Ten pages, one search, and none of them wins.

Nobody sets out to build ten pages for one search. It happens one good intention at a time. You add a service page. A year later someone says you need a blog, so you write four posts about the same condition. The theme makes a tag page and a category page for each of them without asking. Then you open a second location and copy the service page with the suburb swapped.

Each of those pages is fine on its own. The problem is what Google does with the set. It doesn't add them up. For each search it picks one page from your site to show, and when the pages all say roughly the same thing, the signal that would have made one page strong is spread across six weak ones.

WordPress is the main offender, because it makes pages you didn't ask for. If your site has a tag archive for every condition you've ever written about, you've got a few dozen pages competing with your service pages right now.

Open Performance, set the last three months, and click into one search you care about. Say 'knee physio' and your suburb. Now click the Pages tab. If one page is listed, good. If three or more are listed and none of them is above position five, you've found a fight.

Do the same for your ten most important searches. Write down the winner for each one, the page with the most clicks, and then the others. That list is the whole job.

The other thing to look for is Google picking the wrong winner. On an Adelaide neuro rehab clinic we went through in September, 'neurological rehabilitation adelaide' was shown 123 times in sixteen months, and the page Google showed was the home page, at position 4.1, not the rehabilitation services page the clinic had built for it. The service page never got a look in. That's a fight the home page won and the clinic lost, because a home page says a bit about everything and books nothing in particular.

The fix is the same every time. Pick the winner. Usually it's the service page, because it's the one that books. If a blog post has more clicks, the post can stay the winner for the question it answers, but the service page gets the search with the suburb in it.

Then make the other pages point at the winner. A link in the body of each one, in a sentence, not in a footer. Change their titles so they're about something different, because two pages with the same title is a fight by definition. Tell Google not to index the tag and category archives. Merge the thin posts into one good one, and redirect the old addresses to it.

Don't delete anything first. A page that has been live for three years has links and history, and a redirect carries that across. Deleting it throws it away. We take a full copy of a site before we touch a page, and I'd suggest you do the same.

Twenty eight days after the changes, click into the same searches and open the Pages tab again. One page each. Then watch the position on the winner. The position usually settles before the clicks move, because Google has to pick the page first and then the page has to earn its spot. Give it three to four months before you judge it, and judge it on clicks from people who weren't searching your name.

And run the check again every quarter. Every new post and every new location page is a new chance for a fight to start, which is why it's the first thing we redo each quarter on every site we look after.