One unfortunate tactic that can occur when designing your SEO can be Keyword Cannibalization. This is where several websites are optimized for the same exact keyword. An example could be two apartment companies in Pittsburgh both using “Nicest apartments in Pittsburgh” as their keyword optimization. When they do this, the two apartment company websites are competing for the SE ranking and makes it difficult for the website to be ranked effectively for their targeted keywords.
A source says that overall, keyword cannibalization is very bad as your site is getting its ranking messed up while also competing for the same target keyword. But, in some cases your keyword getting cannibalized could be an indicator of something beneficial. Considering that some companies may have several websites that use the same keywords, if one page is attracting more traffic than your other and dragging it down, it might not be as much of a hinderance.
When trying to find the keyword cannibalization issues, a simple way to do this could be to look at both the same keywords that may be used and also the same intent behind the usage of each keyword. When this is performed, it becomes clearer what keywords would be swallowed up and then be avoided.
As a help, some tools can also be utilized to aide in keyword research instead of the user manually conducting their own. One in particular is SEMRush which can be utilized to find ideal keywords for your website to use. It also can show the amount of search volume for the keywords to help the user to find their preferred SEO.
Keyword Cannibalization: What It (Really) Is & How to Fix It
3 Responses
I thought this was a really interesting topic because keyword cannibalization isn’t something people always think about when planning SEO. Your example with the apartment companies made it easy to understand how pages can compete against each other and hurt rankings. I also liked that you mentioned tools like SEMRush, since that shows there are practical ways to catch and fix the issue instead of just guessing.
This is really interesting and a very important topic to be aware of. Keywords are crucial, but at the same time can be detrimental to your ranking if your keywords are the same as other companies and competitors. If there are many results for a search with a particular keyword, your website can easily get lost amongst the others. The key to avoiding this is having something about your company and site that differentiates yourself from your competitors and making sure that aspect is part of your keywords.
I’ve always thought of keyword cannibalization is within your own site. It is interesting to hear about it discussed as between two competing sites.