Keyword cannibalization is a black hat SEO technique that negatively affects a website’s search engine ranking. Most website owners unknowingly implement this technique, hoping to manipulate search engines to rank their websites higher. Unfortunately, it ends up hurting the organic performance and ranking of the sites.
For clarification purposes, keyword cannibalization works similarly to keyword stuffing, where you target similar keywords on multiple pages within one website.
How You Can Identify Keyword Cannibalization Issues
Sites rank for different keywords, and unless you’re targeting a single keyword on more than one page, it’s hard to suffer negative organic performance. However, targeting differently formatted keywords on different pages will lead to adverse effects.
For instance, let’s say you sell pet foods. You create a page targeting the keywords “best cat food” and another one targeting “cat foods.” This is what we call keyword cannibalization and can hurt your website’s ranking. What happens is that one of your pages will rank higher than the other because the former is “cannibalizing” the latter. So, how do you identify keyword cannibalization? Here are some quick hacks.
Content Audit
Conducting a comprehensive assessment of the content on your website provides intuition into what content is available on each page. A thorough evaluation of the information on every page will let you signal out pages suffering from keyword cannibalization.Â
Take note that content auditing tools send multiple requests to every page during an audit. This act can trigger your website to block the auditing tools. Fortunately, that’s a problem the right proxy rotation service can resolve in minutes.
Google Search Console
To detect keyword cannibalization problems on your website, use Google Search Console (GSC). GSC is one of the internet’s most reliable tools for monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting a website’s online presence as portrayed in search engine results. It’s a seamless way to measure your site’s performance and improve its organic search ranking.Â
Using this tool, you can Google search the keywords on your website and filter them to know which of them have suffered cannibalization. On the results listed on Google Search Console, you can filter the queries by the pages to find and fix cannibalizing keywords.
AgencyAnalytics
If you aren’t convinced by the results provided by the first two techniques, you can try AgencyAnalytics. It’s a keyword tracking tool used to monitor and track day-to-day Google positions of keywords on different website pages. It’s an effective tool for measuring cannibalization issues and helping you rebrand or restructure your targeted keywords to boost organic search ranking.
Similarly, you can utilize the tool for tracking on-page health and checking for more cannibalization issues. By checking the Google positions of different pages and the performance of relevant keywords, you can find the ones leading to poor ranks.
Ahrefs
If you want a versatile SEO and digital marketing tool that simultaneously functions as a keyword cannibalization checking tool, you cannot go wrong with Ahrefs. Its keyword explorer feature lets you audit your target keywords in comparison with those of your competitors. The tool provides historical data of every keyword on your website.
Solving keyword competition issues within different pages on your website is easy. Just bind pages with keyword cannibalization issues together to optimize the performance of the pages to maximize their ranking potential.
SEMRush
SEMRush is among the world’s most trusted keyword cannibalization tools. It supports the export of multiple keywords from your pages, including those with high or low search volumes. SEMRush provides detailed information, including keywords for which two or more pages rank within a specific timeframe with the corresponding website URLs.
SEMRush will also provide a list of ranking pages according to a number of keywords. When used alongside SEO proxies, SEMRush can also provide detailed information on your website’s cannibalization health score. To begin your search for the best SEO proxy providers, check for reviews on companies like NetNut.
Conclusion
Have you been wondering why your website’s ranking has experienced a serious setback recently? Did you initiate a new page targeting keywords similar to an existing page? Identifying the existence of keyword cannibalization issues on your website is the first step to resolving the issue. Fortunately, you can use any of these tools to check on such problems and help your pages recover their ranking potential.
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