How to Identify and Correct Keyword Cannibalization
One of the reasons SEO management is so complicated is that there are many pitfalls, so many that you may be unaware of them all. Some are relatively small and fixable when noticed early. Others are more damaging to your SEO rating. And their effects are often quite difficult or outright impossible to fix. One such oversight is keyword cannibalization. Let’s take a closer look at how to identify and fix keyword cannibalization.
What is keyword cannibalization?
To understand keyword cannibalization, we first need to outline what keywords are and how they function. Keywords are the combination of words that people type into a search engine (such as Bing or Google) to find blogs, services, offers, recipes, etc. Therefore, When you write blogs, in order to be found when people search, it is vital to use good keywords. That way, once someone looks for their keyword, they will find your site. Clearly, choosing the best keywords is essential to your SEO management.
Having multiple posts use the same keyword might seem like a good idea. In fact, it may seem like the more posts you have with the same keyword, the more likely the person will stumble upon your website when they look for something. But, actually, it usually is the opposite of what happens. If you constantly use the same keyword, your website will become oversaturated with that keyword.
Keep in mind that all websites compete based on their keyword usage. And that the prevalence of particular keywords, alone, isn’t a good sign that your website properly covers the related subject.
Search engines have advanced their algorithms to the extent that they can sense that a site has keywords without helpful content. As a result, oversaturating your website with a particular keyword will likely lower your SEO rating and diminish your online visibility. This scattering of a keyword all over your site is what we call keyword cannibalization.
Why do we call it that? Because each post with the keyword gets a little bit of your “credit” for having something to say about the keyword. No one post gets is outstanding in the eyes of the search engines. If one post did contain top-notch information and was your site’s standard-bearer for that keyword, that post would rise in the search engine rankings. Having dozens of posts mentioning the keyword dilutes the value of the keyword for your site’s SEO.
Identify and fix keyword cannibalization
In order to identify and fix keyword cannibalization, you need to take a couple of steps.
Identification
Firstly, you need to outline all of your website’s important pages or posts and their associated keywords. You can do this with a keyword mapping tool. Fortunately, doing so is relatively simple with tools like:
A tool like this will automatically analyze your website and outline the important URLs and associated keywords. If you don’t have a mapping tool and your website is fairly new (and, thus, not yet large and elaborate), You can use a simple spreadsheet to manually document this information. But, for the easiest process, you will need to rely on a tool, such as one of the tools we’ve mentioned.
Once you outline all the URLs, you must look for those with the same keyword. If you spot any, you might be suffering from keyword cannibalization. If this is the case with core URLs, then you definitely are. You can check the meta information in your title tags for more advanced identification. If it targets the same keyword, you may be facing keyword cannibalization.
Also, if you use a rank-tracking tool, you can identify thin content and poorly placed keywords. Thin content is content that offers no value or valuable information to the reader. As such, it will not only alienate your audience but likely damage your SEO rank. Such content usually hosts shoehorned keywords with little care or understanding of the context. These keywords are poorly placed and will harm the viewer’s experience and your SEO rating. Some of the best tools for identifying thin
content and poorly placed keywords include:
● SEMrush
● Ahrefs
Fixing
Fixing keyword cannibalization usually requires just a bit of organization and digital tidying up. But there are cases where you may need to break out the 301 redirects or even create new landing pages. The most common ways of fixing keyword cannibalization include the following:
● Website restructuring – Here, you simply take the page with the most prominent online authority and use it as a landing page. To do this, you must first access your website’s navigation menu and ensure your new landing page has a prominent spot. Then you need to update your links (both internal and external) to point to your new landing page (instead of the old one). Tools like Ahrefs or Moz can help with finding external links. Similarly, you need to change your old landing page so that valuable backlinks are connected to the old one. You can do this with a 301 redirect. Lastly, you must update the meta title and description tags to reflect the new landing page properly.
● Create a new landing page – If no page has a decent online authority, you can create a new one. As in the previous step, you will link to the page with keyword variations.
● Consolidate
content – If no page has top authority, you might want to consolidate all the pages that target the same keyword. You do this by creating a new one containing all the essential info from the other pages.
● 301 redirect – 301 redirect is a possible solution but not ideal. Through it, you can consolidate the cannibalizing content by linking the less relevant pages to a more authoritative version. Of course, you should use this method only for pages with similar content.
Finding new keywords
To avoid having to identify and fix keyword cannibalization, you can research and find new keywords. While keyword research is a big subject in it itself, we will give you some helpful pointers to adhere to. Namely, you need to ensure that your keywords accurately describe the page they are in. The last thing you want is for users to arrive at your page only to realize that you have nothing of value to say about what they are searching for. SemRush has a “free to try” tool that will suggest new keywords for you to target: Keyword Magic Tool
With some small changes and keyword alterations and additions, you can easily keep your content relatively the same but subtly increase the performance of your keywords. But you need a clear idea of what your pages are about and what keywords can be changed. If a specific page leads to substantial conversions, we suggest that you don’t touch it. Having a high conversion rate is not something that is easily achieved. This is why experts from Convert More advise that you leave those pages as they are and instead try to determine the cause of their success so you can apply what you learn to your other pages.
Final thoughts
As you can see, it isn’t that difficult to identify and fix keyword cannibalization. But, the best course of action is to minimize the chance of it ever occurring with long-term keyword mapping, not only from keyword cannibalization but various other pitfalls. So, before you start creating content, outline a long-term content strategy and closely follow how it performs. It is much easier to repair keyword cannibalization if you catch it in its infancy.
Photo used:
https://pixabay.com/photos/content-marketing-digital-marketing-7307069/
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