Keyword Cannibalization 101
You have heard time and time again that in order for your ecommerce business to succeed, it is essential to optimize your website for relevant keywords. And that’s certainly true — with an important disclaimer.
With hundreds of similar products, categories and blog posts, it’s only natural that you will have multiple pages optimized for the same keywords or phrases. While this isn’t always a problem, it can sometimes mean that your web pages are competing not just against other websites, but also against each other. Ultimately, this can hurt your site’s SEO performance.
In this post we will discuss what keyword cannibalization is, when and why it can be an issue, and how to resolve it using ecommerce SEO best practices.
What is Keyword Cannibalization?
Keyword cannibalization is when two or more pages on the same website target the same keyword or set of keywords, thereby eating away at one another’s opportunity to rank.
In the context of ecommerce SEO, this occurs most often on category pages, but can also occur on product pages — for instance, if an online retailer stocks similar products described with similar keywords, such as a range of women’s sneakers. Keyword cannibalization can also occur on blog posts if the topics are closely related. As we have briefly mentioned in previous blog posts, keyword cannibalization can also be a side effect of duplicate content.
Is Keyword Cannibalization Bad?
In simplest terms: yes, keyword cannibalization is bad for ecommerce SEO. That’s because when multiple pages are vying for the same keywords, search engines can get confused as to which page to attribute more value to. Since Google will usually only show one or two URLs from the same domain in the search results for a given query, this can mean a less important page may outrank a more important one.
Worse yet, you may end up with subpar rankings for both pages, or with your site not ranking at all for those target keywords. For an ecommerce business trying to get their products in front of interested shoppers, this can be a devastating technical issue.
That said, there’s no need to panic just yet. Targeting the same or similar keywords across multiple pages is really only an issue if it’s hurting your site’s organic search performance — and that won’t necessarily always be the case. Furthermore, it’s entirely possible for an SEO professional to identify and correct keyword cannibalization problems on your site.
How to Identify Keyword Cannibalization
How do you know if your ecommerce site is suffering from keyword cannibalization? As a quick initial check-up, you can do a search on Google for “site:yourwebsite.com ‘topic’” and see where your pages rank.
If you have two pages targeting the same keyword and those pages show up in positions one and two for that relevant query, there’s nothing to worry about. But if one or more of your pages is ranking much further down the page — or not at all — there may be a keyword cannibalization SEO problem.
For an even more thorough investigation, use a paid keyword research tool such as SEMRush, Ahrefs or Moz to identify which pages are ranking from which keywords.
From there, it helps to organize your pages by the keywords they are ranking for and by intent. In general, all ecommerce web pages will focus on one of three intents:
Commercial: Telling a user more about your brand
Transactional: Leading a user to buy a product or service
Informational: Educating a user about a topic to help them make a purchasing decision
For example, let’s say you have a category page for tennis shoes, as well as a blog post on “How to Choose Tennis Shoes.” While these two pages may be ranking for the same keywords, the intent is quite different; the former is transactional and the latter is informational. In this scenario, there likely isn’t much risk of SEO keyword cannibalization.
By comparison, if you have two similar pages that are optimized for the same keywords and are designed for the same intent, it’s worth spending some time working on these pages. More broadly speaking, knowing page intent can also help you organize your site better for user experience and search engine crawlability.
How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization
After separating your web pages by keywords and intent, it’s time for a deep dive analysis of the competing URLs. How similar are the two pages? Is one an exact duplicate of the other? If both pages are supposed to exist, is there anything in either page’s content or structure that can be changed? The answers to these questions will guide your best course of action.
Assuming you are not dealing with duplicate content, start by deoptimizing one of the pages for the keyword that both pages were targeting. Before you begin redoing any content, it’s a good idea to set your new target keyword for that page. The surviving page can then be re-optimized for the original keyword to help strengthen its position.
For pages that are duplicate, a technical SEO expert can consolidate them by placing a canonical link to the surviving page on the duplicate page. They can also 301 redirect the duplicate page to the surviving page, removing any links to the duplicate on your site.
When used together, all of these strategies will ensure that Google associates the right keywords with the right pages, thereby remedying any keyword cannibalization SEO issues.
Final Thoughts
Keyword cannibalization is a common SEO problem for ecommerce websites that have multiple products and categories that overlap — but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be addressed. Checking your site once per year to ensure that each page is optimized for the right keyword and focused on the correct intent can help you stay on top of any keyword cannibalization issues that may be hurting your rankings, traffic and sales.
For best results, we always recommend working with an experienced SEO who can diagnose and fix keyword cannibalization problems using whitehat SEO best practices.
Interested in learning more? Contact the ecommerce SEO experts at Whitecap today.
