Product with two common names: A separate page for each name, or both on one page?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Greg Baka: Product with two common names: A separate page for each name, or both on one page?
  This is a real-life problem on my ecommerce store for the drying rack we manufacture: ; Some people call it a Clothes Drying Rack, while others call it a Laundry Drying Rack, but it's really the same thing. ;  ; Search volume is higher for the clothes version, so we give it the most attention.
  
  I currently have 2 separate pages with the On-Page optimization focused on each name (URL, Title, h1, img alts, etc). Each page also has unique content (one is more of a sales page and the other is more of a details page) Here are the two drying rack pages:
  www.bestdryingrack(dot)com/clothes-drying-rack-main.html
  www.bestdryingrack(dot)com/laundry-drying-rack-details.html
  
  But the ranking of both pages is pretty poor. The fairly generic homepage shows up instead of the individual pages in Google searches for clothes drying rack and for laundry drying rack. We can get the individual page to appear in a long-tail search like this: round wooden clothes drying rack
  
  So my thought is maybe I should just combine both of these pages into one page that will hopefully be more powerful. We would have to set up the On-Page optimization to cover both "clothes & laundry drying rack" but that seems possible.
  
  Please share your thoughts. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Is there another solution?
  
  Thanks for your help!
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  Jeremy Estes: Ya, if its the same exact thing, with a variation in its function's name, put it all on one page.
  
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  Tom McGuinness: Definitely a single page with optimisation for both keywords.  ;
  If you go for ;clothes-drying-rack-main.html as your product page, you could do a blog post all about ;laundry drying racks, linking to ;clothes-drying-rack-main.html with "laundry drying rack" as the anchor.  ;This would help that page rank for that variation.
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  Neeraj Kumar: +Tom McGuinness right suggestion. In addition, +Greg Baka I will suggest the page should also be optimised for some generic keywords like Drying Rack, easy to use rack for laundry drying, must keep near washing machine, buy a rack with washing machine, affordable drying rack, washing area with economy laundry drying rack etc. and also mention locality. Use these phrases re-phrases in your description with mention of price availability and quality and also bold these phrases. Just to increase avg density of keyword, this will help.
  I have not visited these pages, so maybe you have already done this.
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  Tom McGuinness: +Neeraj Kumar keyword density is important, but do be mindful to keep the language natural. If you're informative and authoritative then the keywords will be there, and people will link to your content and share it.
  
  Write for people, not google. The rest will follow. 
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  Greg Baka: From feedback here and in other groups, it appears that combining them into one page would be worthwhile. So I did that this morning. Also I 301'd the old extra one over to the new combined one.
  
  So now we wait and see if this pleases the Google gods...
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  Neeraj Kumar: +Greg Baka yupppp, and do tell when you get changes in report and performance. One thinh if you like resubmit your sitemap in GWT and if want, do use 'fetch as google' and submit new pages...
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  Tom McGuinness: Also consider investing the time in adding microformat markup to your page. There's a rich data tool in webmaster tools so you don't have to code it yourself.