Topical keywords for product pages and blogs

[Mat_C]

Hi all,

I have a question regarding keywords. Of course we all know that keyword research should be focused on a certain topic and on user intent (and thus on answering specific questions) instead of trying to put keywords in a page to make it rank.

However, duplicate content is of course still an issue.

So here's my question:

A client that sells floor heating systems that you can install yourself, has a product page for this topic and blog pages for questions regarding this topic. So following pages are on the website:

• Product page about the floor heating systems the client sells
• Blog article with tips how to install a floor heating system yourself
• Blog article about how to choose the right floor heating system

These pages all answer different questions and are written about different topics. However, inevatibly all these pages also talk about different aspects of floor heating systems so this broad term comes up on all pages naturally.

You could say that a solution is to merge pages and redirect the blogs to the product page, so the product page would answer all questions.

But that is not what a customer is looking for. The goal of a product page is to trigger a conversion: let a customer contact the company or ask for a price offer. If the content on a product page is not comprehensive enough, the goal gets lost. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to talk about tips and tricks on a product page.

So how do you tackle this problem without creating duplicate content? In search results, the blog pages rank for the specific questions, but the product page doesn't rank for the generic term 'floor heating'. The internal link structure is ok: the product page has obviously more incoming links than the blogs. All on page SEO factors are taken care of as well.

Any ideas on this?

Thanks!

[Nozzle]

I wouldn't call these 3 pages 'duplicate content'.

The way I see it is that it's fine to have a topic cluster where several pages/blog posts cover the whole topic. The key is to help Google understand which is the most relevant page for the head term.

To know which page Google thinks is the most relevant for that term currently, do a {site:website.com "floor heating"} search and the first result is the page with the most relevance in Google's eyes. If it's not the product page, then I'd work on the following items:

• Make sure that all floor heating posts link back to the floor heating product page with 'floor heating' as the anchor text.
• Test different title tags on the product page including a test where 'floor heating' is in the title tag twice. [*gasp! Did he just say that?]  Yes. I did. And it doesn't hurt to test it. Just monitor the CTR as well in Google Search Console.
• Test adding a paragraph or two of content to the product page and, yes, do include the keyword 'floor heating'. It can be placed below everything else. Just monitor the conversion rate of the page of course. If it doesn't hurt conversions but helps rankings, then it's a win.
• With all these tests, you can always revert back to the pre-test state without hurting anything.
• Create more blog posts that answer more floor heating questions for this topic cluster, making sure to link back to the topic head product page accordingly.
• Get a few more backlinks to the product page with some keyword rich anchor text. I'm not saying that all your links should be keyword stuffed but I've found that since Panda, SEOs have gone too far the other direction where almost none of their links contain anchor text.

Good luck!

Boyd