Having multiple website pages to target a specific term or keywords can negatively affect website health instead of an optimized website. Check what Keyword Cannibalization is and how to deal with it.
You might have a lot of pages and posts on your website, or you have published a deep study of a topic on multiple pages. Did you notice your website’s various pages ranked on a single keyword? It might be a good thing because more pages appearing in search results increase the website’s impression rate.
Unfortunately, this practice might be harmful to your website in some cases. Why is it bad practice? Website pages might be trying to compete with each other to get a better ranking for the same keyword. How does your website compete with other websites on the same keyword if they are in internal competition? This particular SEO misstep is the cannibalization of keywords.
What is Keyword Cannibalization?
A bookish example of keyword cannibalization is multiple pages of a website that targets the same or similar keywords and competes against each other to get a high rank and hurt the website’s organic ranking.
Following are some cannibalization issues that can occur:
- Page’s ranking position will fluctuate.
- The wrong page ranked.
- Continuous change in URL ranking.
- Ranking Words Struggle to Increase.
How to Find Keyword Cannibalization?
Finding cannibalized pages is pretty easy. All you need to do is search your site on google with the specific keyword you suspect might have multiple results. I have Googled the Cybexo website with the keyword “web development services in Canada.” Please have a look at what effects I have got. You can implement the same approach to find keyword cannibalization links on your website.
To find keyword cannibalization, I have searched site:cybexo.com the web development services in Canada which is my suspected keyword. You can also find your results by implementing this simple step.
site:website.com "Keyword"
I found multiple links that highlighted the exact keywords. If the content in pages explains the same thing, then it is cannibalizing. There are numerous ways to resolve this issue, and you can choose any method you think fits. Here are these methods to remove keyword cannibalization from any website.
In the first phase, your content needs a great audit that will help you analyze the performance of the content, and then you can decide “which content to keep”. The last phase will be the implementation of any suitable method!
How to Audit Keyword Cannibalization?
You can audit your website pages with any SEO tool. The one I like is Google Search Console. It prompts very accurate results. I use the following method while auditing:
Open your Google webmaster and select search results. You’ll find the +New option, click on it and select the page option.
Here you can paste the link to the page you need to audit.
While auditing, you can check the page performance and check the page’s keywords ranked in the Google search engine.
Increase your search result list from your browser setting. Search the keyword on google >> Press ctrl+f >> write your domain name >> Enter. You’ll find your links and their current positions.
Decide and Remove Keyword Cannibalization
You have done a detailed audit of your website, and now you even know which page is ranking well. So it’s time to decide what to keep or what is better to be changed. There could be multiple aspects like while making a decision.
- One page’s keyword ranked higher than the second page.
- The second page appears on the search engine with more keywords than the first page.
Once you make the decision, you can do the following steps:
- Delete cannibalized pages
- Change content and keywords but keep the topic relevant.
- Merge all the content into one page
- Redirect all cannibalized links with one page you want to keep.
Changing your content will be a better approach, but it takes effort and time. Check out how you target your website location with the help of SEO. Feel free to ask any question in the comment section, and I will come back to you to the best of my knowledge.
