Keyword Cannibalization: Top Ways To Get the Right Page To Show Up

Google’s machine learning-based algorithms have significantly improved over the past ten years at connecting subjects and determining relevance. Despite this, the algorithm is still being run by a machine and is still far from ideal.

Because of this, Google will frequently be unable to determine whether a page on your website is better suited for a certain keyword than another. It’s likely that your site has covered the same subject more than once, especially if you’ve been writing material for a while.

Having two pages that Google must decide between (and maybe assigning comparable ranking values) could prevent you from ever making it into the top three, which would potentially affect my overall keyword ranking.

Now, occasionally it’s crucial to have unique content on your website that addressed the same subject in a similar manner, a little differently, or even in a different year. However, there are methods for getting around “laser concentrating” pages to rank even though others may be seen as being of a similar type by Google; we’ll discuss those at the conclusion.

With this tutorial, I hope to clearly explain what keyword cannibalization is, how to cope with it, when to utilize each specific choice, and how to give priority to one page’s rankings over another.

What Is Keyword Cannibalization?

When the wrong page on your website appears in Google’s search engine results pages for the wrong keyword or keywords, or when you have numerous pages ranking for the same keyword when you only want one, such practice is known as keyword cannibalization.

This usually happens when a website targets the same (or closely related) keywords on several pages. The majority of SEOs think this makes Google’s algorithms “confused” and causes them to give the page identical ranking values.

How to Spot Keyword Cannibalization?

On your site without personally spotting the cannibalization by looking at pages that are ranking in the SERPs, it can be quite challenging to spot keyword cannibalization. In order to mass scrape Google for you, you’ll probably need at least one tool (like Ahrefs or Moz), rather than having rank trackers analyze every keyword you can think of or locate.

We’ll discuss how to manually scrape cannibalization concerns later in the tutorial if you don’t have a subscription to one of those tools.

Using Ahrefs, Finding Cannibalization

If you happen to have an Ahrefs subscription (which by 2020, the majority of skilled SEOs should have), they’ve created a 5-step Google sheet that will automatically discover any keywords that may be used by numerous pages to cannibalize traffic.

Here, duplicate the template sheet. Within Ahrefs, export an ENTIRE REPORT (not the “quick report”) of your organic positions.

Choose the first tab on sheet #1 of the template, choose “File” from the menu, then “import”, and then add your report on organic placements.

Simply tick the box that says “Append to current sheet” when asked to import the data, then click the large green “Import Data” button and wait up to 60 seconds.

You can get a list of all the keywords in the report that are cannibalization by various pages by selecting the “Results” column.

Using this Google sheet, Ahrefs has by far the fastest approach to detect cannibalization pages; all other methodologies call for manual data sorting and, for the most part, still require tool subscriptions to execute.

Manually Detecting Cannibalization

You’ll need to have a membership to Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush and be able to extract the organic position data from one of those programs unless you have a list of all of your keywords and utilize a scraper extension. Therefore, you never actually perform this kind of task manually.

Please take note that some of these tools have varying levels of subscriptions that will get you access to more or fewer data. In order to have enough data for the size of the site you’re evaluating, be sure to pay attention to how many exports you’re getting with your subscription level!

How To Prevent Cannibalization of One Page?

According to keyword cannibalization, even if two of your pages are really identical, you want to retain both of them in the SERPs. For instance, I may target “SEO Consultant” and “SEO Consultant Firm” on separate pages because they are two keywords with marginally distinct intentions. Google may get unsure of which website to prioritize for a certain term or may simply rank one page higher than the other.

So how can we ensure that Google ranks the correct website for the correct keyword? We internally optimize for the target variation while de-optimizing the pages for the one variation.

If we were to apply our consultant VS. consultant firm example strictly, we would eliminate any references to “firm” or any of its synonyms from the consultant page.

Use any tool to locate synonyms for the phrase; then, simply conduct a search on the page to find and delete any instances of those words.

Additionally, you should make sure that your meta title is optimized with the exact match keywords utilized and that any additional crawlable code, such as schema or a social meta tag or card, is free of synonym variations.

We’ll then want to use the exact match keyword variant to internally link the sites with ONE link (it’s crucial that you just do one link from each page on the other). As an illustration, we would use our SEO Consultant page’s connection to the phrase “SEO Consultant Firm”.

In order to exploit the term and its variations as internal links, you can also search the website for further opportunities for internal linking.

Conclusion

Keyword cannibalization can be a big problem for website owners and SEOs trying to rank for certain pages. Fortunately, it’s one of the issues that we are able to resolve, which will result in MASSIVE traffic changes for both our websites and those of our clients.