Keyword cannibalization is a common problem for businesses and search engine optimization professionals that threaten to undermine your website's visibility in search engine results. The practice of keyword cannibalization occurs when different pages on your website target the same keyword or phrase. In other words, there are multiple pages of your website that are competing against each other for keyword rankings.
It is important to recognize the symptoms of keyword cannibalization in order to avoid the problem. Symptoms include duplicate content on different webpages, multiple webpages with similar or the same title tags, meta descriptions, and headings, and multiple webpages with the same keyword in their URLs. Additionally, there may be a lack of clarity between different pages, as they may have slightly different versions of the same title and meta description.
It is essential to address keyword cannibalization in order to improve your website's visibility and organic traffic. If a website is targeting the same keyword through multiple pages, search engines may not know which page to deliver in search engine results pages which can result in none of the pages being featured in a search result. Moreover, if search engines do index multiple pages with the same keyword, it can dilute the authoritative strength of any individual page, resulting in diminished page rankings.
In order to avoid keyword cannibalization, website owners should create a keyword hierarchy. The keyword hierarchy should identify the most important keywords and phrases to target, determine and understand what content should be built around those keywords, and provide an effective and efficient structure to place all content. Moreover, keyword research should be conducted along with an analysis of each page's title tags, meta descriptions, and targeted keywords to review optimization opportunities. Furthermore, it is important to leverage canonical tags to indicate to search engines which page you would like to be indexed and featured in search engine results pages.
In summary, keyword cannibalization is a problem that can have a negative impact on your website's search engine results rankings. To avoid keyword cannibalization, website owners should create a keyword hierarchy and conduct keyword research along with an optimization analysis. Additionally, canonical tags should be leveraged in order to indicate to search engines which page you would like to be indexed and featured.