Having Issues Ranking 1000+ Keywords - How To?

Hey all, long time reader. I've looked around high and low on the forums looking for answers but i've not been able to find anything that might offer suggestions or solutions.

So im a local painting company in my city. I registered a domain about 4 years ago and let it sit for a year without doing much. When the time felt right I was able to use g keyword planner to generate a list of keywords, and starting with the most popular and working my way down i busted out a blog post for each keyword with content generally being helpful and aimed and informing potential customers and clients about the services we offer and our prices up front and what we do extra for free that our competitors don't, etc. Essentially rewriting long and drawn out sales pitches but in the end geared at saving customers and clients time and money and offering legit high end services.

All seemed good until about the tenth post. Essentially at this point this was a 10 post website with recent posts in a side bar and no links. I made a small silo style nav menu that linked to the appropriate posts and the appropriate anchor text and then busted out a huge 10k front page post jam packed with i think it was about 600+ keywords (non city location type) (interior painter, exterior painter, house painter, etc) and let it sit for a few months while i got busy with work.

So what seems to have happened is that the rankings jumped from the posts them selves to the main page. I can clearly see where the rankings for the targeted page ranked well and then didn't rank at all but the main page started ranking *even without the keywords being on the page and with no links" but i didn't exactly catch the play until i added about another 150 posts to the site. I dunno how i missed it but the results today are now that anything that could potentially be the same thing ranks on the main page. So even if i have an "interior house painters CITYLOCATION" page specific for that page, and that keyword combination does not exist on any other page on the site, the main page starts ranking for that keyword.

So over time as my site has ranked for more, i've come across more keywords that are obvious for my niche, that don't show up in keyword planner, that my competitors may or may not be ranking for, and essentially what i did was just organized them all by impression count and kept busting out posts.

To date i have about 1000+ keywords i'm interested in ranking for. Is it not the right approach to bust out a new post/page for each individual keyword im targetting or is this old school approach now and i should be trying to get the main page to rank for all 1000+ keywords via on page text of that keyword and the odd anchor text link?

Any thoughts or ideas on how to go about taking on 1000+ keywords for a local company looking to pump out good friendly informative and helpful content? Should i just continue busting out posts? Any idea what might have happened to cause the targeted pages to lose rankings and the main page to take over the rankings? If you had 1000 keywords to rank, you wanted your results to last, would you bust out a page for each one or try to get the main page to rank for everything and concentrate your efforts on one page?

Everything seems fine for me building websites for under 5 keywords and each post and the main page seems to rank for all queries and pop up 1,2,3,4 but it seems with local it's a different beast.

Any ideas or tips or advice or just flat out you are doing it wrong or reading material i've missed trying to get on top of this you can suggest? Thank you.

Sounds like you have what's called "keyword cannibalization" - read about it here. What's likely happened to your main page, is that it is just so relevant and full of information about painting, that Google just sees it as the best piece of content to show its users.

You definitely don't want to try and build a page for every keyword, that's the old school way like you said. What you need to do is find similar keywords, and group them together into a bigger single article.

Just try to rank for the bigger (more searches) keywords, and once you do, any other similar keywords will rank automatically. You should try to have some of the similar/smaller keywords written in the content - as long as it sounds natural - but definitely no need to target every one.

Get a trial of Ahrefs (only $7 if you cancel it before 7 days - make sure you cancel it or you will get charged for a whole month), then put in your top competitors sites and click on the Top Pages section and go through all their URLs and see what keywords are ranking on what pages. This should give you an idea of what keywords will group well together.

In this image, you can see that the keyword that is bringing in the most traffic is "sydney painters", however, that particular URL is also ranking on page 1 for all of those other terms - even if they aren't targeting them directly.

https://imgur.com/a/dzvPLpa

Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks for your input it's much appreciated. I actually read this article right before i jumped in here. and oddly enough in the space that i'm in that's exactly what i'd like to do (if i could). oddly enough again cannibalization has helped me dominate low competition and no competition download niches on free blogger blog adsense sites here and there simply using raw keywords for titles, all keywords in all posts interlinked to each other, obvious keyword stuffing and common same image and video and i think i can reproduce cannibalization in no competition niches at will and effectively rank up to 4/5 pages ranking in 1,2,3,4, on content alone etc like the ranking pictures in the cannibalization link you shared... still working today. =) is that really bad seo or is cannibalization really such a bad thing or actually really good seo?! hehe.

I've not really used the same strategy on this site, although there is some common targeted keywords scattered on most of my pages in an untargeted way in body text i might have used to link to the appropriate page with exact match anchors..im not linking to the main page with the keyword im trying to rank im linking to the appropriate page im trying to rank and the main page ends up ranking even if those keywords aren't on the page...



as you can tell, life was pretty good at one point. not so much now. its like i started writing from the long end of the list and i'm just burying my sites rankings further and further the more content i put out. My competitors are actively buying links and link building full time so i understand that's going to be part of the slide too..

i've been using seo powersuite to look at my competitors websites, looking at the site layouts, content, links, common words, phrases, how they are used, number of times, priority, ranking etc. at most i can see is they seem to be focusing on under 100 keywords and most seem to using 1 or 10 pages tops. Most of them are 1 page wonders. the longest ranking guy is ten pages hes been around a long time. I think it might be safe to say that there are large content gaps (when i look at my search console) and for competitors urls that do seem to rank for a lot what they seem to rank for really isn't on target for the type of potential searchers that might be interested in what we have to offer and what we rank for says search console in the bigger picture of things. maybe the first 100 keywords or less those urls rank for do, but the rest is what i would call completely out to lunch. When i look at my search console for what we do/did rank for, and i look for what they rank for, while there is some common keywords its under 100. I have a list of like 1600 or so keywords and it seems my competitors are not interested or missing it..and im feeling kinda convinced the gaps in keywords/content is easy pickings... if i can just get the right pages to pop. the impressions are there and it doesn't appear to be bot search traffic for the most part

So when i see a keyword i'm ranked for, its almost always the main page just like your example. If i bust out a post to better target that keyword, it never gets any traction, little impressions or traffic over the years, but the main page seems to increase positions and impressions and traffic for that keyword from perhaps the first or second page... however, when i bust out a post for particular types of services we offer using like service + cityname, and it's a one off the keywords are unique and those bad boys rank as expected no problem. so in the example you provided and in my own experience, targeting work on floors would rank on the page its supposed to but not on the main page. General kinda all purpose all the same thing type of keywords seem to go to the front page and not the targeted one.

When i sort my keyword list alphabetically, i get a pretty good idea of what keywords to assign to each page. however, that's really still a long list of keywords even if grouped. It would still be (well) over 1000. my main page is currently ranked for 394+ keywords and i got about 150 posts...with very few exceptions, those 394 rankings are at least the keywords in the 150 posts or very very close. out of those 1600 keywords ive generated from search console and other tools to target, i really haven't even generated the long tails on most of them either...some of those auto suggest tools around sure spit out a lot of unique search phrases you'd never think of until you see a list of new unique words you might want to add in to your targeted page.. i also oddly noticed that each individual keyword + city phrase i targeted that are unique and not common sure helped me get in good in the local 3 pack were i'm most of the time all alone by my lonesome.

So.. im ok with my main page ranking for the keywords my blog posts are supposed to rank but arent..my guess is once the page is ranked for those keywords i should just be building links.. however, it's not really the idea place to be sending those visitors they are kinda going to a general purpose page rather than the page with the content and information they are looking for. If im going to scale up this seems like its just going to continue...and again, its not an issue for some specific unique uncommon search phrase words that align with some of the specific type of work we do...

I've tried changing my site layout several times. I've tried like just a main page no extra pages, flat site architecture with every post linked in the side bar and no contextual links, strictly contextual links no sidebar links, contextual and sidebar links, and again, unless its specific, say floor painting, everything just stays stuck on the main page.... never seen it before...

anyone got any other ideas to share?