How to structure site for effective content marketing without keyword cannibalization?

[cliffrosedoula]

I'm working on setting up the blogs on my site. I am trying to implement pillar pages for content marketing and am a little confused as to how to structure the site without cannibalizing keywords.... 

I created individual blogs that will contain all of the related posts for each one of my pillar pages. ie, family planning blog, pregnancy & prenatal care blog, labor & childbirth blog, etc...

I originally was going to create a page for each topic. ie. family planning page, pregnancy & prenatal care page, etc.. then use a custom template for a pillar page and use metafields to insert the page titles and descriptions. I would include the main pillar page copy in the page and it would be inserted into the template.

I realized that in doing so, I would have duplicate endpoints.... ie. For the pillar "Family Planning", I would have cliffrosedoula.com/blogs/family-planning and cliffrosedoula.com/family-planning.

Will this cannibalize the keyword? It seems 

The other option is to create a custom blog template for each topic and then use the blog template pages as the pillars. This doesn't seem like the right way to do it.

Am I overthinking it? Is it fine to have the /blogs/family-planning and /family-planning endpoints? One would just contain all of the blog articles and the other would contain that actual copy and content for the pillar.

[Josh_Uebergang]

For Shopify's blogs, I think the best structure is to make the URL for the blog name really short like /blogs/a/. That way it doesn't take any attention and minimize's SEO weight.

From there, with your question, while all content pieces sit at the same URL heirarchy, you can create hubs through planning and internal linking. Your one parent page like family planning inside can link to other articles on the topic. You can also use tags to act like a filter if you wish, but that is optional. See an example at https://brickellmensproducts.com/blogs/grooming-manual. I broke down their strategy many years ago in my ultimate guide to Shopify SEO shopify seo https://www.digitaldarts.com.au/shopify-seo

[cliffrosedoula]

Josh,

Thank you for the reply. Good point on the short blog slugs. Is there something I don't know about using the blog tags? I created different blogs for each pillar because I don't know of any way to only show the blog posts that are relevant to my pillar.... ie. I don't want someone seeing posts about labor and childbirth if they're on a pillar page about parenting and family life.

I had to create a separate page template for each cluster because either my theme and/or the Shopify system won't let me dynamically insert blogs into a template. If it weren't for that, the current setup would work pretty well. Everything on the pillar page templates is rendered via metafields except for the blogs.

At this point I've:

• Created separate blogs for each pillar
• 

• Created pages for each pillar
• 

• Created custom page templates for each cluster.
• 

I tried to create a metafield called blog-slug and then edit the page template code to use that metafield, but I got a big fat error.

 

I contacted Shopify support and they just said I couldn't do it without help of a Shopify expert.

I wish Shopify would spend a little more effort on improving the foundations of their CMS capabilities and less on integrating AI..... 

It's pretty inefficient to have 7 page templates that are all exactly the same except for the blog that they pull posts from.

[pembrokelane18]

I wonder if you ever got the solution. I am trying to structure blogs in my store and really confused how to do it.
This is my website https://eastofmainshop.myshopify.com/

if you resolved your problem, can you explain it to me.