How to Fix SEO Cannibalisation Content Issues
When conducting a web search, the keyword is crucial. People typically start their search for something by either keying in a string of keywords or, with the help of speech recognition software and virtual assistants, asking a question. The same keywords are used to search the entire web.
When relevant content is located, the results are presented and ranked according to a variety of factors, including the presence and relevance of proper keywords.
Your own Google rankings may take a hit if you optimise multiple articles for the same set of keywords, a phenomenon known as “keyword cannibalisation.” The more popular your site becomes, the more likely it is that its own content will begin to compete with itself.
Cannibalisation of keywords thus occurs when multiple pages of a website are competing for the same Google search query. There is too much overlap between the two, either in terms of content or keyword optimisation. Your rankings will suffer if you optimise multiple posts or articles for the same set of search terms. For any given query, Google typically only returns one or two results from the same domain.
Cannibalising keywords is a bad idea. It is important to keep in mind that cannibalisation only becomes a problem when multiple pages on a site all aim for the same keyword.
Also, when you spread out your link building and click through rate promotion over multiple posts, you dilute their effectiveness. In this article, we have a look at how to fix SEO cannibalisation content issues.
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Recognising Content Cannibalism
Do a Site Content Audit
Cannibalisation is hard to spot unless you know what to look for: pages that use the same keywords and have the same objective. During a content audit, you should be able to easily identify cannibalisation issues unless your site is extremely large. Conducting an audit of your content’s performance can help you identify areas where it could be enhanced. While SEO performance is a common focus for content audits, a thorough audit will also consider how well the content is serving the business.
Run a Site Search
Search your site for a keyword for which you anticipate discovering multiple results.
Searching “site:domain.com keyword” on Google will quickly tell you if your site is experiencing keyword cannibalism. You can double-check your research by using Google to look up the same term. How many and where do your pages appear in search engine results? Naturally, it’s not a problem if two of your pages for the same keyword are ranked first and second. If your articles feature only on pages 8 and 9, you need to do fix the problem.
Use Google Search Console is
The most popular queries that have resulted in clicks and page views for your website can be found in the performance report. Choose a search under the Pages menu. The top-ranking URLs for that search query and their associated metrics will be displayed. If multiple page URLs appear, keyword cannibalisation may be occurring.
How to Fix Keyword Cannibalisation?
Consolidate Your Content
You might want to merge the content into one main page.
If two pages are both optimised for the same keyword, you should compare them first to see if one offers anything special that the other doesn’t. If not, figure out how to merge or combine them.
Start by checking your analytics to see which pages are generating the most interest among visitors and converting at the highest rates. It’s not the amount of traffic that matters as much as the quality of the visitors who convert.
The next step is to combine the two, with the more successful material being integrated into the more popular page. Find a way to merge related pages that share a common audience and focus.
Focus Your Intent
Key words are just the beginning. They don’t reveal what the user is really looking for when they type a search query. Two pages can be optimised for the same keyword if their purposes are distinct. Yet, if the two pages have similar goals, they will begin vying for placement on the SERP.
User intent falls into these categories:
- When a user has a navigational intent, it means that they want to go to a certain site.
- When a user is looking for information, it means they want to know the answer to a question. These questions generally contain “how,” “what,” “why,” etc.
- Transactional intent indicates a purchase. The user should be taken to a product page to buy what they were searching for.
- There are also business reasons for conducting an investigation. This is when someone wants to buy something later. They compare product features and prices before buying.
Internal Linking
By establishing a solid system of internal links, you can aid Google in determining which article is most important. This implies that you should connect less-important posts to the ones that mean the most to you by using links in those posts. This will help Google understand (via link analysis) which pages you want to rank highest. Consider which of your articles is most crucial to you, and use the others as a springboard to link to that one.
Canonicalise secondary content to the main page
As it crawls a website, a search engine looks for what queries will yield the best results for that page. It also determines whether or not the page is relevant to the search terms being used. The bot will prioritise the most valuable page among those that appear to be similar and ignore the others.
It’s not uncommon to need to keep near-duplicate or duplicate pages. You need them to be accessible either on your site or elsewhere to your users. However, they don’t help with SEO.
Make use of canonical tags to indicate to the bot which page should be considered the primary page and which pages should be considered copies.
By using the canonical tag, you can inform search engines that the specified page is the preferred version and should be used for ranking purposes. Instead of spreading your ranking power across multiple URLs, it is concentrated on just one page.
Here’s how you canonicalise your writing:
- Evaluate how different URLs perform and pick one to serve as the primary address.
- In the head section of the page’s code, include link rel=”canonical” href=”https://example.com/primary-url”/> on pages with duplicate content.
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