Modern SEO analysis tools tend to give you sharp warnings when you try to use the same keyword more than once. Sometimes, your SEO analysis might even say you should change the focus keyword of one article because you used the same keyword in another article several weeks earlier.

This level of strictness is arguably absurd. It’s pretty much impossible for you to indefinitely avoid a focus keyword that is important to your site or your industry. And there’s no way you can maintain a regular blog or do other regular updates to your site and always have a new keyword at hand to appease the gods of SEO analysis.

There’s simply not an unlimited number of terms available, so you’re inevitably going to end up repeating them on different pages and in different contexts. We maintain that you shouldn’t worry too much about that. But at the same time, you should be aware of the underlying lesson that your SEO analysis tools are trying to teach when they yell at you for repeating a keyword more than once.

The main point here is that if you actually try to focus on the same phrase in two articles that you post within days or weeks of each other, you could end up pitting one against the other. At a glance, it might seem like a good thing if you get people clicking on both pages when searching for the same keyword. And it would be – if everyone who searches for that keyword clicks on both links.

Of course, in reality this is almost never going to be the case. People try to be brutally efficient when they’re searching the internet, and they’re quick to skip over anything that doesn’t seem like it’s going to provide new, useful information right away. How many times have you clicked on one search result, failed to find what you were looking for, then went back to the results page and clicked on another link from the same site?

If your own experience doesn’t convey the lesson, run a detailed SEO analysis on your own pages and we’re sure you’ll find you’re not getting a lot of simultaneous traffic to pages with similar content.

But again, it would be ridiculous to conclude from this that you can’t discuss the same topic, using the same phrases, in multiple posts on your blog. You just have to be careful about where you’re directing your energy. And you have to give existing pages time to work their magic and show off for your SEO analysis team, before you send out another page to try to outshine it.

Always be very, very thoughtful and deliberate about scheduling your posts and organizing your pages. And if you can’t keep track of the content in real time, consider hiring professionals to manage your blog and run a regular SEO analysis. This should help you to minimize internal conflicts and also diversify your SEO strategy so your site stands the best chance of climbing up through the results pages for multiple search terms, at the same time.