What would you do about these cannibalized keywords?

[Sutra]

Let's say the niche is Automobile Towing Services and "Stathom Towing" is the name of a popular nationwide towing company. Customers are interested in reading reviews about the company, but some want to know the best tow truck drivers at the company. I have two pages:

1. Stathom Towing Review for 2018
2. The 25 Best Drivers at Stathom Towing

Both pages are doing well (most significant keywords at positions #2 - 8), and are slowly rising. Some keywords are performing as expected but others are being cannabilized. For example:

"The 25 Best Drivers at Stathom Towing" is my only article ranking for the keyword "Stathom Driver Review", at position #2.

However, both articles are ranking for "Stathom Driver Reviews". Article #1 has been climbing for the past few months but bounces in and out of the top ten, usually hitting #3 then bounces out again. And article #2 has maintained a pretty steady spot at #2 in the SERPs for the past couple months. This is also happening with some of the other keywords these articles rank for.

When I created these articles I knew there would be some overlap but my thinking was that someone who wanted to see the best tow drivers would not want to waste time on a full review, thus I created 2 different articles, one specific to each type of intent. But with my SERP results I'm wondering if it's better to combine them to stop the cannibalization.

Well...hold on a second haha. Something just occurred to me as I was writing this. I rank #2-4 for several keywords on these articles. In each of those instances the sites above me are 2 specific articles. One is a full review article but also contains a "customer reviews" section at the bottom that has 50+ customers reviews (don't know if they are real or fake reviews). The other page is just a long list of customer reviews, no actual review made by the site. The article in the #1 spot has dominated that spot every day for at least 6 months according to SerpWoo.

So maybe that's the answer; Google wants to show an article that has a company review plus shows individual reviews. Thus, I should merge my articles.

However, before I do that I want to get your guys feedback. Since I have spots #2 - 4 mostly (although in a couple instances I have spot #1), and often have both of my articles taking 2 spots in the top ten, I want to be sure I make the right choice. Took a long time and a lot of effort to rank these. Don't want to fuck it up, hah.

So, what would you do in this situation?

 

[lion1978]

I would merge them and then have a table of content that would make it easy for those visitors who are only interested in seeing the best tow drivers could then jump straight to that section of the page

 

[Ryuzaki]

You could merge them.

Another option is to de-optimize the one you don't care about ranking and then make sure you're linking internally to the one you do want to rank. It'd probably only require changing the Title Tag/H1 Header. Then rewrite that long "best drivers at" article and summarize it and the rankings succinctly on the main post, so it makes that post have the same information and strengthens it.

I would 100% add reviews if the posts ranking above yours have them, for the exact reason you stated. Google shows it's cards and tells you exactly what they want ranking for each SERP. I doubt you need 50 of them. I wouldn't shit up your post just for the sake of cramming in more. Maybe 10-15 reviews in a section would do it.

@lion1978 has a great idea for the case if you merge them, too. Best of both worlds. But the issue is that having too much information that's way too long and tangential isn't going to help your conversions either.

I typically do some education in my buying posts to fatten them up and help with the LSI keywords and relevancy, but it's always summaries. I link out to full posts on those topics. But they're never this closely optimized either. Usually it's linking to posts like "How to" and "What is." Stuff that Google would never confuse.

 

[Sutra]

Thank you @lion1978 and @Ryuzaki

After thinking about what you guys wrote I think merging the 25 best into the full Review will be best in this case since the keywords are so closely related. But I have a few questions before moving forward, if you don't mind:

1. After the merge, I assume I should just 301 the 25 best article to the full Review, correct?
2. If "yes" to #1, do I need to do anything about the internal links that point to the 25 best article, or should I leave them as is and allow them to redirect to the full Review? The anchor texts are like "Related: The 25 Best Drivers at Stathom Towing", "The Best Tow Drivers", "Drivers you can trust", etc.
3. The 25 Best article has links pointing to other relevant internal pages to direct link juice where I want. Will that link juice still go to those internal pages after the 301? Do I need to edit the full Review article to include those same links?

 

[Ryuzaki]

@Sutra, What I do is set up the 301 and then go back and change the internal links to point to the new destination. You don't have to but that's how you end up with a giant technical SEO mess down the line with redirect chains or redirects getting dropped by accident and posts losing ranks.

Regarding #3, unless you include those old internal links in the new destination post, they're gone. They won't be remembered. The 301 will only deal with the old URL and the new URL, not with any internal links appearing on the pages. You'll have to re-include them on the new URL if you want them to continue existing.