Everything you need to know about keyword cannibalisation

Cannibalisation? Hannibal? What the heck are we even on about.

Chances are if you’ve done a bit of blogging you’ve probably heard this term, however, if not keyword cannibalisation may be something you don’t have a clue about.
Either way, welcome to this blog where we are going to cover what cannibalisation is, how you can avoid it, and how to can check your site against it.

What is Keyword Cannibalisation?

Let’s start at the beginning. 

Back in the day, when Google’s machine learning was in its infancy, the way in which it ranked content was much simpler, it was essentially the more keywords the merrier. 

However, that has since gone, due to “keyword stuffing” as its known. This is the phenomenon where articles are simply jam-packed with keywords in a deliberate and unnatural way to get them to rank higher. Now that the Google machine has evolved, it actually penalises for keyword stuffing. This is referred to as keyword cannibalisation. Google and associated search engines are very stringent to avoid deliberate keyword stuffing. 

Keyword cannibalisation occurs when there are identical or similar keywords throughout the content on your site. As a result, a search engine like Google cannot detect which content to rank higher. This means that sometimes it will give a higher ranking to the web page you don’t mean to prioritize. It may also lower the rank of all the pages that share these keywords.

To be clear, this does not mean that you can only use a keyword once in your site. Two pages with matching keywords can harmoniously live on the same site if they have different search intent. It’s all about providing a good search experience for the reader.

How to identify if its an issue and put it right?

As a business, you know that your website grows. It grows with your brand, services and products. Furthermore, we also do not always necessarily evaluate the changes or additions we are making to the site, and before we know it we could be duplicating content all over the place. A good idea is to get someone independent who has never seen your site to audit it (you could do this as part of an SEO blog writing audit), they will be able to see with a fresh pair of eyes what pages are essential to the user experience (UX) and what are not so much, or what is being somewhat duplicated. Tell them to take lots of notes!

You could also use Google Search Console (GSC). This can be a great tool for finding cannibalization issues. To use it, the performance report will show you by default, a list of queries that your site has earned impressions and clicks from. Click into one of these queries, via the “pages tab” and you will see a list of the URLs that rank for that query and the associated stats that go along with it.

You can do a search on your website for keywords by using site:< insert site name> <insert keyword> 

You can see from above, with the search term “blog writing tips” our site all points to one article, which is the main article related to that keyword. If you got a variety of articles from your site, it suggests that there’s some keyword cannibalisation going on.

Prevention First

Understand the usage of your keywords

We’ve spoke about this at length in one of our previous articles on how to develop a keyword plan but it is worth mentioning that this is the tool that will empower you to prevent abusing keywords on pages. It provides a controlled method to do utilising keywords.

This works like so, let’s say you’re a content marketing agency, instead of LOADS of different pages on your site calling out a keyword such as “blog writing tips”, you can focus on what you want each page to rank for. As a result, instead of two or three pages fighting for authority over “blog writing tips” you can have one page that is the main player. For the other pages, you can use an alternate keyword that is similar but related. In this case, it could be something such as “SEO blog writing”.

So instead of having five pages competing for the search query “SEO tips,” you can optimize each page for a similar but separate query like “digital marketing strategy,” “marketing techniques,” “SEO for beginners,” and so on.

You can also create a keyword matrix as part of your keyword plan, so as you develop content, you can note what keywords have been placed in certain articles. This could be done in the form of a keyword matrix as per the made up example, if your site sells telecommunications equipment:-

URL	Keyword
madeuptelecoms.com/thebestphonesforyourbusiness	phones
madeuptelecoms.com/the5mosteffectivecloudsolutions	Cloud solutions

Alternatively, you can use a keyword mapping tool such as SEMRush. But either way, the implementation of these tools would prevent you from cannibalisation. 

Let organic marketing do its thing and stop keyword cannibalisation

Depending on the issues that your cannibalisation issues identify, there are several solutions you could utilise.

Consolidation of pages

We discussed this pretty comprehensively earlier, but if you identify similar keywords on several articles, pick the one that has ranked the most and had the most clicks, lowest bounce rate etc., and prioritise that for the keyword. Use alternatives for the other posts. 

Utilise 301 redirects

These should not become a regular guest on your site, as they can often harm sites. But, if you are cleaning up your site as a result of cannibalisation research, 301s are a genuinely good tool to effectively implement consolidation of your content. 

Content auditing

Conduct regular content audits on your site, or maintenance activities where you check your keyword performance and whether you’re still meeting the intent of your content. 

Content audits can cover the following stuff:-

Your content audits should ask the following:-

• Is your content still relevant to your target audience?
• Can you update any of the content on your blog? Could you repurpose this content?
• Is your keyword strategy still correct? Check over the keywords and whether they are still appropriate

If you need any assistance in developing your keyword strategies, identifying and remediating keyword cannibalisation or anything else related to your content marketing efforts, check in with us and we’ll see how we can help.

Also check out our blogs if you just want to get some free tips for your blog writing.

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