Keyword Cannibalisation in SEO - How to Find it & Fix it

Keyword Cannibalisation isn’t necessarily a bad thing on your site – the complexities of SEO mean that you will never have a perfect page to keyword alignment for everything. The nature of your website also means that there may need to be multiple pages that talk about a similar theme. The principle of it overall, and SEO best practices, suggest that there is improvement to be seen from addressing keyword cannibalisation issues – so read on to see how to find them and address them!

 

This may be something that you observe naturally – from constant searching and looking at results, and seeing different pages rank over time. You know your site and rankings well, and it’s often something you’ll notice. A more solid way to observe this is through SEO tools – for example Ahrefs – which allows you to look at a keyword level for where different pages are ranking for the keyword. This is very manual however, as it’s a keyword by keyword basis, and for large sites or categories this won’t be efficient. See the example below for the Ahrefs site.

 

This method is often referred to as a quick solve to find cannibalisation issues, but I’d warn against trusting it too much. You perform a ‘site:search’ for your site and the keyword (see below), and Google will show relevant results for that keyword from your site. These can be helpful to identify direct keyword mentions, however it can return a large number of results, and not always be super accurate. A site search will not return all results (don’t consider it as robust as a proper site crawl & content audit) and it’s also important to note that the results from Google are NOT ordered by page strength or relevance – another myth to dispel!

 

 

A proper content audit (see guide here on how to conduct one) is a sound method of investigating keyword cannibalisation issues. The idea of these is that you pull together a comprehensive list of all the pages on your site, all the important data for them, and then look at clustering, categorising and getting a view of where similar themed pages might exist. Once you have experience or a good knowledge of the site and the topic area, you might even be able to identify likely cannibalisation issues just from looking at the URL paths of pages. Otherwise, opening multiple pages within the same theme and reviewing them will give you a good idea of whether these pages are talking about the same concepts. 

 

Both Ahrefs and SEMRush have keyword cannibalisation features in different forms. I haven’t used SEMRush recently so won’t put a full overview here, but you can find out more at https://www.semrush.com/kb/1066-position-tracking-cannibalization-report. Ahrefs flags that you can toggle ‘Multiple URLs’ when exploring the organic keywords a site ranks for, and it will highlight where there are multiple URLs ranking. This is slightly flawed as elements like sitelinks, image carousels and more result in multiple ‘URLs’ potentially ranking for the one keyword – so it’s important to check in detail for anything that’s flagged there. Details from Ahrefs can be found here https://ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-cannibalization/.

 

The final method and one I believe is the best combination of efficiency and accuracy, is to use Google Search Console data, connect it through to Looker Studio, export data to a sheet and play around with pivot tables.

 

Connect your GSC property through to a Looker Studio report, and create a table per the below setup – with Query and Landing Page as dimensions, and URL Clicks and Impressions as metrics. By connecting through Looker Studio you can get much more data than the 1000 row limit of GSC, and you also get the data in the right format that shows all the keywords and all the landing pages.

 

Click to export the table data, and place it into a Google sheet (or CSV if you prefer). A warning that this table format will generate a lot of rows, so it may overwhelm Sheets or Excel. For medium to large sites you might need to filter this data by site section, by keyword themes, or with click/impression cutoffs. I’m sure there’s also an advanced way to do this in Google Cloud Platform for computing large datasets – a post for another time!

 

Once you have the data, build a pivot table with Query and Landing Page as Rows, and URL Clicks and Impressions as Values. Deselect ‘Show Totals’, and add in some filters (as above) if you need to reduce it down a bit to tidy it all. I know pivot tables can be challenging, but with straightforward data and set up as per the below, this will get you what we need to assess cannibalisation.

 

From this pivot table, take a look and assess whether there are keywords that have more than one URL ranking. In the example below – we can see that for the ‘[brand] login’ keyword below, there are multiple URLs that have ranked within the last 30 days. There are two /help/ URLs so that’s a quick example of two pages with likely similar intent that can be consolidated. 

It’s important to note that with this GSC data, you will receive Impressions every time there is a site link shown in search results – so for brand keywords or major keywords relevant to your brand, you might see the below with multiple URLs getting high volumes of Impressions. This is not a bad thing – and easy to sense check with a quick Google search of that keyword.

 

Now that we’ve uncovered instances of keyword cannibalisation (hopefully not too many!) we should proceed through addressing them. The core principle around resolving keyword cannibalisation is to remove one (or more) of the offending pages, so that there is only one primary page targeting that theme and keyword, and not multiple pages that Google has to choose from.

 

1. With your multiple pages identified, it’s now a job to see what themes and sections they cover (separately and together) – where the overlap is, where they cover unique parts, and what a combined super-page would look like that addresses everything in both pages. This is basically a content rewrite, so now is a good time to conduct other content update and optimisation strategies as well!

 

2. Redirecting the now-defunct pages to the one being kept and updating any internal (and external) links where possible will help consolidate the value of these multiple pages into one, and give you an end result with a stronger page than the multiple ones you had before!

 

3. It’s also a strong idea to monitor and track results from this sort of work – are you ranking higher for the keyword those pages were targeting? Are you getting stronger content engagement and conversions from this updated page?

 

If you have a situation where the two (or more) cannibalised pages are or should be a separate enough theme to remain as is, then it can be a solid strategy to ensure that they are targeting separate keywords in headings, titles and key content areas. Some people refer to this as ‘de-optimising’ or de-targeting a page for particular keywords. This isn’t always as easy as it sounds, and it’s recommended you proceed with caution as you don’t want to harm the value of other pages, or the relevance of the site towards the topic as a whole.

Noindexing, Canonical tags, blocking pages from being crawled and other technical directives. None of these are sustainable or correct solutions to approach keyword cannibalisation, please don’t go down this path unless you are looking at significant international and multi-site ranking issues, or areas you don’t have control over and have no other options. Note – if you have a valid need for canonical tags (e.g. duplicated content, eCommerce variations of URLs) then this may already apply – but remember that canonical tags are a signal, not absolute directives, and if you have issues here then it’s probably broader technical and structural challenges to address.

 

Final note on preventing this from happening in future. Every time you go to create a new piece of content – always do a quick check of whether you already have something similar on the site – what comes up when you search your brand + the potential topic? Can what’s already there be updated instead, or rewritten, merged or redirected into the new page you want to create? By doing this, you’ll hopefully prevent major issues of duplication and cannibalisation occurring, and have a clean, well-targeted site for Google to process and visitors to love!

 

The above hopefully served as a helpful guide to you – and if you’re wanting to ask some more questions, or see where I might be able to help your business clean up and streamline content duplication and cannibalisation issues – please get in touch with me! I’ve done countless projects like this for every industry from eCommerce to health, SaaS and more.