I have a confession to make.
One of the main reasons I recommend people blog regularly for their business is to take advantage of the opportunity to include more keywords throughout their content without resorting to keyword stuffing. I mentioned it in this blog post as one reason blogging is important for your SEO.
Keyword stuffing is when you use one keyword or phrase as many times as you can in a single paragraph, or even in a single sentence. People used to do it in the early days of SEO, but Google caught on and started punishing sites that resort to keyword stuffing by lowering their position in the rankings. These days, not only does keyword stuffing not work, but it can actually backfire and cause Google to blacklist you, and no one wants that.
I’ve been known to talk about blogging as a great way to target a particular keyword (or set of keywords) through multiple pieces of content on your website, but there is a downside to that approach: keyword cannibalization.
Keyword cannibalization happens when you have multiple pages (or posts) on one website all targeting the same keyword. The result is you end up fighting yourself to rank for that keyword and all of your website pages with that keyword suffer in the rankings as a result. Both/all of your website pages/blog posts lose, and more to the point, you lose.
In this blog post, we’ll talk about how keyword cannibalization works and how to avoid it.
Table of Contents
How Does Keyword Cannibalization Work?
Remember when I said keyword stuffing worked in the early days of SEO before Google’s algorithm became more sophisticated?
The same goes for focusing on keywords as your main (or even your only) SEO strategy. Keywords are an important component of SEO, yes, but they represent just one part of the picture Google looks at when determining where to rank your website for certain searches.
Since Google’s EAT standards took over, making sure your content is high quality and reliable has been much more important than which keywords you use (although keywords do still matter).
These days Google pays much more attention to the overall quality of the content on your website, which means, in addition to having the right keywords, your content has to be relevant to those keywords and demonstrate Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (EAT).
I’m not going to to go over how to meet Google’s EAT standards, since I’ve already done that in another post, but I will say that keyword cannibalization can have a negative impact on your EAT standards, even if you’re not aware you’re doing it.
When Google sees two different pages (or posts) on a website targeting the same keyword, or set of keywords, it will assume the content on both of those pages is thin and therefore not up to its standards of high-quality content. The result is that both of your pages will drop in the search rankings, whereas one web page/blog post full of relevant, high-quality content, could have ranked much higher in the search rankings if you weren’t sabotaging yourself.
The Wrong Page Might Win
Google is getting better and better at identifying relevant, high-quality content, but it’s still far from perfect. If you have multiple pages on your website targeting the same keyword, Google will pick out one page as more relevant to that particular search term than your other pages and rank it over them, but there’s no guarantee Google will choose the right page as the most valuable. In that case, the page you really want to rank for that particular keyword won’t rank because it was cannibalized by the other pages on your website targeting that keyword.
Your Backlinks Could Suffer
Another important aspect of SEO that I talk about a lot on this blog is backlinks, and those could also become less effective in a case of keyword cannibalization. If all your backlinks lead to one super-valuable source of information, then everybody wins. But if you have backlinks leading to different pages that are competing for the same keyword, Google might devalue those links as well as your pages, in which case everybody loses.
This goes for both external and internal backlinks.
Your Digital Marketing Funnel Might Suffer
One key ingredient to content strategy success that a lot of small business owners tend to forget about is the fact that each piece of content should lead prospects to another piece of content, all the way to the very end of the buyer journey. This could mean leading them from a blog post to subscribe to your newsletter, which lets them know about a promotion on a particular product or service, thereby leading them to the sales page for that particular product/service.
Or it could lead them from a video you posted on social media to your ebook, to a sales page.
There are several variations, but the point is to not let anyone finish consuming any piece of content without taking the next step in the buyer journey – whatever that step might be.
If you have multiple pieces of content targeting the same keyword, your digital marketing funnel could suffer as a result.
As I mentioned in this blog post from a couple weeks ago, people who find partial answers to the question they’re asking are more likely to click away to find the rest of the answer than they are to take the next step in the buyer journey with you. This means you might get more visitors to your website with a particular piece of content, but you won’t get more newsletter subscribers, social media followers, or buyers.
This means, when you decide to create a piece of content targeting a particular keyword, you’d be better off answering all their questions related to that keyword because that gives you a better chance of leading that prospect through the rest of the buyer journey.
How to Avoid Keyword Cannibalization
Now that we know a little bit more about what keyword cannibalization is (and why we should avoid it), let’s focus on how we can avoid it when optimizing our content for certain searches.
Target Long-Tail Keywords to Avoid Cannibalization
I’ve talked before on this blog about the importance of focusing on long-tail keywords over short-tail keywords. The short answer is that long-tail keywords allow you to target a more specific niche, giving you a better chance of showing up in searches when your target audience is looking for you. Long-tail keywords also give you a better chance of converting the people who find your website using long-tail keywords, because they’re more likely to be looking for something specific, and if you can prove you have what they’re looking for, they’ll be more likely to buy.
Using long-tail keywords also gives you a reduced chance of keyword cannibalization. For example, I use the word “keyword(s)” quite a bit through several of my blog posts and sales pages, but “keyword cannibalization” is a slightly longer keyword, making it less likely I’ll cannibalize my own content through this blog post.
The Importance of Meta-Tags
Meta-tags are pieces of code throughout your content that help Google categorize your content. For example, your headline is a meta-tag, each sub-heading is a meta-tag, and if you include alt-tags in your images (which you should) those are also meta-tags. Google “reads” all those tags before it reads the rest of your content, which is why it’s so important to include your target keyword for each piece of content in each of those meta-tags.
For example, because the word “keyword” is included as part of the keyphrase “keyword cannibalization”, you might think I’m cannibalizing myself, but because I use the longer keyphrase in all my meta-tags, Google is much less likely to be confused about where to rank my content than if I had just included “keyword” in the slug of both this blog post and the one other blog post in which I specifically talk about keywords. As it is, it’s pretty obviously (to both Google and viewers) that each post is talking about two different aspects of keyword research. As a result, people who are specifically looking for information on keyword cannibalization will find this post, whereas people looking for more general information on keyword research for SEO are more likely to find my other blog post on that subject.
Keep Track of Your Keywords to Avoid Cannibalization
I just started this blog about a year and a half ago, and I still find myself having to check my existing list of blog posts every time I have an idea for a new post to make sure I haven’t already covered it.
For some of my clients with older blogs, I’ve been known to create spreadsheets that list each blog post title, as well as the main keywords each blog post is targeting to make sure a) I don’t cover topics that have already been covered on that blog, and b) I don’t cannibalize keywords.
Making sure you regularly conduct SEO site audits is another way to make sure you aren’t cannibalizing yourself without realizing it. If you aren’t sure how to conduct an SEO site audit, or you just don’t want to take the time to do it yourself, we can help.
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