How to optimise 2 (almost) identical ecommerce pages

[Ecolaundry]

I have an ecommerce site selling only 1 product on subscription. However, I want to offer a free trial of the product on 1 page, and a buy it now on the other, thus 2 pages, but selling exactly the same product.

I also thought it would give me the opportunity to rank both pages for separate keywords?

Will this strategy work, or should I just look at combining both of these pages into 1 ?  If so, would I then just build out blog content around my keyword list?

Many thanks

[seoelevated]

One consideration is how you plan to acquire links and gain relevance. In many cases, one page is a better strategy because you will have twice as many links to the one page, in contrast to splitting half to one and half to the other. For example, you might find better results ranking #1 for at least one of the terms than #5 for both terms. Also, you should be able to rank one page for multiple terms. For example, if you can include both terms in the URL itself, and in the title tag, and within context on the page. There's not a definitive answer to your question, but I would say in general I would prefer one very strongly ranked page than 2 weaker ones (and splitting your product into 2 will usually result in two weaker ones, from an inbound links standpoint).

[Ecolaundry]

Thanks for that, I hadn't thought about it from that perspective. I guess that alone would be a good reason to go for the 1 page.

[Paddy_Moogan]

In addition to the links and relevance, I'd also consider if your keywords would be distinct enough from each other if you created two pages and two sets of keywords. If they are quite close to each other, then Google may get confused as to which one to rank which can lead to keyword cannibalisation issues.

Generally, I'd only recommend creating two pages and allowing Google to index them if they are distinct enough from each other to avoid this problem. It sounds like this may be tricky if your new page is the same product but simply a free trial.

Also remember that you could create two pages and then just stop the new one from being crawled and indexed by Google. This would prevent any ranking problems but allow you to have two pages. I'm not sure if this is worth it in your situation to be honest but I thought I'd mention it just in case. I'm sure that you could use some good design/UX and have both a free trial and a buy now link on one page - it's fairly common.