The process of competing for the same target phrase across many pages on the web is known as keyword cannibalization marketing, which lowers a site’s overall search engine results due to a drop in visitors. As a result, website visibility and traffic may suffer.
This can cause confusion for both users and search engines. Here are five strategies to detect and address keyword cannibalization on your website to prevent it.
Do a site audit
- Performing a proper website audit is the first step to identifying keyword cannibalization. This involves assessing each page on your site to see which ones are targeting rankings for the same or related marketing keywords.
- Duplicate content, pages with similar titles and meta descriptions, and other potential cannibalization issues can all be found using tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs. Once you find these pages, you can begin formulating a plan to regroup or re-optimize them to increase their search engine rankings.
Use Analytics information to identify underperforming pages
Analyzing your website analytics data is another technique to detect keyword cannibalization. Find pages that aren’t getting as much traffic as they should or have a higher bounce rate than usual. For the same target keyword, these pages may compete directly with other pages on your site, which could lower their search engine rankings.
To resolve this issue, you may need to combine the information on some of these pages, delete some pages entirely, or re-optimize them for alternative keywords to avoid competing with other pages on your site.
Improve the organization of your website
Optimizing your website structure is one of the best strategies to stop keyword search marketing cannibalization. To do this, you need to clearly lay out the layout of your website’s pages and organize them logically so that both users and search engines can easily navigate them.
For example, to organize related material, use categories and subcategories. Use internal links to help people get from one page to another. This type of structural optimization of your site can help search engines recognize the most important pages and reduce the chance of term cannibalization.
Make sure each page has unique content
To prevent keyword cannibalization, every page of your website must have original content that targets a specific target term. As a result, search engines may be able to better understand the intent behind each page and increase their search engine rankings.
When writing content for your website, focus on one large digital marketing seo keyword per page and don’t use the same keyword on multiple pages. In this way, you can reduce the competition on the page and increase the overall results of your site in search engines.
Use canonical tags
Using canonical tags is the ultimate strategy to stop keyword cannibalization. If a page has many versions and these tags are present, search engines can tell which version is preferred.
You can use the canonical tag to determine which of two pages on your site should be considered the main version, for example, if they both target the same keyword. This can help avoid confusion for both visitors and search engines, and it can also ensure that the correct page is ranked for the desired phrase.
Identifying keyword cannibalization
Finding potential keywords for digital marketing cannibalization issues on your website is actually quite simple. You will usually get the results you need by entering your search as “Domain + Keywords.”
For example, if your dog care company’s website is called “DogCare.Com” and you wanted to investigate keyword cannibalization for dog food, you would enter those terms into a search engine along with other versions.
You’ll see a list of results, but are they what you’re looking for? Does your older, less important dog food blog post rank any higher than your newer, important one? In that case, that would be the definition of keyword cannibalization. Fortunately, you can stop this by taking a few specific actions.
Conclusion
Your website’s search engine results can suffer from keyword cannibalization, which will also lead to an overall decrease in visitors. These five techniques will help you find and fix cannibalization issues on your website so you can improve your website’s search engine rankings. Modern search engines are much more complex and sensitive when it comes to deciding how to rank results.
Making sure you avoid losing keyword sales will help you better highlight your intended content and ensure it gets the attention it rightfully deserves. Excellent content will always be the most important ingredient to achieving good rankings.
With the Search Professional Certificate, you can learn how to use keywords correctly.
Always remember to conduct a thorough site audit, use analytics data to identify underperforming pages, improve site structure, create original content for each page, and use canonical tags as needed. This will help ensure that your website appears higher in search engine results and attracts more organic traffic.