Many website owners understand the importance of optimizing their websites for the search engines. When doing that, one of the things they do is AI keyword research to optimize their websites for certain keywords. However, at times, they will do everything right using best practices but still not achieve the desired results.

Despite following best practices in keyword research, they find that their traffic doesn’t increase and, in some cases, decreases. Their target keywords don’t appear anywhere on the SERPs, even after positioning new content. If this sounds like you, there could be several reasons. One of these could be keyword cannibalization. In this article, we explain what keyword cannibalization is and provide you with actionable steps on how you can fix it.

What is Keyword Cannibalization?

Keyword cannibalization happens when you target the same keyword with the same search intent across different pages of your website, often unintentionally. This results in the keywords competing against one another, or rather eating one another, reducing the performance and preventing your page and website in general from getting the desired results.

Ideally, you should optimize each page of your website with a single primary keyword to avoid keyword overlap. If you create several pages for the same keywords, they will eat into each other. For instance, if you sell clothes, you might end up creating several pages, all with the keyword "clothes". While nothing might seem wrong with that, the problem occurs because you try to rank several pages for the same keywords. That means you will be competing against yourself.

Instead of trying to outrank the competition, you are trying to outrank your own pages on the SERPs. When two or more of your pages compete against one another, they end up dividing traffic amongst themselves. This results in each of your pages having lower click-through and conversion rates, rather than all the traffic going to one page. This also means that Google tries to find the page that best matches the search results, which may cause the wrong page to rank higher on the SERPs.

How Keyword Cannibalization Harms Your SEO

So, how does having multiple pages competing for the same keyword harm your SEO? Here are several ways:

Confusing the Search Engines

When you optimize several pages for the same keywords, you can decrease the chances of your site appearing on the SERP. This will affect your competition because you will be competing not only with others but also with yourself. Instead of showing all pages optimized for the same keywords, they will show the page best optimized for the keyword. This is the page that search engines will consider relevant, even when it isn’t.

Search engines may even impact your page’s ranking, making it harder for the primary page to get to the top and also remain there.

Weaker Off-Page Optimization

Backlinks play an important role in SEO and require more time and effort. You want to find a website that works for you, check its authority, and ensure it aligns with your topic. With more external links pointing to a page, you are more likely to rank higher,

With keyword cannibalization, you can reduce the value of backlinks that negatively impact your SEO ranking. For instance, if you have similar pages with different high-quality backlinks and authoritative sources, their value will be lower than that of a page with several backlinks.

Decreased Authority of Your Internal Links

Internal links can help crawlers and users find necessary pages and indicate the importance of content. Internal links not only help with site navigation but also enable Google to crawl more deeply.

When you have several pages optimized for one keyword, they have internal links pointing toward them. This will distribute internal links across pages rather than on a single pillar page. If you would like the pillar pages to get most of the traffic, this shouldn’t be the way to go.

If you are creating multiple pages for a similar keyword, Google will doubt your expertise on that keyword. Having the same keywords on different pages will also mean you will have little content. You will end up looking like you are stretching your page across multiple pages, making it appear more complex.

How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization

Now that you understand the dangers of keyword cannibalization, let us look at ways to address it.

Conducting Keyword Research

One reason for keyword cannibalization is poor keyword research. Keyword research can help you find the right keywords for your pages. When doing keyword research, you may want to focus on the long tail keywords that consist of 3 or more keywords.

By leveraging the long-tail keywords, you can create some better subpages. You will avoid keyword cannibalization by creating variations of the targeted keywords. This means you can avoid competing with your own pages, thereby improving your SERP ranking.

Be Specific on Different Pages

If you are creating multiple pages for your keyword, you want to ensure you are more specific in your keyword targeting. This will ensure you don’t engage in keyword cannibalization. Instead of creating several pages targeting the term “clothes,” find a more specific term that better describes the page. For instance, you can use terms like "junior women’s clothes" or "petite dresses for women." This will enable you to categorize pages more effectively and improve search results.

Website Restructuring

When you have several pages with keyword cannibalization, you will need to restructure the site to fix it. If you already have several pages with similar keywords, you will need to choose the right page and position it as an authority for your top page.

You will need to update any other pages that use the keywords to reflect the unique keyword variation. If your authoritative page was on women’s clothes, you can make another page for women’s skirts, dresses, blouses, pants, and other women’s clothing. By linking to the subpages on the authoritative page, you can ensure you direct leads to the right places.

Better Landing Pages

It could be that you already have several category pages, but don’t know how to organize them. I recommend creating a landing page that serves as the primary page of your site. This can help ensure that your website remains more organized and guides users to the correct pages. It can direct them to the right product, resulting in a smoother buying process and higher conversion rates.

Update Your Content

Remember that information is constantly changing, and what you wrote several years ago may no longer be relevant today. However, you need to provide your audience with the most up-to-date information. If you create a new page, you might end up with keyword cannibalization as the old and new pages compete for the same keywords.

The old page might rank higher than the new one. To avoid the problem, you can update your original post instead of creating a completely new post for the keyword after the change in information. This will ensure that you have the most up-to-date information, helping you avoid competing with your own pages and direct users to the relevant page.

In Conclusion

You spend a lot of time researching for your keywords and optimizing for the same, and you want to get the most out of them. You don’t want a situation where all your effort goes in vain. Therefore, use the above tips to avoid keyword cannibalization. You can read our guide on keyword clustering based on search intent.