Oftentimes, entrepreneurs overlook some of their marketing efforts. They are dedicated to producing content, however, they end up cannibalizing their keywords.

Larby Amirouche says that when more than one of your web pages is designed to rank for one particular keyword, you end up competing with yourself.

Unfortunately, competing with yourself does not guarantee your success. This unintentional action diminishes your authority, decreases your click-through rate and even lowers the conversion rates.

Here, Larby Amirouche will give you everything you need to know about keyword cannibalization.

What Is Keyword Cannibalization?

Through this process, unknowingly, you’re splitting CTR, links, content, and conversions between two pages that should be one.

Keyword cannibalization does not give Google the best impression of your site. The search engine will be missing out on the depth of your knowledge, and it will imply that you aren’t improving the authority of your site for that query.

If you practice keyword cannibalization, you allow Google to weigh your pages against each other. You also let it choose which ones it thinks suits the matching keywords best.

How to Recognize Keyword Cannibalization?

This is an easy and quick process you can perform on Google. You just simply type ‘site:domain.com “keyword” on the search engine and it will give you the answer to your question. It is recommended to use a private browser.

Checking whether or not your site suffers from keyword cannibalism is easy. You simply do a search for your site, for any specific keyword you suspect might have multiple results. In my case, I’ll google site:yoast.com readability ranks. The first two results are the articles I suspected to suffer from cannibalization.

If your content is on the top ranks, there’s no problem there, however, if your content is at the lower part of the list, you should be concerned. There is a chance that these contents are almost the same.

From there, you should look for solutions on how you can pull these up in the rankings.

Effects of Keyword Cannibalization to Your SEO

Larby Amirouche already established the damaging effects of this practice, moreover to SEO. Unfortunately, many people who are suffering from keyword cannibalization aren’t even aware about the problem.

It is clear that keyword cannibalization causes lost site traffic, queries leading to the wrong page, fluctuating SERP rankings, and ultimately lost sales.

1. Diminishing Page Authority

Keyword Cannibalization forces you to your CTR to multiple moderately relevant pages. You pitted your pages against each other and now you need pageviews and SERP ranks.

2. Weak Links & Anchor Text

Similar to CTR, your backlinks are being split between two pages or more (if you are not aware). Moreover, your anchor text and internal links are leading visitors to multiple different pages instead of one authoritative page on the subject.

3. Google May Devalue the More Relevant Page

Keywords help Google to understand what your pages are about. However, if you have the same keywords, Google will be forced to choose what’s best fit for the keyword.

4. It’s a Sign of Poor Page Quality

Same keywords on different pages will create a negative impression on your audience. This will tell them that your content is probably stretched thin.

5. Your Conversion Rate Will Suffer

Inevitably one of your pages will convert better than the rest. In addition, you’re losing potential leads when they land on less relevant pages.

How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization?

Here are just a few options you can adapt as a solution to your problem on keyword cannibalization.

1. Restructure Your Website

2. Combine articles

This could be one of the best options you can do. If several of your articles target the same keywords, made for the same audience, and basically, have the same content, combine them. Rewrite the posts and make a better version of the topic. That’ll help your rankings and solve your keyword cannibalization problem.

3. Find New Keywords

This time plan your keywords properly so you will not commit the same mistakes.

4. Improve internal linking

You can help Google to figure out which article is most important, by setting up a decent internal linking structure.

Choose which post is better and link valuable content to it. By following the links you added, Google can figure out which post should be at the highest in the search engines.

Your internal linking structure could solve a part of your keyword cannibalism problems.

5. Use 301 Redirects

It is not recommended to use many 301s, however, they might be necessary if you are dealing with keyword cannibalization.

Using 301s allows you to consolidate your cannibalized content by linking all of the less relevant pages to a single, more authoritative version.

Conclusion

For someone who has been in the industry for over a decade, Larby Amirouche observed that keyword cannibalization is more rampant today than ever before.

Ironically, most of the victims of this practice are webmasters. Indeed, they recognize the importance of SEO for a business. However, they don’t fully understand how to ‘speak’ Google’s language.

Larby Amirouche agrees that keyword cannibalization can cause major problems, but it’s a really easy issue to fix.

Business owners must perform regular site audits and frequently check the SEO health of any website. In addition, they must also carefully check their keyword and content strategies.

Make sure to cross-check any new pages during planning to avoid creating duplicate or similar content that could be a potential competitor.

Originally Posted: https://medium.com/larby-amirouche/larby-amirouche-answers-what-is-keyword-cannibalization-447f30ba97f1