Keyword Cannibalization: What It (Really) Is & How to Fix It

If someone needs a specific good or service, they immediately turn to a device with internet access to do an online search.

The days of relying on printed catalogs or the Yellow Pages to locate a company or service of interest are long gone. Seventy percent of modern Americans (According to Latimes) discard new phone books without looking at the listings.

Yet, along with the convenience of posting online comes a new risk: the possibility that your material will be buried under a mountain of data.

If you know exactly what you're looking for, a search engine is a great tool, but if you're just browsing, it can be time-consuming and frustrating trying to whittle down the results to something more manageable.

As a local business owner or manager, you may target customers in your immediate area, but your target market could be the entire planet. As a result, you now have a global rivalry. So, effectively employing keywords is more crucial than ever for usability and search engine rankings.

What is keyword Cannibalization?

This is called keyword cannibalization, and it occurs when multiple articles or blog posts on your site compete for the same search query on Google's search results page. It could be that you've optimized them both for the same keyword, or the topics covered are too similar to distinguish between them.

When you optimize multiple blogs or articles for the same search terms, you dilute the effectiveness of each. When performing a search, Google typically only displays one or two results from the same domain. In some cases, especially if your domain has a lot of authority, you could obtain a score of 3.

Keyword Cannibalization Identification

Problems with keyword cannibalization on your site can be easily detected. A search that includes the domain name and the terms you're interested in most cases, should yield the desired results.

If your company's website is DogCare.Com, and you're interested in keyword cannibalization for dog food, you may search DogCare.Com, dog food, and related terms.

A set of results will be returned to you, but are they the ones you need? Is that blog post on the dog food you posted two years ago getting more views than the one you just published, which you probably consider more substantial? If that's the case, you've got a classic case of keyword cannibalization. There are, fortunately, measures you may take to prevent this from happening again.

Avoid Keyword Cannibalization in 5 Easy Steps

The following methods will help you avoid keyword Cannibalization −

Merge

You may want to consolidate the content of two similar websites onto a single page. This could be the case if, for example, you have one website that recommends high-quality dog food and another that provides a blacklist of low-quality dog food.

While this may not be the best course of action in every circumstance, combining material can often streamline your website and boost its SEO.

Delete

While drastic, you could remove problematic content from your website entirely, especially if it is no longer relevant. Delete the post if your business has expanded and it still ranks higher than the material you want to appear in search results for the keywords it uses in its title. There can no longer be a problem if no content exists.

Remove Keywords

If a keyword isn't crucial, but you still want to keep some text around, you can. Although manual solutions are typically more time-consuming and labor-intensive, this approach has the advantage of being straightforward and straightforward to execute.

Rearrange Your Internal Links

There may be opportunities to enhance the quality of the links if your website features material that refers to other pages on your site. If you link to another content or web page, a search engine may give that content a higher ranking because links signal relevance to search engines like Google.

If you want less-important information on your site to link to the content you want to highlight and prioritize, try adding or adjusting the internal linking structure of your site. This way, you can indicate to the SERP that the linked information is more relevant than other options. The value of a high position in search engine results remains high.

Alter Requests for Outbound Links

This is likely one of the trickier types of cannibalism to counter, but it may be crucial nonetheless. SEO also considers the number of incoming links when determining a page's position in search engine results. If you search your site, you may discover that older, less relevant posts rank better than more recent, more relevant posts because of links from other sites.

The software can monitor backlinks, and webmasters can be contacted to request that connections be changed or removed if they have the time and resources to do so, particularly if the linked sites have great authority. In a perfect world, they'd swap out unwelcome old links for desirable new ones, improving your SEO standing.

Expanding Websites Will Get Hampered by "Keyword Cannibalism."

Your site's size increases the likelihood that it will suffer from internal keyword cannibalization. When you write about something you're passionate about, you may not realize how similar your pieces are becoming.

Yes, the same thing occurred to me. It's important to keep tabs on the most important keywords every once in a while. Don't forget to see if you're consuming your keywords. Occasionally, you may find that you need to reorganize your site's content or rewrite certain pieces.

Conclusion

Keyword cannibalization is not a thing, at least not in the manner that most people think it is. If you have many pages on the same topic or use the same keywords, Google won't "confuse" them. In light of its content knowledge, it assigns a value to each page.

Does that guarantee that your preferred Google result will always appear first? Not. This, however, does not imply that it is "ranking the wrong page" or that immediate action is necessary to "fix" the issue. In many cases, so-called "solutions" to the problem of term keyword cannibalization worsen the situation.