How to rank 1 page for multiple keywords in the new way

[Raptor-crew]

Hi There

It has been a little while since I was involved with KW's in earnest.  1.5 years ago and beyond I did really well with SEO.  I'm not in a hugely competitive market but we found our keywords, we wrote great web pages for 1,2,3 keywords and when we found more great keywords that we built a new page to rank for.  For example:

One big hitting keyword was "Rugged PDA", we created a category page for Rugged PDA's.  Another was "Rugged Handheld" so we had a new page for that.  We then long tailed "semi rugged PDA", "waterproof rugged PDA" etc etc and built sub category pages.  We were legit, did lots of content marketing, ran a blog tweeted etc and we did really well to be honest.

However these days it's not working, One of Rand's whiteboard sessions stated that you need to build bigger topic based pages that delivered on more keywords (The one about shoes!).

This is great as we love that idea as we can have 1 big category page that offers great value to the visitor, however I am struggling to work out how we target a bigger list of keywords to the one page or to fewer pages.  To underline this the MOZ page rankers also still seem to work in the same way where they expect 1 or 2 KW's per page to get A ranks to them, so I'm confused!!

For example Rugged PDA is an old term, Google trends is showing that it's glory days are over and we know that the term "Rugged Smartphone" is the one to use as we all use smartphones not PDAs these days.  However we also see a lot about Rugged + Phone, Mobile, Cell, Handheld, tablet, device, phablet... all relevant to one big category page.

So I run these KW's through google search to see if the same pages come up as a test to see if Google thinks they all mean the same, I get a few, but not much overlap.  How do we therefore have 1 page that talks about all kinds of great stuff about the "Rugged smartphone" but one that also targets rugged handheld, rugged android device etc etc?

I've spent 2 days catching up, i'm none the wiser on this specific element but i'm sure I am just missing one key element of common sense here and any help is very much appreciated.

Regards

Dave

[Andy.Drinkwater]

You are very welcome

-Andy

[Raptor-crew]

Thanks for your help Andy, it has been been very helpful.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

The best thing you could do Dave is decide on what you want to write, but don't focus on keywords too heavily otherwise it could sound very odd. Look at the subject as a whole and delve in.

Here are a few articles that will give you some ideas...

• Moz
• Kiss Metrics
• Quick Sprout

Just keep in mind that you are writing for your audience, not Google. Research your subject heavily as this will help make the work more accurate.

With regards the keywords, you will need to do some keyword research and add in supporting content. For example, if you are talking about Cats, you would talk about different breeds, life span, history, etc.

-Andy

[Raptor-crew]

TY for getting back to me. that was a great help,

OK, so I get that.  Maybe a case of reading in to this more than I need to, just get on and pick the keywords and see how it goes with some in reserve to tweak, swap and test with.

So lots of pages all designed to land 1 or 2 keywords on is now bad.

But am I right in saying that the converse is now true so that if you have 2 pages with different content on it but it turns out they are optomised for the same meaning keywords (although different ones specifically) then you could in fact be doing the wrong thing?  What I mean by that is that you could be seen as having 2 pages that are effectively delivering the same content as perceived by the search engines.

I guess for people who have always been used to making good content, this is actually better as you can just focus on the content rather than having to split that out for each page/KW combination.

Dave

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Dave,

You aren't really missing anything as one point you make here...

How do we therefore have 1 page that talks about all kinds of great stuff about the "Rugged smartphone" but one that also targets rugged handheld, rugged android device etc etc?

You have kind of answered your own question here. Of course, your Page Title has a limited number of words available to you, so you need to focus heavily on the page content itself. You want to talk about rugged phones, that is fine - mention in detail, Android devices, iPhones, link out to reputable sources as citations, build supporting content and any of your own insights.

Use these other keywords in the page, but don't overuse them as that will land you in trouble.

There is no secret really, just a good dollop of research and writing - if you target the phrase 'Rugged Handset' you will find Google can return your page even though this isn't mentioned in the title. G is very good at matching searches with intent and will pick up on what you talk about.

-Andy