Keyword Cannibalization, how to avoid, how to fix it.

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome to episode 98 of SEO is not that hard. Today I'm going to be talking about keyword cannibalization.

Now, keyword cannibalization it sounds it's quite an aggressive term, but what is it? Well, essentially it's where you have an issue where multiple pages on a site. You have an issue where multiple pages on a site target the same keywords and serve the same purpose, the same intent, and then, having that it can cause you issues with the search engines because they don't know which page is the most relevant to rank. You're essentially competing against yourself for the same positioning in the search results, same positioning in the search results, and obviously Google prefers to only put one result in for any one site. Sometimes you might get a couple, but generally just one. So if you are being your own competition, you're cannibalizing your own site. Essentially, you're eating yourself, and so it's something that you want to avoid. You want to be very sort of targeted on your site with making sure you only have one page targeting the keyword with the same intent. Now, just to be clear, keyword cannibalization isn't just caused by mentioning the same keyword on multiple pages, because it can be quite natural to mention the same keyword on multiple pages, especially if it's keywords with variations. For example, you might have a site on a page on your site. If it was about broadband, you might have a page about broadband deals and then a page about broadband reviews. They've got very different intents and even if you combine them with other keywords to make it a longer tail site. So so you could have like a provider, so you could have BT Broadband, one of the big providers in the UK you could have BT Broadband Reviews, bt Broadband Deals. They're very different intents because the reviews are someone who's just considering BT. They want to see what other people are thinking. They're looking for reviews around. That They've got one. We're looking at BT Broadband Deals. They've got one. We're looking at bt broadband deals. That's someone who's looking to purchase. They've made a decision that they value bt broadband enough that they're thinking about purchasing from them and they're now looking for deals. So that's very different intents there.

You can also have the same with exactly the same keyword phrase. So let's think, say, holiday cottages in derbyshire, that could could have two different intents. It could be someone very top of funnel who is looking just for basic information on holiday cottages in Derbyshire. Maybe they're trying to narrow down the areas, see what types of cottage are available, that kind of thing. They're still in the information intent stage. But then you could also have people who would type in exactly the same keyword holiday cottages in derbyshire who have decided that's actually where they want to be, where they want to go and they're looking to buy.

So you could actually have two pages that target that same keyword, the different intents. So one would be very much here's deals of cottages, here's exact, the exact cottages you could hire. And you could have another one that's much more informational about derbyshire and the holiday cottages and the areas in derbyshire where the cottages are, but without being very focused on the actual cottages themselves that are available and prices and stuff. You could create two very different pages targeting the same keyword with very different intents. So that's what you've got to bear in mind when you're considering whether something is cannibalizing itself. But if you had two pages for example, holiday cottages in derbyshire which both were in the buying phase and both listed cottages for sale and have the very same intent people looking to actually targeting people looking to actually purchase, you know, hire a cottage then that's clear cannibalization. And Google is going to weigh them up and go hang on which one's the best one to rank here. And rather than concentrating all your efforts into one page, all your internal links into one page, any other link building, you do all those kind of metrics into one position, you're splitting it amongst two and you're making it hard for Google to choose and you're diluting the effectiveness of your website and your SEO. So that's the basics of keyword cannibalization and why you want to avoid it.

Complication now comes because you can actually have related keywords that cannibalize each other. Now, this is obviously because Google is very good at combining keywords with very similar meanings, very similar intents, into groups. So it will rank a page for a whole gamut of keywords that are all related to each other with the same intent, that are all around the same topic. And if you were to try and create individual pages for each one of those keywords, then you're again. You're cannibalizing the search meaning and the intent across multiple pages. What you need to do is to bring all those keywords together into one page to give you the best chance of ranking across all those related keywords with the same intent, rather than splitting it amongst a whole bunch of pages. So that's kind of like the second level cannibalization.

You see lots of people doing us, especially in lots of niche sites, where they're just trying to rank pages for individual keywords and rolling out lots and lots of new pages all very similar, all with just slight variations on a keyword theme with the same intent, when really they should be pulling them all into one page or a smaller number of pages to match the intents and the search behavior properly. So how do we avoid creating keyword cannibalization? Well, in the first instance it's by having good information architecture. It's by making sure you design your site well and when adding any new content you check to see whether it is going to have a clash with intent and keywords with any other pages on your site.

But the main way, the key thing to do, is, when you're first designing your site, first thinking about it getting good information architecture in place and there are tools that can help you do this. Keywords people use can help you do this. So when you're doing your keyword research, the key thing to do is to yeah, do your keyword research, get your big list of keywords and questions and the things that you think you want to write content about, and then run them through a keyword clustering process. Now what this keyword clustering process will do is it will go to Google and it will search for every single keyword and find what URLs are ranking for each keyword and it will then take all the keywords together and all the URLs that are ranking and look for common URLs. And if two keywords have got enough URLs in common normally three or more, but you can decide based on your experience on how many you want to put in three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, even 10 URLs in common, we find three works best. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, even 10 URLs in common, we find three works best. And if you've got enough in common of those URLs, then you can say right, that keyword is serving the same intent as the other keyword, because Google is ranking the same pages for that and Google has spent billions very, very intensely. Clever algorithms that have worked all this out and have ranked those pages together. So there's a very, very good indicator that those two keywords should be covered on the same page. They're clustered and obviously you do that across all the keywords together and you will get multiple keywords together for each cluster. This gives you really good starting points for individual pages on your site because you know that, considering each of those keywords clustered together with the same intent, being served by the same URLs, therefore you want to be doing the same and cluster them together.

So if you do that keyword clustering, at any point you are creating content, but especially at the point you're designing your first iteration of your site. That will solve a lot of your problems and that's the easiest way to do it, to solve it in the first place. But what if you've already got a load of content and you're concerned you might have cannibalization? Well, the first thing is do a sense check on your site. Have you clearly got? Do you think might have cannibalization? Well, the first thing is do a sense check on your site. Have you got clearly got? Do you think? Have you got pages that are um serving the same intent? Um, you know from that.

One way to do it is pull out the keywords, pull out all the keywords that are on that page that you're ranking from both the pages or multiple pages you think are. You are, you think are cannibalizing each other, and run them through a clustering process and see if the clustering process keeps them separate or decides they should be pulled together. That's one way of doing it. Another way of doing it is going to your Google Search Console. Google Search Console has got huge amounts of information on all the queries you rank for and what pages you rank for each query. So if you go to your top queries and then click them in Google Search Console, you can then click to see which pages are ranking for each search query.

If you find you've got pages which are ranking across the same you know multiple pages ranking for the same query then again there is a potential cannibalization issue. You're always going to get a few where you've got like the 90 plus percent of impressions and clicks are on one page and you know you've only got like a small number across a range of other pages. That kind of thing can happen because google will occasionally, you know, put very further down the rankings a second page from your site. That's not really cannibalizing much. It's when you've got pages where they're approaching a sort of more similar number of impressions each and a more similar number of clicks each. That's a very strong indicator that Google can't quite decide which of those pages it should be ranking. You want to be making a decision for Google on that.

Now, if you find pages that are cannibalizing each other, how do we then fix it? What are our options? Well, we've got a few. You can obviously decide to keep one and redirect all the other pages that are cannibalizing to the top page that you want to do. That's one way of doing it. Or if you want to keep the duplicate pages, the pages that are ranking for similar intent, similar keywords, you can decide to set one page as being canonical. So that's where you put a canonical tag on all those pages and you say the definitive version, the canonical version of this page, is the one you want to rank.

Next thing is, obviously you can create new content. So, for example, if you decide, actually we've got a search intent and a target keyword and we're not really covering it properly at all, it's less of a cannibalization issue, it's just we're missing content. You can obviously create new content With that. Obviously I would say look at the keyword clustering process. Make sure you put in all the keywords that you can and put the right ones with the same intent together on individual pages and then finally you've got the no index option. So if you've got pages that are ranking but you want to keep them because it makes sense for users on your site that those pages are there you don't want to maybe maybe mix up a user journey you've got in there then you can obviously no-index pages. So you could say right, I want to keep this page on my site but I don't want Google to try ranking it. Then you put a no-index tag on it and that means Google will then ignore that page on your site and will only concentrate on the one page that you want it to be ranking for that keyword and that search intent. So hopefully that's given you a good overview of what keyword cannibalization is and why it's important to avoid it and, if you find it, why it's important to fix it.

If you've got any questions on it, you know, as ever, do give me a shout. All my contact details are in the outro at the end of this podcast and, um, yeah, I hope you enjoy and see you next time. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at keywords people use that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode.

Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywords people usecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywords people usecom to get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.