Optimization of search engines is possibly one of the main concerns businesses in the digital world have to tackle. Also, SEO helps to get your company in front of the right people at the right time in a digital world. After all, every day, Google receives about 67,000 searches a second. That's a lot of chances to get the target audience involved.

Over the years, the laws of SEO have changed dramatically. Keywords have become a critical ranking factor, driven by the need for better client interactions and more meaningful content. In any campaign, blog, and forum, the words you want to target decide where your clients will find you. Also, what kind of audience you'll draw to your website.

In principle, a new keyword emphasis should come with every new content page. That should be capable of bringing more meaning to the online presence of your company. However, in reality, most organizations will end up writing about similar subjects, particularly as they continue to produce content over the years.

So, how can you make sure that you don't take a bite out of your opportunities to rank? 

"What is cannibalization of keywords?" by reading this article you'll know what it is and how you can find, address, and stop it.

What is keyword cannibalization?

It's easy to see why the cannibalization of keywords is a common issue in SEO. 

However, the digital world today is more competitive. Many individuals believe that generating as many pages as possible with the same keyword is the best way to get ahead. The more attention you pay to one particular word, the better your chance of ranking, after all, right?

Unfortunately, that's not the case. In reality, keywords cannibalization damages the ability to appear in the correct words by misleading Google and reducing the authority of your website. Even if you do not cannibalize your keywords deliberately to boost your rankings, over time, there’s still a good chance that you will fall prey to this issue.

Moving on, a long-term approach is SEO. There's a fair chance you'll find yourself stepping on the toes of your previous pieces. For instance, if you've written two or three blogs a week for ten years.

Keyword Cannibalization places your website pages against each other in competition. Imagine that you own a digital marketing agency, for example. You want to make sure your business has the #1 digital marketing spot. Therefore, you can use the main phrase on your home page, category pages, and blog posts anywhere you can.

Avoiding keywords cannibalization and ensuring that every domain within your website has a clear emphasis is the best way to improve SEO.

Why is keyword cannibalization an issue?

You need to know how cannibalization hurts short and long-term strategies. Here's what the site does with Keyword Cannibalization:

• Decreases your page’s authority.
• Devalues significant aspects of your page.
• Too many keywords lead to disturbance of your crawl budget.
• Multiple pages harm the quality of content.

Reduces the page's authority

You're splitting your click-through rate across several sites instead of building a single, high-authority website. Essentially, you're competing for the top spot, which means the scores on your website can only ever be 'mediocre'.

Devalues the most relevant pages

Some of the most significant aspects of getting Google to understand what your site is about are keywords. Google won't know which page to put in front of your target audience if all your keywords are the same. This implies that less of the proper digital experiences end up with you.

Squanders your crawl budget

The amount of times a search engine can crawl through your site within a given time is a crawl budget. Depending on the same keyword, having several pages ensures that the wrong pages can be categorized.

Harms page quality

Multiple pages impacted by cannibalization of keywords warn your users that your content is pretty thin to stretch. This could keep you from getting the attention that you deserve.

How to fix keyword cannibalization

Starting to build your online content strategy? Make sure to avoid Keyword Cannibalization for maximum benefit. 

Moving on, the good news is that cannibalizing keyword fixes is easier than you think. What you need to do is alter your plan for keywords. Here are a few ways your keyword woes can be banished:

Use internal linking to relieve cannibalization of keywords

You can enable Google to decide which of your pages is the most relevant by setting up an internal linking plan if you are facing a problem with keyword cannibalization. Also, link to the posts you want to rate the highest, from less important posts.

Merge articles to overcome keyword cannibalism

In certain cases, merging articles that cover the same topic is the perfect way to solve problems with keyword cannibalization and improve your SEO. After all, we're starting to discover that long-form content is usually chosen by Google and your readers over brief and very ambiguous bits.

Re-optimize your content to avoid being a cannibal

While it will function in some instances to combine content, if you get a decent amount of traffic and backlinks to both posts, it is not a good idea.

In this case, you can always re-optimize them if you want to maintain both pieces of content, despite their mutual keyword or expression. Keep one of your papers focusing on the phrase you're updating and consider changing the other one to cover a similar keyword.

Conclusion

Your chances of facing keyword cannibalism will also rise as your site continues to expand. After all, there are only so many subjects applicable to any particular sector. In this case, the best thing you can do is determine when you need to simply update or uninstall a piece of content, instead of having two pages to eat into the value of each other.

In conclusion, spend some time auditing the website frequently and searching for signs of cannibalization of keywords. This will help keep your SEO plan on track and increase your chances of ranking for the correct terms and phrases effectively.