How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization to Prevent Hidden SEO Issues

August 13, 2020

Is your website suffering from keyword cannibalization? The good news today is that you can Fix Keyword Cannibalization to Prevent Hidden SEO Issues. Before we go fully into that, what is keyword cannibalization? As a website owner, it is important you know what keyword cannibalization is. Keyword cannibalization could be very harmful to your website SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Keywords Cannibalization is a situation where you have various blog posts on your site that passes the same or similar information. Your basic SEO efforts are done with the goal of making your site easier for Google to crawl and rank. What website owners and bloggers obviously do not know is that it becomes difficult to find a particularly relevant article on a specific topic when you have several articles on your site that pass the same information or covers the same topic. (Fix Keyword Cannibalization to Prevent Hidden SEO Issues)

Fix Keyword Cannibalization to Prevent Hidden SEO Issues

You should know that keywords cannibalization is likely to affect the ranking of your site. According to Alexa, in theory, the clearer your layout, linking, and schema data are, the more likely you are to reap the benefits of search through higher organic traffic and links. You should know that even the best SEO Professionals could fall victim to keyword cannibalization. If you are not careful with this, you could be eating away the chances of your site’s potential growth. (Fix Keyword Cannibalization to Prevent Hidden SEO Issues)

CHECKOUT >>> LSI SEO - What is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) | How to Create/Find LSI Keywords

Why is Keyword Cannibalization an Issue

We’ve discussed at an amount what keyword cannibalization is and by now we hope that you’ve understood what it is. If you’ve understood what it is, then its time for you to know why it is an issue and poses a threat to your SEO.

It could make an undesirable or less informative page to rank higher than a desirable or informative page. In a nutshell, it could make a page you really did not have much hope on to rank higher than the one you took your time to create and expected to rank.
It could affect or even drag down the ranking for both pages. In this instance, instead of having your article ranking on google position 1, you could have both articles rank in positions 7 and 8.

Above are the two main reasons why keyword cannibalization is an issue. (Fix Keyword Cannibalization to Prevent Hidden SEO Issues)

Causes of Keyword Cannibalization

Now that you’ve discovered some of the reasons why keyword cannibalization is an issue, it is time to figure out the causes. Below are some causes of keyword cannibalization. You can never be too sure you are free from keyword cannibalization.

Creating several pages all targeting the same keyword. This is very common as a lot of bloggers and content marketers end up creating a lot of pages that target the same or similar keywords.
Changing search intent. When it comes to identifying or fixing KW cannibalization, this is another important aspect you need to keep in mind. You should keep an eye on the search intent of your focused keywords and optimize it with changing time and needs. Today you may be on page one of Google page result and tomorrow you may no longer be there.
Improper internal linking. Improper internal linking is one of the most common root cause of KW cannibalization. You should avoid linking your focus keywords to other pages within or outside your site.

Above are some of the common causes of KW cannibalization. Now that you know some of the causes, you can probably fix KW cannibalization on your site. If not, keep reading below.