Seven Factors of Keyword Cannibalism That Affect Your SEO

It is high time that Keyword Cannibalism is more existing today than ever before. Generally the experienced webmasters recognize the importance of SEO for their business. With the best tools you can give your SEO a well-deserved boost.

We understand that Keyword Cannibalism happens when several pages on your website compete for the same keyword or phrase in Google. You have a common misconception that the more pages you have targeting a keyword, the better you’ll rank for that keyword. After all, the more pages you have focusing your niche, the more likely Google is to select up on your keywords and increase your SERPs ranking.

Primarily targeting a particular term across multiple pages almost always has the exact opposite effect. You might probably end up doing more harm than good to your SEO. The reason is so simple, in case when you have multiple pages ranking for the same keyword, you’re generally competing with yourself. Similarly, each page has a lower CTR, diminished authority, and lower conversion rates than one consolidated page will have.

Keyword cannibalization is primarily called since you’re “cannibalizing” your own results you’re splitting CTR, links, content, and often conversions between two pages that should be one. So when you do this, you aren’t illustrating Google the breadth or depth of your knowledge and you aren’t improving the authority of your site for that query.

But instead, you’re actually asking Google to weigh your pages against each other and choose which ones it thinks suits the matching keyword cannibalism best. For instance, if your website sells socks, and “socks” is the only keyword you target, you’re mostly telling Google that every page is about “socks” regardless of whether they’re hiking shoes, tennis shoes, sneakers, etc.

Negative Effects of Keyword Cannibalism Can Have on Your SEO

Precisely keyword cannibalization has some negative effects for your SEO. Many users suffering from keyword cannibalization aren’t even aware that anything’s wrong. They might even be satisfied that one page is ranking in the fifth and sixth slot for their targeted keyword, without actually realizing that one authoritative page would probably rank higher and convert better. The practical consequences are vivid, thereby lost site traffic, queries leading to the wrong page, fluctuating SERP rankings, and eventually lost sales.

Diminishing the Authority of Your Page

Instead of having one highly authoritative page, users are splitting your CTR to multiple moderately relevant pages. More importantly, you’ve turned your pages into competitors and now you are fighting for page views and SERP ranks.

Diluting Your Links & Anchor Text

It is illustrated that Backlinks that could have gone to one consolidated source of information are now being split between two or more pages. Thereby, your anchor text and absolute internal links are leading visitors to multiple different pages instead of one authoritative page on the subject.

Feature where Google Might Devalue the More Relevant Page

We knew that Keywords are one of the main ways in which we help Google understand what our pages are about. Si if all of your keywords are the same, Google tries to understand which page is the best fit and if your content is too similar, it might get it wrong.

Squandering Your Crawl Budget

Generally your crawl budget is the number of times a search engine spider crawls your website in a given time period. Thereby having multiple pages devoted to the same keyword results in the crawling and indexing of pages that aren’t required. It is said that small sites probably won’t notice a difference or ever have to check about their crawl budget, but large ecommerce sites or vendors with multiple products will notice a difference.

Sign of Poor Page Quality

You can experience multiple pages targeting the same keyword tells your users that your content is probably pushed thin, and it also key signals Google that your content may not match your keywords on each page.

Conversion Rate Will Suffer

Regardless one of your pages will convert better than the rest. Instead of directing new visitors to that page, and developing it the most authoritative page possible, users are instead losing potential leads when they land on less relevant pages.

Important Methods to Fix Keyword Cannibalization – GegoSoft SEO Services

Best to Restructure Your Website

The basic solution is often to take your most authoritative page and turn it into a landing page that links to other unique variations that actually fall under the umbrella of your targeted keywords. So if we return to our socks product example, it might make sense to make “socks” our canonical source page and link all of the more particular variations back to it.

Develop New Landing Pages

You might lack a landing page that consolidates all of your product pages in one place. In this situation, people would benefit from developing a unique landing page to serve as your authoritative source page and link to all of your variations from there.

Actively Consolidate Your Content

In case if your pages aren’t special enough to warrant having multiple pages targeting the same keyword, consider combining them into one page. This is a absolute chance to take two underperforming pages and turn them into a more authoritative source. Ultimately it might also solve thin content issues.

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