More Singular KW Targeted Landing Pages vs. Less Multiple KW Targeted Landing Pages

[NickG-123]

So my question is...

I have a adopted a site which currently ranks quite well for some industry competitive keywords with a number of poor quality landing pages which specifically target a singular keyword.

I am wondering if its worth merging some of these pages together into one authoritative, better quality landing page targeting multiple keywords (as the intent for some of these keywords are largely the same).

What i don't want to do is jeopardise the existing rankings in doing so.

The alternative option would just be to improve the content on the existing landing pages without merging.

What are peoples thoughts on this? Are there any positive case studies out there where merging has had a positive effect?

Any help would be great.

Regards,

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Nick,

I'm not aware of any studies specifically around this (other Mozzers might chip in with something) but this is a daily struggle for many site owners.

Without seeing the pages or knowing the keywords, my thought would be to improve the existing pages if they are already performing well in Google, but if they are causing concern from a visitors point of view, then that might be a different conversation.

Combining pages isn't as difficult as it sounds as long as you get them right and have checked to see if the keywords are synonymous and to what level - I have found that in doing this in the past, there is a cut-off point where it is prudent not to try and get a page to rank for too much.

Another way of achieving this is to use page anchors to capture some of these additional keywords. I have had better than moderate successes with these in the past as well. Google has no problem in indexing these if they benefit the page and visitors.

I hope this helps a little.

-Andy

[LoganRay]

Nick,

I've inherited a number of sites with this same problem, some of them quite large sites with rampant singe-keyword landing pages that required a lot of cleanup. In my opinion, in the long run it's definitely worth the effort to prune where you can and get same/similar content combined into one higher quality page. I've had pretty good success in combining pages into topical focused LPs.

There's been a lot of talk in the SEO world over the last year about "topics, not keywords", and this discussion is exactly where that idea comes into play. With Google's increasing effort at better understanding keyword intent, they've gotten really good at determining synonymous phrases. As a result, sites with single-keyword LPs are suffering (or will eventually) due to content cannibalization. Let's say you have a LP for "blue widgets" and another for "widgets that are blue", eventually those 2 pages are going to compete with each other and Google will choose to rank neither very well.

If you do go down the road to combining pages, here's a few tips:

• Look in Google Analytics for page metrics like organic entrances, conversions, whatever other KPIs are important for you site
• Check Moz metrics like Page Authority and links
• Grab bits of content from the pages going away - just because the overall page is lower quality than others doesn't mean it doesn't have some good content you can
• 301 redirect the old pages to the new one so search engines, people, and links will still lead to relevant content
• Update internal links and your XML sitemap to reflect the changes

Hope that helps, happy optimizing!