Keyword cannibalization sounds a lot harsher than it is, but it’s important to know about. It can affect your SEO ranking, quality of your pages, and most importantly, affect the amount of customers that visit your store.

What is Keyword Cannibalization?

Keyword canibalization is when you use the same keyword too many times across different pages. This is different from keyword stuffing which when you use a keyword too many times within a single page.

Keyword cannibalization is bad because it makes you compete with yourself. By that we mean that if you use the same keyword like print-on-demand shirts for a product page and blog post, those posts will compete to appear on search engine pages (SERP). Depending on the intention of the searcher, one is better than the other, but a search engine isn’t sure which.

Having the same keyword on multiple pages can dilute your authority and affect your SEO ranking, which means it will also affect your conversion rate.

How does Keyword Cannibalization do to Your SEO?

Keyword cannibalization afects your SEO in a variety of ways.

Dimishes Your Authority

Authority is a large part of SEO. Authority tells search engines that your page will help the searcher because you know what your talking about.

Having the same keyword for multiple pages means you’re telling a search engine that you are the authoiryt multiple times. This causes the search engine start to doubt your site as an authority while turning all your pages into competitors.

Potentially Annoying Searchers and Declinign Conversion RAtes

Let’s say someone is searching for a good gift for dog lovers, which is what your store is all about. You have a blog post about your favorite dog lover designs, a list of gift ideas for dog lovers, and three different product pages saying the product is perfect for dog lovers.

Let’s say the keyword for all five pages is “gift for dog lovers”.

Now all those pages are competing for the searcher’s attention. The two blog posts come up first because they offer more information and the searcher is getting frustrated because they don’t want to read blog posts. They want products.

So they back out and move onto another website and buy from them because you couldn’t give them what they wanted right away. This means your conversion rates will suffer.

No one wants to go through multiple pages to find what they’re looking for. Keyword cannibalization will cause search engines to show multiple pages with the same keyword to a searcher, if they show your pages at all.

Confuses Search Egnines

Search engines don’t like to be confused. By having the same keyword for multiple pages, it can confuse search engines and make so they don’t know how to value your pages. In fact, they may devalue your pages because they’re confused.

Poor Page Quaility

Having the same keyword for multiple pages can make it seem like you lack ideas or inspiration. It may even look like you don’t know what you’re doing and therefore lack authority as well.

It also can actually dilute your topic as well. Having one long and informative page is better than three shorter ones. The more knowledge an article has, the more likely people will use your article in theirs, and you’ll get more backlinks. Backlinks play a huge role in your SEO rank.

How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization

If you’ve discovered keyword cannibalization within your site, don’t worry! There are plenty of ways to fix it!

Identifiying Your Keywords

First start by identifying all your keywords. Create a spreadsheet feature the pages or blog posts that you’ve publsihed in the first column. The second column should have the keyword(s). The third can be the type of page it is and the fourht column can bbe for notes.

Doing this will help you stay organized as you collect all this information and it will be helpful for the future too. You can reference it as you make new pages to reduce the risk of this happening again.

Change Keyword

Once you have your list, make not of how many times a keyword is used on different pages.

Let’s use the “gifts for dog lovers” example. As a reminder, you have a blog post about your favorite dog lover designs, a list of gift ideas for dog lovers, and three different product pages saying the product is perfect for dog lovers.

Not all of these pages need the keyword “gifts for dog lovers”. An easy to minimize your keyword cannibalization is to change the keyword for the product pages. You pick the product pages because “gifts for dog lovers” doesn’t accurately describe your product.

Yes, it would make a great gift for a dog lover, but what is it?

So for these product pages, why note have the keyword have something to with what the product is? Try “t-shirt for dog lovers”, “mug for dog lovers”, or something. To even further seperate the keywords you can replace dog lover with pet parent, dog parent, pet lover. This will not only help your SEO but help widen your audience as well.

Combine Pages

Let’s say you already have a great blog post about your entire design process. You can take that blog post about your favorite dog lover designs and add it to the post about your design process. This will not only get rid of one of your competitive pages, but will make your orginal design post longer and more informational. This could result in it ranking higher because it’s more infomational.

When you get rid of your dog lover design post, make sure to use a 301 to direct people to your design process post. Your old link will still pop up so using a 301 makes it easier for the searcher/future customer.

Create New Pages

The need to create new pages probably won’t come up too often, but it is an option. If your have two very similar blog posts about a subject, like your design process, you can take bits and pieces from each post and create a brand new one.

Again, make sure to use 301s to redirect searchers to this new page once it’s up.

When You Don’t Need to Fix Keyword Cannibalization

Not every instance of using the same keyword for different pages means you’re cannibalizing a keyword. There are instances where you don’t have to do anything and leave things be.

Take for example if you have the first and second position for “dog lover gifts”. You don’t really need to change anything because you’re already at the top.

Tools to Help

• Keylogs Keyword Cannibalization Checker: This tool will help you locate, analyze, and fix any cannibalization issues you may have in three steps. It’s great for anyone that’s new to SEO or don’t have the patience (or time) to go through everything themselves.
• SEMrush Position Tracking Tool: This software can help keep track of where your pages are in terms of SEO ranks. It’s a handy tool because ranks constantly fluctuate. It will also analyze your pages to see how you can improve them. They even have a specific CAnnibalization report within this tool to make locating and fixing them.
• Google Search Console: Google Search Console is a great tool to have while building up your website. It will track and measure your site’s performance. If you go to the PAges tab, you’ll see a list of URKs that rank for different keywords, it’s an easy way to locate and fix any cannibalization issues.
• Moz Keyword Explorer: This tool will help you organize your keyword. They’ll collect them all, analyze them, check keyword difficulty, and more. It’ll even let you export your keyword information so you can share it with other members of your team.
• Ahrefs Site Explorer: This will help with more than just keyword cannibalization, it will help with your entire website. For this specific issue, you can use their Organic Keywords report to find all the keywords that your site ranks for. Then they have a separate Keyword Cannibalization Finder Tool, so you don’t have to do all the sorting.

Conclusion

The best way to prevent keyword cannibalization from happening again is to stay on top of the keywords that are being used on your site. Like we’ve said in other articles, organization is key to easy SEO procedures. If you haven’t already created guides for yourself, take this opportunity to do so.

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