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Should I avoid duplicate url keywords?
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I'm curious to know
Can having a keyword repeat in the URL cause any penalties ?
For example
xyzroofing.com/commercial-roofing
xyzroofing.com/roofing-repairs
My competitors with the highest rankings seem to be doing it without any trouble but I'm wondering if there is a better way.
Also
One of the problems I've noticed is that my /commercial-roofing page outranks my homepage for both residential and commercial search inquiries. How can this be straightened out?
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Thank you Boyd
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There is no penalty for using the same keyword twice in a URL, especially if it's part of your domain name.
There are many examples of sites that have a sub folder that contain the same keyword as their domain name that have no problem ranking including your competition:
- runningwarehouse.com/mens-running-shoes.html ranks #2 for 'running shoes'
- seo.com/seo ranks #5 for 'professional seo'
- overthetopseo.com/professional-seo-services-what-to-expect/ ranks #2 for 'professional seo' (in fact only 3 url's that rank for that phrase don't repeat the term 'seo' in their url.)
- contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing ranks #1 for 'content marketing'
- etc.
**Ranking the correct page: **
Whenever you have an issue with the wrong page ranking better than the one you want, you just need to work on tweaking your onsite optimization for those pages. (And you may have to continue building more links to the page you want to rank.)
Here is a list of things that I'd make some test changes to: (Keep in mind that you can always revert things back if a test makes rankings go down.)
- Test different title tags on the two pages making one less optimized for the keyword and the other more optimized.
- Add more copy to the page you want to rank.
- Do an internal link audit. You want to make sure that anytime you are linking from one page to another with a specific keyword as the anchor text, that it links to the page that you want to rank for that phrase.
After you make a change, you need to wait until Google re-caches that page and sees the update (which can take a few days or more sometimes) and then check your rankings after that to see if there was any movement or not.
Boyd
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