SEO
How To Get More Traffic By Fixing Keyword Cannibalizations
This post was sponsored by DinoRANK. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Google is a great source of qualified and recurring traffic for your business – that’s a fact.
Many people say that the key to SEO success is to establish yourself as an authoritative source for all the keywords in your industry, even niche keywords.
Unfortunately, your competition is doing the same thing. In some cases, you may even be competing with yourself.
Everyone is creating the same content to rank high on Google. So, you need to set yourself apart.
Your competition may be using the same niche keywords as you, but are they optimizing their domain’s SEO by cleaning up cannibalized content and keyword cannibalization?
They may not be; so, this is a great way to propel your website to the top of Google.
What Is Keyword Cannibalization In SEO?
As you may know, sometimes two or more URLs on the same domain may rank for the same keyword or group of keywords.
When this happens, Google does not know which piece of content to show on search engine results pages (SERPs).
When these URLs compete for the same search terms, it is called SEO cannibalization.
How Cleaning Up Cannibalization Can Instantly Boost Your Rankings
When you and your competition are ranking for the same keywords, yet your position on SERPs is lower, you may have a cannibalization issue.
If your content is cannibalizing itself, you not only have to fight your competitors for a top position – you also have to fight your own pages.
There’s enough competition out there without having it at home, right?
Cannibalization is a detrimental factor when URLs compete with each other. They can even harm your domain authority if there are too many of them, especially if you haven’t told Google that there is a clear difference between two similar pieces of content.
As you can see, cannibalizations have a negative influence on your domain’s SEO.
To solve the cannibalization problem, we must first know how to find them.
How To Find Cannibalization On Your Website
There are different ways to find cannibalization on your domain:
- The Manual Way
- The Easy Way
How To Find Cannibalized Keywords By Hand
There are two ways to locate content and keyword cannibalization without using a tool:
- Use a rank tracker or Google Search Console to see which positions your pages are ranking in the search results, as well as the keywords they are ranking for; then, find matching URLs for the same keywords.
- Review your site’s content manually to see if there are several pages that address the same topic or include the same keywords. Then, go to Google and search for that keyword you suspect you are cannibalizing and check if you really do it or not; this can also help you prevent it from happening.
How To Locate Keyword Cannibalization With A Single Click
Using DinoRANK, you can simply click one button and instantly see all your cannibalized content.
All you’ll need to do is create a project in the tool, and sync it with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console account. DinoRANK does the rest.
See what content is cannibalized on your website now →
Now, once you have located all the cannibalizations that affect your website, what decision should you make?
What Is The Best Way To Fix Cannibalization?
Once you have found the cannibalizations on your website, you can take these steps to solve the problem:
- Join or merge two URLs into one.
- Make a 301 redirect.
- Make a shift in focus to one of the two contents and de-optimize or optimize for the word that it cannibalizes.
- Place a canonical tag in one of the two URLs.
- Remove one of the two contents if you consider it thin content or duplicate content.
How Do I Pick The Best Method?
What analysis should you do when facing cannibalization to perform the most optimal action?
Let’s say that you have 2 URLs of the same domain that are positioned for the same keyword; 1 URL is in position 5, and the other URL is in position 7 on the SERPs.
In this case, you should:
- Check the content of both pages to see if they are addressing the same topic or include the same keywords. If so, they are probably competing with each other and causing cannibalization.
- Review the page authority of each page, as measured by the number of inbound links, quality of links, site structure, etc. The page with higher authority will likely perform better in search results.
- Check the traffic received by each page to see which one is receiving more visits, and analyze which URL is responding better to the search intention of that or those keywords.
- Check the conversion rates of each page to see which is generating more sales or conversion actions.
Once the analysis is done, you will have enough elements to recognize what action you should take in each cannibalization.
Still not sure?
Don’t worry. DinoRANK will show you recommendations on how to proceed, depending on the case.
Usually, content is consolidated into one of the two cannibalized URLs (the one with higher authority or higher traffic), and the discarded URL should become a 301 redirect.
The impact of this repair is usually positive in a very high number of cases.
Although if both contents fulfill their function (for example, one URL belongs to the product card and the other to a blog post), a better option would be to optimize or de-optimize the content as appropriate or choose to implement a canonical tag to one of the URLs to indicate to search engines which is the main page.
In any case, it is important to continuously monitor the performance of the pages and make adjustments if necessary to avoid cannibalization in the future; with DinoRANK you will have this under control.
How To Optimize Or De-Optimize Content That Is Cannibalizing
Search engines use algorithms to determine the relevance of a web page for a given search query, and one of the ways they do this is by identifying the keywords that appear most frequently on a page, relative to the keywords that appear on other similar pages.
Before optimizing or de-optimizing one of the two contents, it’s important to know all the keywords for each URL being cannibalized.
Then, you’ll need to analyze their semantic content with TF*IDF analysis.
So, analyzing a URL whose content you want to optimize/promote for a specific keyword with TF*IDF will allow you to understand which keywords are relevant to that content.
Expanding and semantically optimizing content that is already ranking highly, whether it is cannibalizing or not, is one of the best ways to gain more relevance for those terms that only received impressions or a few clicks. This is because you are now providing a greater semantic richness to that content.
With DinoRANK, you can use TF*IDF analysis on already published URLs to see how to optimize them.
You can also use this feature when you want to create new content based on a keyword or a group of keywords you want to rank for.
DinoRANK arranges the information visually, separating the graph into three filter layers: one keyword, two keywords, and three keywords.
In addition to the recommendations, you will also be able to quickly see the header structure used by your most direct competitors in Google’s Top 10.
In a very short time, you’ll discover opportunities and content ideas with an optimal heading structure, including the related semantic keywords needed to rank.
If, in addition, this semantic content extension is complemented by some internal links to that optimized URL, and you do it with anchor text of the primary keyword or exact semantic keywords, you will strengthen the authority and the typicality of that URL you want to promote.
With internal links, you derive a greater semantic context and strengthen the authority of that page already optimized, thanks to the semantic prominence analysis TF*IDF.
If you want to use these features to work the SEO of your projects in a simple but effective way, you can try DinoRANK.
All the SEO your website needs can be found in DinoRANK.
SEO
Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It
Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when…
SEO
8 Free SEO Reporting Tools
There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?
In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.
Price: Free
Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.
Most common reporting use case
GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.
As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:
- Total Impressions
- Average CTR
- Average Position
Tip
But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.
If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.
Price: Free
Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.
Most common reporting use case
Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.
Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.
Such as:
- Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
- Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
- Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
- Social media platforms – Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter
- Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage
Sidenote.
If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks
Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:
With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.
Favorite feature
The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.
Price: Free for 500 URLs
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.
Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.
Most common reporting use case
When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.
Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.
Favorite feature
Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs.
If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.
Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.
Price: Free
Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.
For example, you could use our:
Most common reporting use case
One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.
With AWT, you can:
- Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
- See the performance of your website
- Check all known backlinks for your website
Favorite feature
Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.
If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).
Price: Free
Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.
Most common reporting use case
For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.
With the free version, you get the following features:
- On-page SEO report
- Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
- Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
- SERP positions
- Country changer for SERP
The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.
If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.
Favorite feature
The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.
Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.
Price: Free
Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.
Most common reporting use case
GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.
Favorite feature
You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.
Price: Free
Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.
Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.
Most common reporting use cases
The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.
This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.
Price: Free
Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.
Most common reporting use cases
Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.
Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.
Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.
Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.
Favorite feature
Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.
Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.
You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.
Final thoughts
These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.
The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.
Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂
SEO
Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO
A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.
These findings include:
- When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
- 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
- Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.
Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.
As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.
High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects
The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.
The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.
The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.
This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.
The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.
Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results
With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.
When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.
Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.
New Competition From Unexpected Sources
The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.
On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.
An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.
Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search
The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.
Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:
“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”
Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.
Methodology & Limitations
To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.
The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.
While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.
Why We Care
The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.
Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.
SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.
As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.
How This Could Help You
While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.
Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:
- As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
- Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
- Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
- Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
- Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.
Looking Ahead
While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.
By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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