sure what to do