One of the most common and easiest mistakes that can be made when building SEO for a website is keyword cannibalization. This means that the copy on your site targets keywords that are too similar, causing many of your pages to get penalized in search engine rankings because they don’t provide enough diversity. Find out what keyword cannibalization is and how to avoid it in this article!
What is Keyword cannibalization?
Keyword cannibalization describes the act of a single website having multiple pages that share similar content on one or more of its pages. Yes, keyword cannibalization does exist and yes, it can have a negative impact on your rankings because Google doesn’t like duplicate content. Keyword cannibalization is a huge problem for website owners. But it’s not just an SEO issue — it can also affect the user experience and hurt conversion rates.
Why Is Keyword Cannibalism Bad For SEO?
Keyword cannibalism is bad for SEO because it shows up in search results as duplicate content. This can potentially cause confusion and frustration to your customers, who are trying to find the information they’re looking for. It’s also a waste of valuable time and resources.
Keyword cannibalism is when you use the same keyword for multiple pages on your website. For example, if you have a page about dog training and a page about dog grooming, both of these could be targeting the keyword “dog training.” When this happens, search engines will assume that this topic is covered well enough on one of these pages that they don’t need to show it in the results for both keywords. This can lead to a big loss in traffic and rankings for your site as a
How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization
While this is a very common problem, it can actually be easily fixed by careful analysis of your site structure and content, as well as ensuring that every page that ranks has unique, high quality content.
1. Restructure Your Website
Keyword cannibalization is a situation where multiple pages of your website all rank well for the same search term. For example, if a popular search term is “Cheap Running Shoes,” and you have three separate pages on your website about running shoes, each page will be competing with the other to rank for that keyword. If you want to fix this problem, you should restructure your site so that no two pages compete for the same keyword. If you structure your website in a proper way, your content can be found more easily by search engines and avoid keyword cannibalization. Your site should also have a well-designed navigation menu, which will keep visitors on your site longer.
2. Audit your content
It’s important to regularly audit content for keyword cannibalization. If you’re not regularly doing this, your content may be performing well on one keyword and terribly on another. This can cause a confusing user experience and drive up your bounce rates and average time on-site. In order to solve keyword cannibalization, you need to use a content audit. This will allow you to create more focused content that your customers want. It will also help your SEO by allowing search engines to determine the best page for a given keyword.
3. Use 301 redirects
This will allow you to keep the original ranking of that page. You can also use URL parameters to tell Google which is the main page for that article. If you have multiple pages on your website that are targeting the same keyword, you should use 301 redirects to send traffic away from the other pages. This will ensure that your pages will rank for different keywords due to the amount of link juice they each get.
4. Create new landing pages
Keyword cannibalization is when you rank for a keyword and then your website or landing page ranks for the same keyword. For example, if I rank for “pizza,” and my landing page also ranks for “pizza,” this is considered to be keyword cannibalization. If half of the people who land on your site leave within seconds, you probably have a problem. You want to keep visitors as long as possible and having too many keyword variations is not doing that for you. Creating new landing pages–ones that are specifically optimized for those keywords–will help with this.
5. Find new keywords
One way to fix keyword cannibalization is to find new keywords. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, SEMrush, or MOZ, and identify the keywords with not many monthly searches but have a high conversion rate. Then use these new keywords in your ranking strategy. You should also look for keywords that could be related to your product or service. If you sell mobile phones, then “cell phone accessories” might be a good keyword. You can do this by using Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
6. Improve Internal Linking
Keyword cannibalization is a problem that occurs when two pages on the same website rank for the same keyword. This is a problem because it’s difficult to attract visitors to both pages and rankings for all of the keywords will be diluted. To fix this, you need to improve internal linking so that people can easily navigate from one page to another without getting lost or frustrated. Establish a link-building strategy that will go after the most popular and highly linked keywords and then work down the list until they find ones that are more relevant to their site. This way, they can build links to these new keywords while maintaining connections with their most powerful keywords.
Conclusion
Keyword cannibalization is a very serious problem for marketers. If you have more than one page targeting the same keyword, it’s essential that you take steps to avoid keyword cannibalization. Follow these six tips to ensure you are not losing valuable traffic due to this common mistake.