I’ve only heard this question a few times from a client, and that just proves that most clients haven’t taken the time to notice it is true. At the most, your website can only rank twice for any given keyword phrase. That would seem strange to a company whose every page is well-written and targeted for their industry’s primary keywords. Nonetheless, Google has limited each website to two results maximum in most cases (some long tail searches may still yield additional results).
Matt Cutts recently referred to this as “host crowding”, which is as good a name as any. Host crowding has been guarded against for more than a year, and Google is apparently perfecting it’s algorithmic defense.
How does this host crowding fix affect my company?
Simply put, this means that you don’t need to target more than two pages with one keyword phrase. Keep in mind, however, that the combination of one consistent phrase with a unique secondary phrase could potentially help you cover the gamut of keyword phrase combinations based on one primary word or phrase. I’m not recommending you tack on a word or phrase onto each page. I am simply saying that it IS possible that you could rank for various combinations that might bring you some traffic. It’s also just as possible, however, that you could diversify your keywords targeted and your page copy more and actually draw a wider net of visitors to your site.
AB Testing is not a bad idea. If you want to see which method is better for your site and industry, take at least four pages and optimize two of them with the same primary phrase and give them both unique secondary phrases. See how those pages perform and how traffic increases/decreases based on your changes. Compare their performance with two other pages whose content and title tags do not share the same primary phrase.
Feel free to send me any questions you may have.
