What is keyword cannibalization in SEO?

Hello, in this article we will be explaining what is keyword cannibalization in SEO. when you add the same keyword or similar keywords to more than one page on your website and try to rank them. Then Google cannot decide which page to give priority to, and Google gets confused, making it difficult for you to rank because your multiple web pages compete with each other.

This creates a tug of war among each other in rankings and this also has a negative impact on your webpage’s

 

Click-through rate (CTR) and authority

 

The damages caused by it are

 

Confuses your search engines

 

Decreases your site rankings

 

Link juice and authority are split

 

Conversions and traffic are greatly affected

 

How to check keyword cannibalization

 

Step 1 Use Google Search:

 

site:yourdomain.com “target keyword”

Like 

If the website shows that more than one keyword, you may have cannibalization.

 

Use Google Search Console (GSC)

 

Use SEO Tools (like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Screaming Frog

 

Manual Audit 

 

How to fix keyword cannibalization

 

To do this, you should do a content audit to see which pages are being targeted for the same keyword.

 

After identifying this,

 

 You should use canonical tags 

 

Purge or Merge—You can merge two pages or delete one, depending on what is convenient for you.

 

You need to work on internal linking. To improve this, you need to give more internal links to the page.

 

You can also use a 301 Redirect – remove the old or duplicate page and redirect it to the main page. This is the most effective.

 

You should re-target the keyword so that each page has a keyword with a different intent.

 

Conclusion: 

This is one of the important processes of SEO, it is an essential part of SEO problem, which we cannot ignore. If multiple pages on your website compete for a keyword, then instead of increasing search engine visibility, search engines get confused. If you want to maintain strong SEO performance, you should regularly audit your content, identify overlapping keywords and take corrective steps like merging content, optimizing internal links etc. for ranking. In short, having only one focused page for a keyword is the golden rule of SEO success.

 

Faq 

The process of ranking multiple pages on the same keyword this is called Keyword cannibalization in SEO