How To Detect And Fix Keyword Cannibalization?

Many website owners face keyword cannibalization issues. Even a few of them are not even aware of the same, and they lose potential organic traffic by not resolving the keyword cannibalization SEO issues.

This article will discuss the stated issue and help you know how to detect SEO keyword cannibalization.

By the end of this article, you will also become an expert in fixing SEO cannibalization issues.

What Is Keyword Cannibalization?

Keyword cannibalization, aka SEO cannibalization, takes place when multiple pages of the same website target similar keywords, if not the same.

That makes them compete against each other, ending up damaging the website’s SEO and SERP rankings.

How Keyword Cannibalization Affects SEO?

If several web pages of your website are targeting the same set of keywords and with the same search intent, they practically compete against each other.

That confuses search engines about the relevancy of those web pages. They get no idea which web page to rank as the most relevant page.

As a result, the search engines either do not show any of those web pages or show multiple pages targeting the same search intent.

Both of the scenarios hamper the organic performance of your website.

Why Keyword Cannibalization Needs To Be Resolved?

It is evident from the above section that you won’t want to lose organic traffic on your website due to multiple web pages targeting similar key phrases.

Following are the key reasons why you need to resolve keyword cannibalization in SEO,

1. When multiple web pages target the same keyword, the wrong page may rank instead of your desired page.
2. The link juice gets distributed among your website’s multiple similar web pages. That, in turn, hampers the link equity.
3. SEO cannibalization decreases the authority and quality of your web pages.
4. If crawlers find several URLs containing similar content, it may cause indexing problems.
5. Cannibalization SEO may waste your crawl budget.
6. It confuses users and offers them a poor experience.

How To Find Keyword Cannibalization Issues?

You can use online tools to detect and fix keyword cannibalization. 

RankWatch is one of the most reliable among them.

You can resolve keyword cannibalization using RankWatch tool by the following two methods,

Method-1: Using RankWatch Console Module

You should follow the below steps to resolve cannibalization using RankWatch console module,

1. Open RankWatch Console module and select your search console account.
2. Select the website to be analyzed as the property by clicking on the “choose a property” box.
   
3. Select at least a period of six months for analysis.
   
   
4. The tool allows you to choose a particular country by clicking on the “choose a country box”. You can also keep it as ‘global’.
5. Similarly you can choose any specific type of device by clicking the “choose a device” box. You can also keep it as ‘all’.
6. Once you click the ‘search’ button at the top right-hand corner, it will generate a detailed analysis report showing ranking pages, ranking keywords, keyword performance, number of clicks, and CTR percentage with positions.
7. You can apply filters by clicking on any particular metrics, and it will generate refined  results for that factor.
8. The table below shows the list of queries for which the website has ranked in the past six months. You can find the total number of queries at the bottom right corner.
9. If you click on the ‘Pages’ icon, you will get the list of URLs ranked in the last six months.
   
10. The keyword section reflects the performance of your website for each search query with the ranking URLs. That helps you detect keyword cannibalization SEO issues.

Method-2: Using RankWatch Ranking Overview

1. Now let us see the steps you need to follow to implement the other method,
2. Click on ‘Rankings’ after opening the RankWatch ranking overview dashboard .
3. Choose a minimum of a six month period. 
4. Select Rank, Previous Rank, Ranking URL, Previous Ranking URL, SOV, and Search Volume in the “Table Settings” and click on the “Apply” button.
5. The tool marks the keyword cannibalization SEO issues with an exclamation flag. 
6. It also allows you to download the report by clicking the ‘Export’ button.
   
7. You can view the report by clicking on the ‘Download’ icon. The report can be downloaded in CSV format too.
8. You also get the option of saving the report in Google Drive and opening it using Google spreadsheet to use it more conveniently.

How To Fix Keyword Cannibalization?

Now that you know which web pages of your website are creating keyword cannibalization SEO issues and for what search queries, let us dive in to resolve those issues.

Method-1: Merging Pages

If two of your web pages serve the same search intent, then merging them and forming long-form content makes better sense.

1. Let us take ‘parts geek reviews’ as an example.
   
   
2. If you click on the ‘Ranking URL’ for the same, we can see that the web pages customer-reviews-1.html and reviews.html are internally competing for the same search query.
3. It is clearly evident that the customer-reviews-1.html page is delivering better results than the reviews.html page in terms of clicks, impressions and click-through rates.
4. It would be a good idea to merge the content of the reviews.html page with the customer-reviews-1.html page content.
5. However, you must check the quality and quantity of backlinks of the two competing pages using the backlink checker tool to determine which page has a higher authority.

   

6. You need to move the content of the web page with lower authority to the one with higher authority.

Method-2: Rework On The On-Page Factors

If two of your web page content are serving different search intents and still facing keyword SEO cannibalization, you need to rework the on-page factors of those pages.

1. Let’s go back to our previously analyzed search query’ auto parts online’.
   
2. The different brand pages like Chevrolet and BMW cannot be merged as they serve different search intents.
3. So we need to remove the main search query ‘auto parts online’ from these brand pages, which serve different search intents.
4. RankWatch SEO IQ will help you perform this.
5. The content recommendations tab of the SEO IQ feature offers you a refined LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and recommends the ideal frequency of different keyword phrases used on any of your targeted web pages.
   
   
6. The SEO IQ feature also analyzes more than forty on-page factors and provides you with improvement ideas for your landing pages.

Method-3: Delete Low-Quality Pages

You must delete old pages with lower authority from your website.

1. If a web page contains outdated versions of the content, cannot be repurposed for any other search intent, or cannot be merged with any other high-authority web page, you must get rid of that page.
2. However, you must check if the page has some authority or backlinks before deleting it. If you find any, redirect it to the main page instead of deleting it.

Method-4: Use Canonical Tags

If you do not want to merge or delete a web page, causing keyword cannibalization, you can assign canonical tags to it.

That will indicate your main page to the search engine that you actually want to rank for that specific search query.

1. Let’s take the example of the search query ‘partsgeek review.’
2. You can see multiple pages like customer-reviews-1.html, customer-reviews-6.html, and customer-reviews-10.html ranking for this same query due to pagination.
   
   
3. You need to place canonical tags on those two pages redirecting to the main review page customer-reviews-1.html.

Conclusion

Keyword cannibalization in SEO is a common issue that prevents many websites from ranking higher in search results.

If you do not closely monitor your web pages ranking for the same search intent, cannibalization SEO can seriously damage your organic rankings.

Moreover, keyword cannibalization also diminishes the authority & quality of your web pages, dilutes link equity, wastes your crawl budget, causes indexation uses, and ultimately offers a poor user experience.

Hence, it becomes essential to resolve SEO cannibalization issues using a reliable tool like RankWatch.

I hope this article will help you fight against keyword cannibalism and ensure a higher ranking for your web pages.