Maisie Lloyd
Maisie is the Digital Content Manager at Intelligency, handling all things creative for the agency. Her experience centres around the production of digital content, pertaining to graphic design, writing copy, and video and audio content.
What is keyword cannibalisation?
Keyword cannibalisation occurs when multiple pages on your website target the same keywords, causing them to compete against each other in search engine results. Rather than boosting your visibility, this overlap can dilute your SEO efforts and hurt your rankings.
Why is keyword cannibalisation such a problem?
Keyword cannibalisation directly impacts your content. Here’s how it directly impacts your SEO efforts:
Impacting your rankings – the greatest issue with keyword cannibalisation is the impact it can have on your rankings. Negative Impact on ranking decreases the chance of content being displayed, clicked on and engaged with.
Decreasing page authority – when your content is directly competing with more of your content, it can negatively impact your authority. It dilutes the authority you have potentially established on one page by redirecting your audience to another.
The spending of unnecessary crawl budget –if you have multiple pages targeting the same keywords, it can impact the chances of other important pieces of content being crawled. This is because Google determines the crawl budget, meaning other pieces of important content can be directly impacted because of keyword cannibalisation.
Negatively impacting conversion rates – if two pieces of content are competing with each other and one ranks higher than the other, it is going to have a higher click-through rate. You never want to compete with your content, as the goal is to create unique pieces of content that perform consistently.
Preventing and fixing keyword cannibalisation
Prevention
The key is to define the intent of your content; your intent will directly influence the way your content is ranked on search engines. Using long-tailed keywords allows you to directly answer and cater to different search intents, which would be one of the key factors in content not being ranked against other pieces of your content.
Avoid repeating the same keyword sets, diversify the words you target to make sure your content isn’t competing against each other. Coupling this with pinpointing your intent will ensure there’s no content battling to be ranked.
Monitor your content after it’s been created and look at how your content ranks for your keywords. If it’s ranking poorly, the content may need to be optimised to add more value and demonstrate to search engines it’s worth displaying.
Fixing keyword cannibalisation
Once you’re certain keyword cannibalisation is your problem, you can begin to strategise how to move forward with your different pieces of content.
The best approach is to consolidate your content. Merging your content into one comprehensive piece can be beneficial for preserving content. You can do this by implementing 301 redirects, which will allow the original link to still exist but funnel it back into the new consolidated content.
If you think your content serves different audience intents, then optimise the content to cater to that intent. You can do this by adapting the copy and integrating more long-tailed keywords.
If you decide you need to keep the content as well as needing to keep the pages separate, then canonical tags may be the best approach for you. A canonical tag lets the search engine know which page to prioritise for ranking and indexing.
What not to do…
Whilst some scenarios might call for you to delete the page to fix a cannibalisation, its not an ideal solution. Not only can you lose the value that piece of content added to your site, but any links embedded on the page are lost.
In Summary
Keyword cannibalisation can quietly damage your SEO performance if left unchecked. By planning strategically, optimising with intent, and auditing your content regularly, you can ensure each page has a distinct purpose, helping search engines and users alike navigate your site more effectively.
