How Can You Boost Your SEO by Abolishing Keyword Cannibalization
People who aren’t related to search engine optimization, they think that their site will rank better if their targeted keyword is used on all the pages of the website. The more you try to add keywords to the pages the more Google is going pick them up. That’s the prevailing thought everyone has, but this isn’t the case.
If you are targeting a specific keyword on the pages of your site it’s not going to have a positive impact on your search engine ranking; instead, you will be adding more negativity to your websites ranking factor. If you think it through, when you have the same keyword on multiple pages of your site, you are not competing with anyone but YOURSELF. In simple words, your click through rate (CTR) of each page will be decreased and will result in reduced authority, also the conversion rates will drop as well. The term used for this misconception is Keyword Cannibalization.
The pages which should be one, you are splitting them in two which also means you are dividing CTR, links, content, and most conversions, so stop cannibalizing your results. Even, when you are doing this, you aren’t letting search engines know how much knowledge you have relevant to that query, preferably, you are requesting search engines to decide which page is more relevant to the made search query. In short, if your website is about shirts and you are using it on every page then basically you are just letting search engines know that your every single page is about shirts notwithstanding of whether they are t-shirts, dress shirts, formal shirts, etc.
Below are two of the primary adverse effects keyword cannibalization can have on your SEO:
- Decreased PA (Page Authority)
Some people aren’t even aware that their site is affected by keyword cannibalization and they are focusing on other means of SEO to increase the PA of their website. There is also a probability that you are happy about your site appearing on the 5th or 6th slot of the SERP (Search Engine Page Result) but do you know, one page with competent authority can convert better and rank higher? You have actually divided your CTR to various pages of your site, and now they have become contenders and are struggling to get a better rank than the other.
- Weaken Link & Anchor Text
As you know, the backlinks you create are also divided, and the link that could’ve gone to one page with merged content is now fragmented amongst all the pages. Just like that, the internal linking you have done will be leading your visitors to different pages. You know very well that keywords are the only way we can help search engines understand what the page is about and if all of your pages contain the same keywords then Google will misunderstand your effort, and you are already aware of the results.
The Bottom Line
Fixing this problem is not a big deal; there are many ways once you have identified the issue. If you are the one who created the site and added keywords, then you know what to edit and remove. If your site is small then, restructuring your website is an option and you will be able to create a new landing page that can contain all of your services and other pages in one place.
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