Targeting nearly identical keywords

[uSwSEO]

Hi, I have a website selling home furniture and I can't work out the best way to target keywords relating to sofas/couches. They both have very similar search volume and so I would like to target both. However, I obviously can't create different pages for couches and sofas as this will likely be seen as duplicate content, I also think it wouldn't read well if the content swaps between using couch and then sofa.

I would really appreciate some advice on how best I can target both keywords.

Thanks in advance!

[uSwSEO]

Hi shiftins & donford- thanks so much for your responses here, much appreciated and they certainly make sense!

Thanks

[donford]

Hi uSwSEO,

shiftins is correct, synonyms are picked up by search engines to some degree.

Here is Matt Cutts (lots of good links here to) on how Google deals with Synonyms

You should pick one the keyword that sounds the most natural for the page / site and your dialect. To insure the search engines pick up on the fact you mean either or, I would try to fit both keywords into the Title, then try to use the secondary keyword 2 or 3 times on page or put it in the alt tag or image names.

The goal is should be to primary target one keyword but show a relationship between it and the second keyword, without going crazy on the second keyword.

Hope that makes sense, and helps.

[shiftins]

I'm not an expert so forgive me if I'm wrong. I am doing the same thing with my search results car / auto. From what I know Google recognizes synonyms and acknowledges them. What I did is target car as the main keyword and in the first paragraph or somewhere close to the top I use the term auto. When you do a search in the SERPS I rank for both car and auto terms (not exactly the same position but not a big discrepancy). The only difference is what Google bolds in the SERPS description. If I search car it will bold my page title with the term car and when I search auto it bolds my description with the word auto in it.

Again I am no expert and there may be better or more SEO friendly ways but this is how I went about it.