If you’ve ever used SEO analysis tools, you might have noticed them chastising you for trying to use the same keyword in multiple articles. A really strict SEO analysis might even tell you that you’re wrong for ever targeting the same keyword twice.
Of course, this is a little ridiculous, since it’s impossible to maintain a blog one a fixed topic, or to regularly update your content without repeating the same essential phrases. Still, the underlying point is an important one: Your SEO analysis should reveal as little repetition as possible across different pages.
In other words, to whatever extent possible, your optimization strategy should go page-by-page and focus on one keyword, or one aspect of your business, at a time. To use my own industry as an example, a provider of multiple web services ought to have one page dedicated to web design and all the associated keywords, one dedicated to social media management, and so on.
This way, when people are searching for specific aspects of your business, they’re most likely to arrive directly at the relevant page, rather than having to go through a home page or some other random page that is full of a mish-mash of different keywords.
More to the point, this is the way the separate pages will be indexed by search engines. Whenever you run SEO analysis, you should be able to identify specific pages that you’ll be trying to get to the top of the results page for each specific term. And if you don’t, then there’s a good chance that some of those pages will be competing against each other.
This is often a death knell for any search optimization campaign, and a professional SEO analysis should be able to easily ferret it out. On one hand, it should reveal a diverse assortment of relevant keywords associated with your site as a whole. But on the other hand, it should be able to pinpoint specific pages that stand head-and-shoulders above all the others in utilizing each term on that list.
Those individual pages are difficult enough to get into the top of search results. The task becomes infinitely more difficult if there are a bunch of pages on the same site, all featuring roughly equal repetition of the same keyword, all jostling to be the page that represents your site for that term.
Don’t fall victim to this sort of friendly fire. Run a regular SEO analysis in order to understand where your various pages rank in relation to each other. And when it’s clear which ones should stand up for each of your target keywords, put your full effort into them, page-by-page.
