As your website grows, you will have more and more articles. Some of these articles are going to be on a similar topic. It should be noted that, even when you've always categorized it well, your content can compete with itself: You suffer from keyword cannibalization.
At the same time, some of your articles might be out of date. To avoid all of this, finding and fixing keyword cannibalization issues should be part of your content maintenance job. And that's what we'll show you in this article.
But before, if you have never installed WordPress discover How to Install a WordPress Blog in 7 Steps et How to search, install and activate a WordPress theme on your blog
Then back to why we are here.
Keyword cannibalization?
Keyword cannibalism - or content cannibalism - occurs when your website has multiple articles with similar content on the same keyword. This problem mainly affects growing websites:
More content means a greater chance of creating articles and pages that are very similar. For search engines, it is difficult to distinguish between these similar articles. As a result, they might rank all articles on that topic very low in their rankings.
How to identify and resolve content cannibalism
In many cases, solving keyword cannibalization will mean removing and merging content. We're going to walk you through some of this maintenance work, to show you how to do it.
Step 1: Audit your content
The first step in our process is to find all the content that matches the keyword you're looking for. A Google search gives us the articles that Google considers to be from the keywords. Just simply do your research and typing your keyword in in the following format:
site:site:domaine.com "Mot-Clé Recherché"
If Google returns you several of your articles then your content is in competition with itself. It will therefore be necessary analyze the performance of which page should be ranked and which should not.
Step 2: Analyze content performance
Let's go to Google Search Console and under the Performance section click on the filter bar:
We clicked on Query, then entered "the search keyword":
This allows Google Search Console to match all queries that contain the searched word or keyword combination. This gives you two very important data:
- The list of keywords for your website and the click-through rate (CTR) for those keywords;
- The list of pages that are receiving all that traffic and how much traffic each of those pages has received.
You have to watch the number total clicks we had received for all of these queries, and then looking at the individual pages. You will see that only a few pages will receive all the traffic. the others will hardly receive it.
Obviously, you will need to clean up your content. But be careful that does not mean that you will have to delete the other articles which are not included in the filter. Each item must therefore be checked individually.
Remove the filter below and apply the filter by page. This allows you to filter by a group of URLs or a specific URL. On larger websites, you can filter by URL groups. In that case, take a look at the data for each of those posts, which is the best way if you really want to find and fix the keyword cannibalization on your website.
Step 3: Decision time
Now that you have decided to go through each article individually, you must decide which one you should keep, or delete. If you decide to delete it (which is done for the majority of articles), you must decide to which article you will need it. redirect to give your item more value.
For each of the articles, you need to evaluate if they have any sections that we need to merge into another article. Did any of these articles have paragraphs or even entire sections that could just be merged into another article?
When merging articles involves more work (and time) than adding a paragraph or a few sentences, we recommend working in a new project by duplicating the original article with the plugin. Yoast Duplicate Post.
This way, you will be able to work on your merged article without making live edits to any of your original articles.
Learn more about how to duplicate an article in WordPress.
There may be times when you come across an article that does not rank in your keyword search, but needs to be kept: because it has long tail keywords. They are so far reaching that removing the latter would be a waste, so you must decide to redirect the other articles on the topic to that specific article.
Step 4: Take action
Now it was time to act! you have a list of action items: content to add to specific articles after which the other articles should be removed. Using Yoast SEO Premiumit's easy to do 301 redirects to any post or page there when you delete it, so the process is pretty seamless.
Fixing keyword cannibalization is hard work
If you think, "That's a lot of work." Yes, finding and fixing keyword cannibalization takes serious effort, and it's a process that we have to do on a number of terms, several times a year. This is a very repeatable content maintenance strategy.
Now what you have to do is go through this process at least once a year for every major group of keywords in your website that you want to rank for.
Recommended Resources
And for those who want to go further, especially in optimizing their WordPress website, here are some resources that we invite you to consult.
- How to Merge and Edit WordPress Categories and Tags
- SEO benchmarking: Competitive analysis
- Bloggers: here's 3 lessons you can learn from my mistakes
- Keyword Research For SEO: The Ultimate Guide
- 9 WordPress plugins to customize your dashboard
Conclusion
Here is ! That's all for this article showing you how to find and fix keyword cannibalization in 4 steps. Do not hesitate to send us your appreciations and suggestions. in the comments section.
However, you can also consult our resources, if you need more elements to carry out your projects of creation of Internet sites, by consulting our guide on the WordPress blog creation or the one on Divi: the best WordPress theme of all time.
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