When should you create a new piece of content for keyword variations or closely related keywords?
I get asked about this a lot. You have a bunch of similar keywords. How do you know if you should target them all on a single page or create new pieces of content for some of them?
The answer is actually really simple. The SERPs will tell you.
I’ll use a really basic example.
When I search for ‘divorce attorney york pa’ and ‘divorce lawyer york pa’, in the organic search results I see the exact same 9 search results. They are in a slightly different order, but the same pages are showing up in the results.
The same listings show up in the local listings as well.
That is a pretty good sign that you do not need separate pages to target these two search queries. If I continue to the second page, 7 out of the 10 results are the same.
What Google is telling you is that the search intent behind the two queries is the same.
On the other hand, if I do a search for ‘term life insurance rates’ and ‘term life insurance quotes’, only 3 of the top 10 results are the same. There are a lot of the same websites ranking, but different URLs.
In this case, the results are telling you that Google believes the search intent behind these two queries is different enough that it warrants showing different results.
Take a moment to read some of these pages, and you can see the difference in the information they are supplying.
In the case of the first example, instead of creating separate pages, I would consolidate my efforts on one page and make sure that both the words attorney and lawyer are sprinkled through the content.
With the term life insurance example, I would create two distinct pages to target those terms with each page striving to match the intent I can see in the existing search results.
