Keyword Cannibalization: What It Is and Why It Matters
These days, when people want to find something, whether it’s a product or a service, the first thing they look for is a device connected to the Internet so they can conduct a search.
Gone are the days when people would refer to paper product catalogs or consult the Yellow Pages to find a business or service they were interested in. In fact, 70% of users today never open the phone book to conduct any kind of search.
However, the extraordinary accessibility of content we’ve become accustomed to comes with a new danger: your content gets lost in a sea of information.
Search engines can be fast and accurate for users who know exactly what they are looking for, but when it comes to a general search, narrowing down candidates to a smaller, more appropriate pool becomes more difficult.
As a business owner or manager, you probably offer your goods or services to a local market, but you could potentially serve the entire world, reaching a global market. In turn, of course, the entire world also becomes your competition. Therefore, it is more important than ever, for ease of use and high search rankings, to use keywords correctly.
Cannibalization and Keywords
First, let’s look at the basics. The keyword is one of the most important elements of an online search. When people turn to a search engine to find something, the first thing they do is type a series of words that are relevant and compatible with their interest or, with voice recognition software and virtual assistants, ask a question. The search engine uses those same words to scan the Internet and provide you with appropriate answers.
When it discovers content that matches the keyword criteria, it presents the search results and ranks them based on different criteria, such as usefulness and popularity, as well as the presence of appropriate keywords.
But it all starts with keywords.
For example, if you sell dog care products and food, you should use keywords such as dog, dog food, dog care, or pet care on your website. If your website does not contain any mention of dogs, a search engine would not recognize your website as being about dogs or dog care products. Obviously, you wouldn’t reach your target market.
On the contrary, if you overdo it and stuff too many identical keywords on all the pages of your site, you could suffer from what is called keyword cannibalization.
Why Keyword Cannibalization Exists
In the past, search engines like Google were much simpler. They would crawl and create SERP rankings based on very simple criteria. This eventually led to widespread search engine abuse and misuse as techniques like “keyword stuffing” became more widespread.
Google thought that a web page’s content could be relevant if it contained a keyword repeatedly, so unscrupulous content producers simply included the same word hundreds or even thousands of times to boost their search rankings.
Today, keyword stuffing is one of the worst things you can do, and it will hurt your search rankings. Modern algorithms react harshly to overt keyword stuffing; keyword cannibalization is an occasional side effect of this effort to punish keyword stuffing with lower search rankings.
Keyword cannibalization occurs when you have too many identical or similar keywords scattered throughout your website’s content.
As a result, a search engine like Google can’t discern what content to rank higher. This means that it will sometimes give a higher rank to a web page that you don’t intend to prioritize. It may also lower the rank of all pages that share those keywords.
Fixing Keyword Cannibalization
It’s actually quite easy to identify potential keyword cannibalization issues on your website. Typically, running a search along the lines of “Domain + Keywords” will provide you with the information you’re looking for.
You’ll get a list of results, but are they the ones you want? Is that dog food blog post you wrote two years ago somehow higher than your most recent and important one? If so, that would be a perfect example of keyword cannibalization. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to remedy this state of affairs.
5 Ways to Prevent Keyword Cannibalization
1. Merge Content
If you have two web pages that cover similar topics, such as a web page that recommends good dog food and a page that lists bad dog food, you may want to take all of this content and put it on one page.
This won’t necessarily work for every situation, but, more often than not, merging content will make your website easier and more search engine optimized.
2. Delete Content
This is extreme, but you may want to consider deleting the problematic web content entirely, especially if it’s no longer relevant to your website. If the content doesn’t exist, the problem doesn’t exist.
3. Remove Keywords
If you want to keep some specific content for other reasons and the presence of a keyword is not essential, removing it is always an option. This can be a slower and more tedious way of doing things – manual solutions usually are – but they have the advantage of being very simple and easy to implement.
4. Change your internal linking
If you have web content that links to other content on your website, the links themselves may be something you can improve. For search engines like Google, links establish importance, so if you include a link to another piece of content or web page, a search engine may rank the linked content higher.
Try adding or changing your website’s internal linking so that less important content links to the content you want to highlight and prioritize. This sends a signal to the search engine results page (SERP) that the linked content is the one that should be prioritized. Doing well on the SERP is still very important.
5. Change Inbound Link Requests
This will be one of the most difficult forms of cannibalization to address, but it can be very important. Another factor that SEO considers when ranking search results is how many other people have linked to your content. After doing a search on your website, you may find that one of the reasons why less important content is still ranking higher than your newer, more relevant content is that other websites are building those links.
If you have the means and the time, and especially if those links are to highly influential websites, you can use software to track backlinks and then contact the webmasters to request that they change or remove the links. Ideally, they will swap out the old links you don’t want for the new ones you’re trying to prioritize, and you can actually boost your SEO rankings as a result.
Conclusion
Today’s search algorithms are much more sophisticated and insightful when it comes to assigning search ranks.
Good content will always be the most important factor in getting a good ranking, and making sure you’re not cannibalizing keywords will help your intended content shine a brighter light and get the attention it deserves.
