What Is Keyword Cannibalization and How To Avoid It


Keyword Cannibalization
A literal interpretation of Keyword Cannibalization

One day you may be searching for a keyword that one of your webpages was trying to rank for when you realise that one of your other webpages has outranked the webpage you were focusing on. What gives?

What Is Keyword Cannibalization

The scenario above is an example of keyword cannibalization. Now, keyword cannibalization is an on-page SEO issue that happens often, yet many people on Internet marketing forums do not discuss it. A simple definition for keyword cannibalization is when two or more of your webpages are competing for the same keyword.

Why Is Keyword Cannibalization An Issue?

Why is this an issue you ask? Well, when you have 2 webpages competing for the same keyword, this doesn’t increase your chances of ranking for the keyword twice. Instead, the search engines will choose the page that is the most relevant to the keyword. In other words, it causes internal website competition that can harm your chances of ranking for a keyword rather than raising your chances of ranking for that particular keyword.

How Can I Prevent Keyword Cannibalization?

Keyword cannibalization can be easily prevented by targeting different keywords related to your niche on each webpage.

How Can I Fix A Keyword Cannibalization Problem?

Keyword cannibalization can be fixed by going to each of your webpages and targeting different keywords by reducing your keyword density or using latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords, which are related keywords and synonyms, on each of your articles.

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