I recently launched a site that I intend to be fairly large (~200 pages) and to say I'm frustrated with my on page SEO and site structure is and understatement.

I did all my keyword research and laid out 5 major keywords that I wanted to rank for. I made these my categories. It took me a while, but each category looks exactly like a page (meaning I have about a 500 word intro content), has custom sidebars specific to that silo, etc.

I originally chose categories/posts as opposed to parent/child pages because it felt more user friendly. If someone visited the site and wanted to read all the content for Category A they could do so quite easily. As opposed with pages I would have to manually link ALL related articles, etc.

My frustration is now at the bottom of each category I use a widget that reads "More Related Articles" and it is essentially the archive of that category. With that said there are now 1-5 pages for that category and I'm starting to wonder if this dilutes the silo. I have the categories indexed (of course) and I'm concerned about duplicate content (though the archives only show post titles, not content).

Should I have gone with parent/child pages instead? Is all of this okay? Am I making any sense?

Would love any advice, thanks.