What is Keyword Cannibalisation?
Keyword Cannibalisation is when you have multiple pages ranking for the same keyword. This means you have blogs or articles on your site that rank for the same search query in Google. If you optimize posts or articles for similar search queries, they’re eating away at each other’s chances to rank. Usually, Google will only show 1 or 2 results from the same domain in the search results for a specific query.
Is this bad for SEO?
You are competing with yourself for ranking in Google. Google can’t distinguish which page to rank highest for the users search query. In addition, your CTR will be diluted across all ranking pages instead of one. As a result, they’ll all probably both rank lower.
How to find Keyword Cannibalisation?
Here at Kirk Lloyd SEO we use many tools to crawl your website and identify issues. Keyword Cannibalisation is one of the areas we can provide reporting on.
Solving Keyword Cannibalisation
Yoast SEO recommends the below steps, and so do we:
- Audit your content
- Analyze content performance
- Decide which ones to keep
- Act: merge, delete, redirect
The first two steps will help you to decide which articles to keep and which ones to merge or delete.
Combine articles
If two pages contain basically the same information, you should combine them. Google loves lengthy and well-written content, and it will solve the keyword cannibalization.
Internal linking
Internal linking can solve a part of your Keyword Cannibalisation problem. Decide which article is most important and link from the less important article, to your most important article.
Conclusion
If you rank in positions #1 and #2 for the same keyword, and you’re holding those positions long-term, then you don’t need to worry about keyword cannibalisation. Keyword Cannibalisation is only an issue if it is impacting your ranking. Talk to us to review your website today.