Video: How to group your keywords into pages

There's a very common set of SEO questions that almost everyone will bump into:

• How many pages do I need on this topic?
• Which page should rank for which keyword?
• How do I group my keywords into effective groups?

This is a talk I gave at Brighton SEO in 2017 about just that. I think it actually holds up quite well.

Watch

(Edit: It looks like embedded playback has been disabled, so you'll have to click through.)

Footnotes

It is worth adding a handful of footnotes which I don't really cover in the presentation.

• Winner takes it all:

  • When Google starts getting good signals about a URL, it'll often pick that to the exclusion of other pages which better fit the intent.

    • This is quite frustrating when you're attempting to carefully match up pieces of content to intents.
  • The best way to do see this is to watch a piece of content from creation to performing well. You'll see it slowly start to rank for an increasing number of more generic queries, often at the expense of URLs which are a better fit.
  • What can you do? This is really hard to get around, particularly if there are other long running successful bits of content. By and large my best success in changing this has come from trying to build positive user signals/links to the new piece of content.

• How do you spot if you've done this badly?

  • Seeing a lot of cannabalisation amongst URLs is usually a pretty good sign you're not doing a good job here.

    • Downloading lots of search console data day by day is often the best way to spot that.

• How many pages can you support

  • I don't really harp on it enough. The biggest constraint I've found to how many pages you can have for individual topics, is how well you can support them.

    • If the place you're looking to rank is relatively competitive you're going to need to support your pages.
  • Going for loads of very specific pages is great, but it'll be a lot more work to get that engine up and running. It's a lot easier to build good signals to one page than to 10, so keep that in mind when considering your own scale.

  • What is support? Getting links, promotion on your other channels, ranking for easier topics first and then getting broader. Anything that will build good user signals.

    • If you're really lucky you already have an authoritative domain with good signals and then going specific is a lot easier.

That's all folks.

Anyway. Thoughts?

How does this set with your own experience?