Preventing Keyword Cannibalization and Optimizing Your Website

Using the same keywords on several pages of your website can be detrimental to its performance. Here are some ways to fix the problem.

Video Transcript

David: Okay. So, Onawa, you’ve been asked to do keyword research for a half dozen pages or so, and you’re noticing the client has a lot of pages that seem to have the same topic.

Onawa: Correct. There are landing pages for specific clientele, and there are multiples for each type of client construction.

David: Okay. So, it sounds to me like when you say clientele, these are portfolio kinds of pages.

Onawa: Yeah. We do websites for these businesses. We specialize in them. We’ve done them before. It’s to pull in those clients looking for legal websites or what have you.

David: Right, okay. Yeah, that’s pretty common. You’re thinking about it correctly. We want to have one page per topic. One of the final steps of our keyword research process is deciding which keywords go on which pages, knowing that it’s not one keyword per page but a funnel of keywords per page. So, we want to pick the page that is the most sales-oriented for that. Right? So, in this case, you said there are some construction or some lawyer pages, but you also have a page for lawyer websites or construction websites.

Onawa: Right.

David: So, it sounds to me like someone previously had gone through the portfolio pages and said “Website for Lawyers” on one lawyer page and “Website for Lawyers” on another lawyer page. Is that it?

Onawa: Yeah. I even think one of them is like “Legal Websites,” and the other one is “Websites for lawyers.” We can certainly combine that and get all those keywords on one page.

David: Yeah, yeah. That’s why we don’t put just one keyword per page. We put a list of keywords per page. So, what I would do is unoptimize the portfolio pages. Make sure the title tag is not using, or what we might call poaching, a keyword from the main service page by optimizing the title tag, the H1 on the portfolio page to be like “So and So Legal Practices Website. Here’s an example of one of the many legal websites we built.” Legal websites become a clickable link to the sales page that you’re optimizing.

Onawa: Oh, that’s a good idea.

David: Right.

Onawa: It gives me a lot more work to do.

David: Yeah, yeah, but it helps because, number one, we’re focusing all the keywords on one page. We should have about 800 words of content on that page. I know people don’t like that, but that’s what we need. Right? So, we’re building that page out. They’ve unoptimized the portfolio pages, but we still link them with the words “We have several other legal websites,” “Legal websites are our specialty,” or “Do you have a law firm and you need a legal website? Go look at our services.” Right? A clickable link with the anchor text of one of the phrases for which you want the sales page to rank. That clickable text on the portfolio page can vary. On one, you might say “legal websites,” and on the other one, you might say “website for lawyers,” but they all link to the sales page, which you’re optimizing for all these variations. The anchor text is very important for Google to understand what the purpose of a page that receives that link is about. We can get away with a lot more keywords in our anchor text on our internal website. That would be a problem if we were linking from other websites to ours. Right? So, that’s how I would do this. Now, you can double-check this by going into Search Console. I’m presuming they already have a “legal websites” landing page, right?

Onawa: Yeah.

David: So, I would go into Search Console and into the performance data, filter by their sales page, and look at the queries bringing traffic to that sales page.

Onawa: Okay.

David: Then, I’d click on the phrase that brought the most impressions – not necessarily clicks, but impressions. Now, in the filter above the performance in your Search Console, I would uncheck the URL you gave it originally and then select the pages. So, what you’re going to see is all the pages that received impressions for that same phrase on the website.

Onawa: Okay.

David: That’s going to show you if two pages on your own website are competing for the same phrase.

Onawa: Okay.

David: Now, sometimes portfolio pages like this don’t have a lot of content. So, Google probably isn’t going to serve it. But that means optimizing it doesn’t really help anyway. Right?

Onawa: Right.

David: Yeah. It’s not a good landing page. It’s just a picture of a website.

Onawa: Right.

David: It’s not a particularly helpful landing page. Maybe it shows up for the client’s brand name, which would be kind of weird if you’re searching for a law firm and you found their web developer’s page.

Onawa: I have to dig pretty deep to find that.

David: Yeah. It’s probably not going to rank for anything or show up very often anyway. But that little trick of finding a phrase for a page and then seeing what other pages are being served from can help you determine if you’re cannibalizing your own keywords on your own site. So, if it weren’t a portfolio page, instead you had a web page, let’s say you were a law firm. Let’s say you’re a law firm, and you have a page for lawyers, a page for attorneys, a page for lawsuits, a page for law firms, a page for class action lawsuits, or whatever. And you did all these things. This would be a great way to see, number one, which pages Google likes the most and which it serves up the most. Now you know which of the other pages to redirect to because Google clearly doesn’t like the other pages very much. Right? That helps you determine what we call cannibalization, which is the idea that you’re working against yourself. And there are several pages Google could potentially serve for one keyword. We don’t want that. We want Google to serve one page, our page. We don’t want Google to guess, try to figure it out, or test it. We want one page for them to serve. And this little process will help you. So, as you do this if your client pushes back and says, “No, I want these to rank,” you could go into Search Consoles, show they aren’t ranking, or you’re cannibalizing yourself. Right? You could provide the Search Console data to say we’re actually hurting ourselves by doing this. Instead, I would like to focus this page on those keywords, too. Whoever writes the page, give them the list of keywords and say include as many of these as you can. You have them sorted by biggest search volume to least. So, now you know which ones are most important, and you’ve not cannibalized yourself. Does that help give you a little bit of action there?

Onawa: That helps me a lot. That gives me a lot of next things to do.

David: Yeah. Web developers fight me more often than not on optimization things. So, you might have to show them the data.

Onawa: Yeah, I know.

David: There you go. Now, it’s a conversation about data, and it’s not personal.

Onawa: Yeah.

David: Yeah, it’s not, “I don’t trust you, Onawa.” It’s, “I’m going to argue with Google’s data.” Well, okay, good luck with that. I mean, this is real. This isn’t like I made up some numbers here.