When optimizing your content for various keywords and choosing the keywords you will be using for optimization, there are some strategies that could potentially hurt your rankings. When your site is growing and your content starts to compete with one another, this can lead to a case of keyword cannibalization. Here are some of the ways that this can occur with your SEO and how to fix it.

What Is Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization means that you have several pieces of content on your site that are ranking for the same keywords. Keyword cannibalization can occur when you have content that is very similar or when you have the same search results many times over on your site. In most cases, Google will only show 1-2 results for your site for a specific keyword so any of the content that is optimized for these keywords after that could be seen as unnecessary. 

Why Keyword Cannibalism Is Bad For Your SEO

If you are cannibalizing your own keywords, this means that you are placing yourself in direct competition with your other rankings in google. Diluting your efforts across several posts where you could generate a search engine result with new strategies can be more important. As a result of several pages ranking similarly, they will all rank lower. Through proper analysis and working to optimize your content in a fresh and diverse strategy, there will be less competition for your pages.

By completing a bit of keyword research, you can discover which pages on your site could be responsible for this. Making an effort to audit your content, remove old articles that are not ranking, merging together similar topics, and focusing on a strategy that differs from the content can be important.

Don’t let keyword cannibalization ruin your chance to rank, address this so you can stop competing with yourself.

This post was written by Kristian D’An. Kristian is the owner and SEO Specialist at Lux Digital Marketing, a search engine optimization company. Kristian has been optimizing websites successfully for over 7 years. He has helped his clients get number one on Google in several different industries.