Is this keyword strategy totally wrong?

[Brian_Worger]

I have a Driving School website www.1stclassdriving.co.uk.

The site is structured geographically with one page per Area
(post code) and one page per Driving Instructor.

There are links from each Area page to the instructors
working in the Area.

The principal search keyword that I want to optimise on is
"Driving Lessons"

The thinking was to target each individual Area page for
"Driving lessons in xxx" where xxx is the particular geographic area
and each particular Instructor to "Driving Lessons in yyy" where yyy
is the main  town .

The ideal would be that a search on "Driving
Lessons" would pick up the root page - search on an area, say "Driving
Lessons in Croydon" would pick up the Croydon area page and a search on a
town, say "Driving lessons in Mitcham" would pick up the Instructor
that covered that town page.

However having read Rebeccas Keyword research guide I am
concerned that this strategy is wrong because of the volume of pages that use
"Driving Lessons in xxxx".

Does this fall foul of "Keyword cannibalization" ?
and if so what is the best way of being able to achieve our objective?

[Brian_Worger]

Is there anyway that I could be able to target "Driving Lessons" alone for the home page and "Driving lessons+ city" for the others?

[AndyKuiper]

I think you'll be just fine using the strategy you've described Brian. I think Rebecca's concerned about having several landing pages for the same keyword. Her example described using the kw "space needle" in the title tag on several different landing pages... thus confusing Google as to which should be the relevant landing page for queries regarding "space needle". You'll have different cities in each title tag; no issues there.

• if the search kw you were targeting was "driving lessons" - without some qualifier (eg. city name), then yes, Google would have a hard time ascertaining which was the appropriate landing page for "driving lessons". Having the city/locale name coupled with "driving lessons", multiple times, while not perfect, will be just fine.

Andy