Eliminating SEO content cannibalization increases traffic by 110%, according to Keyword Insights
Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2024 3:50 am
Kamila Dantas
Jun 9, 22 | 4 min read
seo content cannibalization
Reading time: 4 minutes
If you are a Digital Marketer or create content for the Internet, you have surely heard of Keyword Insights , a tool developed with the aim of helping companies and web content creators to optimize their SEO strategies and achieve better organic results in search engines.
Many professionals use the tool on a daily basis to create online content and perform keyword research that identifies content that can be created based on keyword clusters .
However, in a recent attempt, Keyword taiwan email list used keyword clusters to identify content to be removed, the opposite of what they used to do for this strategy, and they achieved fantastic results: a 110% increase in organic traffic due to reduced content cannibalization!
Follow us on the Rock Content LinkedIn page
First of all, what is content cannibalization?
Content cannibalization occurs when you have multiple pages targeting the same or similar keywords, causing these pieces of content to compete with each other for position in Google and, consequently, harming your site's organic performance.
Let’s say you have two posts on the same topic, and therefore Google doesn’t identify which of the articles should rank higher for a specific query. As a result, both posts will likely rank poorly, meaning you won’t be able to consistently rank well for either one or the other.
Another problem caused by cannibalization is that — depending on the website and how the pages are structured — larger sites can unnecessarily inflate their page count and reduce crawl efficiency/budget.
And it is at this point that Keyword was able to capitalize and reduce the website’s URL count by around 15 million, increasing organic traffic by 110%.
A case study of a real estate website in the US
The client who got Keyword to achieve these results was a large real estate website in the US. The types of queries they wanted to rank for were like:
California Homes for Sale;
2 Bedroom Homes for Sale in Florida;
Log Cabins for Sale in Boulder;
Colonial homes for sale in Orange Country.
After attempting to diagnose the issues by crawling the site, the keyword team concluded that the company had created a “property type” for each word in their keyword research, meaning they had over 400 property types, including:
houses for sale in…;
properties for sale in…;
log cabins for sale in…;
log houses for sale in…;
In this way, property pages were created for every state, city, and neighborhood in the US, generating thousands and even millions of extremely similar and potentially ambiguous web pages, such as "property for sale" and "homes for sale."
This led to the hypothesis that they were cannibalizing content, as well as generating a significant amount of unnecessary URLs to be crawled by search engines.
What did you do to increase this company's organic traffic results?
ADVERTISEMENT
The first step was to download a list of all the property types the client had and attach the phrase “for sale in California” to it, thus assigning a state to the inquiries as a way to facilitate the listing process.
As a result, the search list looked like this:
California Homes for Sale;
California Property Sales;
2 Bedroom Homes for Sale in California;
Colonial homes for sale in California.
Shortly after, this information was uploaded to Keyword Insights and selected from its groupings and classifications. That is, the search results were analyzed and grouped into segments on the same page.
For example, if "Homes for Sale in California" and "Properties for Sale in California" both appear in the same group, they should only have one page targeting them, not two as the client used to do.
The ranking and rating URLs were also analyzed and indicated that there were multiple content categories showing that there was a lot of cannibalization between them. An example of this is the screenshot taken by the keyword team showing the first 30 property type pages.
Jun 9, 22 | 4 min read
seo content cannibalization
Reading time: 4 minutes
If you are a Digital Marketer or create content for the Internet, you have surely heard of Keyword Insights , a tool developed with the aim of helping companies and web content creators to optimize their SEO strategies and achieve better organic results in search engines.
Many professionals use the tool on a daily basis to create online content and perform keyword research that identifies content that can be created based on keyword clusters .
However, in a recent attempt, Keyword taiwan email list used keyword clusters to identify content to be removed, the opposite of what they used to do for this strategy, and they achieved fantastic results: a 110% increase in organic traffic due to reduced content cannibalization!
Follow us on the Rock Content LinkedIn page
First of all, what is content cannibalization?
Content cannibalization occurs when you have multiple pages targeting the same or similar keywords, causing these pieces of content to compete with each other for position in Google and, consequently, harming your site's organic performance.
Let’s say you have two posts on the same topic, and therefore Google doesn’t identify which of the articles should rank higher for a specific query. As a result, both posts will likely rank poorly, meaning you won’t be able to consistently rank well for either one or the other.
Another problem caused by cannibalization is that — depending on the website and how the pages are structured — larger sites can unnecessarily inflate their page count and reduce crawl efficiency/budget.
And it is at this point that Keyword was able to capitalize and reduce the website’s URL count by around 15 million, increasing organic traffic by 110%.
A case study of a real estate website in the US
The client who got Keyword to achieve these results was a large real estate website in the US. The types of queries they wanted to rank for were like:
California Homes for Sale;
2 Bedroom Homes for Sale in Florida;
Log Cabins for Sale in Boulder;
Colonial homes for sale in Orange Country.
After attempting to diagnose the issues by crawling the site, the keyword team concluded that the company had created a “property type” for each word in their keyword research, meaning they had over 400 property types, including:
houses for sale in…;
properties for sale in…;
log cabins for sale in…;
log houses for sale in…;
In this way, property pages were created for every state, city, and neighborhood in the US, generating thousands and even millions of extremely similar and potentially ambiguous web pages, such as "property for sale" and "homes for sale."
This led to the hypothesis that they were cannibalizing content, as well as generating a significant amount of unnecessary URLs to be crawled by search engines.
What did you do to increase this company's organic traffic results?
ADVERTISEMENT
The first step was to download a list of all the property types the client had and attach the phrase “for sale in California” to it, thus assigning a state to the inquiries as a way to facilitate the listing process.
As a result, the search list looked like this:
California Homes for Sale;
California Property Sales;
2 Bedroom Homes for Sale in California;
Colonial homes for sale in California.
Shortly after, this information was uploaded to Keyword Insights and selected from its groupings and classifications. That is, the search results were analyzed and grouped into segments on the same page.
For example, if "Homes for Sale in California" and "Properties for Sale in California" both appear in the same group, they should only have one page targeting them, not two as the client used to do.
The ranking and rating URLs were also analyzed and indicated that there were multiple content categories showing that there was a lot of cannibalization between them. An example of this is the screenshot taken by the keyword team showing the first 30 property type pages.