Keyword / Content cannibalization

I'm trying to rank separate pages with different content for "best cheap item", "best budget item" and "best value item". I'm wondering if they would they drag each other down as they're synonyms of each other or if it wouldn't matter so much as they're unique words?

Would this be considered content / keyword cannibalization and therefore harm my site?

Thank you

Technically keyword cannibalization is where you have multiple pages targeting the same word. And those would all be separate terms.

With that said, if "item" is the same in the examples above I would definitely combine them onto one page.

They are all related enough to be on the same page - and while you can definitely rank shorter articles, Google has noticeably given preference to longer articles that cover a topic in depth. (They'd rather serve up one page that answers all questions a searcher might have than have to send them to 5 separate pages. Makes them look better).

You have to consider the type of search as well as the type of page that ranks well... go look at the types of pages that are ranking well currently.

Keep in mind that "best" and "cheap" are a marketing contradiction. Your target customers either want best or cheapest. If they truly want the cheapest while still having "quality" then you want to target "affordable" which implies the quality at a good price.

Best implies "highest rated" or "most liked" and cheap implies "lowest price"... so the page you want to target should probably be a category page with the appropriate sort applied.

Affordable would be a category filtered to 3.5+ stars and sorted by price ascending.

"best" usually activates social signals as a factor. At least that is what I see with my ecom categories. So for onpage make sure you have your like and share links in place. Make sure you have your product, price, and rating schema in place too.

finally, be sure you have very verbose opengraph meta tags.