For people not familiar with SEO lingo, keyword cannibalization is when a single website unintentionally targets the same keyword across multiple posts or pages. Many SEO experts believe that this “confuses” Google and Google will penalize you if this is not fixed in a timely manner.

When it comes to creating new content, you must ensure you have a variety of high search volume keywords on your website. If you have too many of the same keywords on your website, it can significantly hurt your rankings and website traffic. More importantly, if you only focus on a couple of keywords for your website you are missing a large audience of people that are searching for other keywords that are related to your product and services. You want to make sure you cast a wide net of keywords to get that audience to your website and convert it to a customer. You can find webpages target keywords by doing a simple keyword density check on each page to see which one is used most.

How Does Google Penalize Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is not new, however, search engines have gotten smarter over the years and can spot keyword cannibalization easily now. You will see that certain sites often do not have enough keywords on their site and therefore do not have a robust website with good quality content. It is up to you to decide what keywords you will use to create content for your niche.

Google’s search algorithm is more intelligent than you think it is. When Google crawls your website, it looks at many different things and will record them, so it knows if anything has changed the next time it searches your website. One thing Google’s algorithm does is tries to figure out what your page is about. it does this by looking at all the words on the page and seeing which ones stand out the most. For instance, because we have used the keyword “keyword cannibalization” so many times in this blog Google has a good idea of what we are discussing. If your site has structured data then it has a better idea of what the page is about because structured data tells Google which is the most essential part of your page.

Keyword Research Is Vital

If you want to increase your site's traffic by creating content for your niche, you must research the keywords you want to use to create content for your site. You can search the internet for "keyword research" and find tools and software to help you find the most competitive keywords. This can be very useful and will help you create content that people will want to use.

One tool that can be very helpful is SEMrush that has a keyword cannibalization feature. These tools can help you to find keyword phrases and keyword combinations that people are using to search for information about your niche. You can use these phrases to create content for your site. Keyword research tools can help you find the most competitive keywords that you want to use. The tools will also help you to find keywords that are low in competition and have high searches. You will find that some keywords can help you with both of these goals.

Research is the most important part of this process. Without doing research, you will not be able to find the keywords that can help you with ranking and increasing your traffic. The search engines will not show you the competition for a keyword, but you can find this information on SEMrush, Google Keyword Research Tool, SEranking, and Ahrefs. If you want to increase your search engine rankings, you need to find keywords with very little competition but a decent amount of monthly search volume.

The last part of the process is to create content for your site based on the keyword research that you have done. This will help you to create the content that you will use.

Steps to Help You avoid Keyword Cannibalization:

1. Get a list of all the pages on your website

2. Do a keyword density check on each page to see what the main keyword is

3. Once you have found the target keyword for each page see if there are any duplicate keywords

4. If there is you have two options 1) Delete the page. 2) Repurpose the page and create new content that is similar but has a different keyword

5. Re-index your site on Google Search console

6. Watch your site traffic and rankings to see if the Google penalty goes away.