Ahh yes, the ancient art of content pruning is seeing a renaissance in the wake of Google’s Helpful Content update.

Except pruning content isn’t that old of an SEO technique and is one that has been feared (rightly so) by many SEOs. As the power of a successful prune can breathe life back into a website, an ugly hack job can seriously harm your website’s performance.

So, be mindful of who you’re handing those pruning shears to.

In this blog post, we’ll look at what content pruning is exactly, how it impacts your SEO and the best way to go about conducting a successful content pruning strategy.

What is Content Pruning?

Content pruning is the practice of identifying underperforming or non-helpful web pages and removing them from your website to improve your site’s overall SEO health.

This can be done through a number of methods, such as deleting outdated blog posts, removing low-quality pages, merging similar content, or redirecting URLs to more relevant content.

The full pruning process involves auditing and analysis to determine your content’s fate—whether it be reviving, repurposing, or ultimately the removal of low-quality content.

The goal of content pruning is to improve your website’s overall health by removing the dead weight—thus improving user experience and focusing your site’s energy on authoritative content that is helpful for people (and Google).

Why Prune Content?

Content pruning is one of the most underutilized SEO techniques that can deliver results for your website.

By removing poor performing pages, you can improve the ratio of high-quality indexed pages that exist on your site. The higher the ratio of quality pages compared to the total number of pages on your site can lead to an enhanced performance in the SERPs, as the overall ‘value’ of your site has improved.

Benefits of Content Pruning

With Google’s latest helpful content  and core algorithm update launching within the last month or so, now is a perfect time to clear out some lackluster content from your site. This is especially true if it has been a while or you have never audited your content in this fashion.

With a further emphasis on creating better experiences and more helpful content, its become more of a necessity to reevaluate the pages on your website and see if it is helping or hurting your overall site health.

Some of the major benefits of content pruning include:

Higher Quality Content

Elevate your overall quality of content.

When you remove outdated or poor-quality content from your website, you improve your site’s overall quality. This impact is two-fold: (1) you’re able to remove old content that is often unhelpful or outdated for visitors and (2) search engines, like Google, consider the overall quality (and authority) of a website when determining its rank within the search results.

Improve UX

Helping people find the right stuff.

If there’s a lot of low-quality or outdated content on your site, it can be hard for people to find the accurate information they’re looking for.

No one likes to read an article, only to find out the post is from 7 years ago and no longer reflects the modern advice they should be receiving.

This poor user experience can speak to your credibility as a business and website—leaving people feeling frustrated and like you wasted their time. Rough.

Maximize Crawl Budget

Getting the most from Googlebot.

Search engines may not index all the pages on your site if they think they’re low quality. When you prune pages from your site, you’re maximizing your crawl budget by helping Googlebot more easily find your best content—helping you get the most out of each crawl.

Helpful Content Era

For the people…and Google.

As the helpful content update continues to expand its scope, diligence with high-quality content will remain a priority. Continuing to monitor your site’s performance while removing or updating underperforming content periodically can help your site stay current with this next wave of algorithm advances.

Optimized Linking

Pointing to the right places.

A strong link strategy, for both internal and external links, can help your website on a number of levels.

Not only are you directing users to the most helpful content on (or off) your site, but you are also ensuring that you’re passing link authority to the right places on your site—helping elevate your over performance.

How to Prune Your Content

Let’s get into it! How to approach a strategic content pruning session. There are five-main-steps when thinking about a content pruning process for your website:

1. Collect Your Content: Get a list of pages on your site.
2. Gather Your Data: Grab performance data from available sources.
3. Conduct a Content Audit: Evaluate how your content is performing.
4. Finalize Your URL’s Fate: You’ve got options.
5. Backup, Rollout & Monitor: Execute your plan and track its impact.

Step 1: Collect Your Content

Creating a list of all the pages on your website.

For this step, you can export a list of URLs from your CMS. If you’re unable to export from your CMS, you can grab a list of URLs from Google Analytics or Search Console.

The Analytics option won’t necessarily yield a complete list of URLs, as someone needs to visit a page for Google Analytics to record a visit. However, this can still be a great starting point, you may just be missing some pages that don’t see any traffic.

After you have collected a list of URLs, make sure to remove any duplicates, as this will serve as your master list in the content audit portion of this process.

Step 2: Gather Your Data

Grab page specific performance data from available sources.

You want to look at all the available data you have to help gain as many insights as you can on the URLs in question. The source data you accumulate here will help keep you from making any costly errors, such as mistakenly eliminating the wrong pages.

You can pull in a host of data from various sources including (but not limited to):

Google Analytics:

• All traffic — a breakdown of visits, unique pageviews, bounce rate, exit rate, conversions, page value on a page-by-page basis. In Google Analytics, Behavior > Site Content > All Pages> Export.
• Organic traffic — You can filter the All Traffic report to show only organic traffic by applying an Organic Traffic segment.

You’ll want to pull in data from the last 12 months along with data going back a few years. This can be helpful when determining the fate of your content—by understanding if the page has ever performed well, and not just how it has done in the past year.

Google Search Console:

• External Links — These are links pointing to your domain from another website. You want to consider the number and quality of links pointing to your site. It’s very important to not get rid of any URLs that are receiving quality links from other sources. In Search Console, navigate to Links > External Links > More > Export.
• Internal Links — These are links within your website that are linking to other pages on your own website. In Search Console, Links > Internal Links > More > Export.
• Search Results — This report allows you to export impressions, clicks, click-through-rate (CTR) and average position in the Google search results for each of your URLs. Within Search Console > Search Results > Pages > Export.

Bing Webmaster Tools:

• Backlinks — An alternative method of downloading your site’s backlinks provided by Microsoft. This data can help you understand how many other domains are pointing to your website.
  • In Webmaster tools, Backlinks > Backlinks for Your Site > Pages > Download All.
  • To get a numerical value of links pointing to each URL, you can quickly run the Excel function =UNIQUE(C:C) this will get you a list of all unique URLs listed in the target URL column.
  • Then you can run another Excel function =COUNTIF(C:C, x2). The ‘x’ represents the column where you have your list of unique URLs. So, if you put your list of unique URLs in column ‘D’, the function would be =COUNTIF (C:C, D2). This will get you the number of backlinks pointing to each unique URL.
• Search Performance — This report provides insights into the number of impressions, clicks and average position in the Bing search results each page on your site has achieved.
  In Webmaster Tools > Search Performance > By Page > Download All.

Content Management System:

In WordPress, there are several plugins that can help you export this data.

• Publish date — This displays when the post was originally published.
• Last updated — This shows you when the post was last updated.
• Word Count — An export of words per page can help identify thin content. You can also grab this info from site crawling software like Screaming Frog.

Google Search Operators:

• Indexed content — Using the search operator site:example.com. You can gather a list of URLs that google has indexed for your site.
• Dated references & content — using this advanced search operator, site:example.com intext:”2016″ | intext:”2015″ | intext:”2014″ | intext:”2013”. You can search for content on your website that has any of those years listed in the body of the page copy.

Quick note: there are several Chrome extensions that can help you quickly extract a list of the URLs listed on the SERPs when you conduct these searches.

Paid Tools:

There are many tools out there that can provide additional insights into your website’s performance on a page-by-page basis. If you have access to any of these advanced tools, please include this data to help you evaluate the performance of each page on your site.

Step 3: Conduct a Content Audit

Use data and evaluate how your content is performing.

It’s time to compile all that data into a content auditing document. You can use your data tool of choice such as Excel, Google Sheets, R, Power BI, etc.

We’re looking to match each URL up with the corresponding data points from each of our exports.

From there it’s a matter of weighing and evaluating each of these metrics on a page-by-page basis, compared to the overall performance of your website as a whole.

Your content auditing document should help you identify opportunities on what to do with each page of your site.

Using the exported data, the Excel document above correlates each of the data points to the corresponding URL and compares it to the overall performance of the website.

The spreadsheet should help identify any pages that are:

• Not getting any traffic
• Receiving minimal organic traffic
• Not leading to conversions
• Not assisting on the path to conversion (page value)
• Not getting many backlinks
• Featuring (potentially) outdated information
• URLs with a low word count (thin content)

The final column gives a suggested outcome for each page. Please keep in mind each URL should also be subject to a manual review (Step 4). Data can help us, but it can’t paint the full picture here.

Step 4: Finalize Your URL’s Fate

What are you going to do with all that content? You’ve got options.

Ok, so you have your content audit document and you’re now ready to determine the fate of your URLs. If you added a suggested outcome column, you’ll have an idea of where the data is leading and you can begin sorting your content into three groups:

1. Keep it: do (basically) nothing. That was easy 😅
2. Update it: Improve, update, combine or repurpose
3. Remove it: 301, noindex or canonical

Now, each URL is still subject to manual review—just because your content audit suggests an outcome, does not mean it’s final. So here are a few more columns I add to my spreadsheet during a manual review before making any final decisions:

• Target keyword: The focus keyword/ phrase for the page. (Some paid tools can help automate this for you!)
• Ease of updating: Rate how easy the content would be to update (Scale 1-10).
• Notes: Any additional notes or thoughts.
• Final outcome: Note the final decision for each URL.

Whether you address these last few items or decide to skip them, you’ll at least want to make sure you add the ‘Final outcome’ column to your spreadsheet to mark the action you plan to take with each of these URLs after your manual review.

The “Keep It” Group

Do (basically) nothing.

This is the easy group. These are pages that are doing well—they drive traffic, have backlinks, convert users and generally rank well organically.

Additionally, this group will include any pages that should not be removed, like your privacy policy, contact page, terms and conditions and recently published pages that have not had time to properly evaluate.

You’re going to want to note the target keywords for each of these pages and look for any cannibalization that may occur from pages that don’t perform as well. We’ll identify those URLs in the next group and deal with them accordingly.

.Any social media strategy worth its salt needs to be measured properly. Yet you might be surprised by how many marketers don’t think to look past the data found on the ‘Overview’ tab.

While no one would argue about the importance of keeping track of those stats (that’s why they’re right up front), there’s more valuable intelligence to be gathered by doing a deeper dive.

Let’s look at the top platforms and find out the best social media metrics you should track for each one to boost brand awareness and improve social media ROI.

Facebook Metrics – The Basics

Facebook (owned by parent company Meta) is still the most popular social media network out there according to Statista despite competition from newcomer TikTok and second-place YouTube. For businesses, Facebook offers a range of advertising options that are highly targeted and have a broad reach. So how do you use Facebook analytics to grow and engage?

1. Facebook – Engagement

Engagement measures the number of times people took an action on your post. Actions include clicks, shares, comments, or reactions.

This is a valuable metric to gauge how much your audience likes your content. Learning the kinds of posts that people engage with will help inform your content strategy. Better engagement also helps your post reach more of your followers’ newsfeeds.

2. Facebook – Reach

Reach indicates the number of people who have seen your post. Changes to Facebook’s algorithm have made it more difficult to have messages seen organically. So, even if a business has a large number of followers on Facebook, it doesn’t mean its posts will be visible to many of them.

You can access topline reach information on the ‘Overview’ tab of your Facebook Insights page and get more detail in the ‘Reach’ tab. This is a useful metric to help show the number of individual people who saw your campaign or content.

3. Facebook – Impressions

While reach is the number of people who saw your post. Impressions are the number of times your post was seen. If an individual saw a single post on three different occasions, that individual represents an increase of one in the reach figure and an increase of three in the impressions figure.

To see impressions data, go to the ‘Posts’ tab and choose ‘Impressions: Organic/Paid’ in the drop-down menu. This metric allows you to understand how many times your ad was shown.

If you divide your impressions by your reach you will get your frequency metric. Which is the average number of times a person saw your ad. This can be helpful when trying to determine ad recall or brand uplift.

4. Facebook – Page Likes and Followers

Facebook likes and followers are important audience measurements. Likes are people who have identified themselves as a fan of your page, whereas followers have indicated a desire to see posts from your pages on their newsfeeds (although the algorithm does not guarantee that they will).

It’s important to keep track of your audience size to make sure you are not losing more fans than you are gaining.

Twitter Metrics – The Basics

Despite ongoing changes at Twitter, it’s a platform that can offer a lot to marketers and brands. Its real-time nature means hashtags can trend quickly and companies can leverage tweets to raise brand awareness and drive engagement. Let’s look at the metrics to look at using Twitter analytics.

1. Twitter – Tweet Impressions

This metric is the number of times the tweet was shown, either on your followers’ timelines, as the result of a like, or in a search. This data can be found by selecting ‘View tweet activity’ in your Twitter analytics and can help show how your content or campaign has been pushed out to audiences outside of your follower list.

2. Twitter – Engagements

On Twitter, engagement is any action a user has taken on your tweet, including clicking on a link, retweet, reply, and like. This measure indicates whether or not your tweet motivated someone to find out more or to share it with others. You will find engagement data under the ‘Tweet’ tab. Having more engagements is a good sign that people like or want to interact with your content.

3. Twitter – Top Tweet

On the account homepage in Twitter analytics, you’ll find the top tweet for the current month. That’s the tweet that has earned the most impressions and includes the top card tweet (includes a card) and the top media tweet (includes a photo or video). It’s an important indicator of what works well with your audience, be it the type of content, the hashtag used, the day and time of the tweet, or a combination of some or all of those factors.

4. Twitter – New Followers

‘New followers’ is the tally of new people who have chosen to follow your Twitter account during the past month. Choosing to become a follower shows a greater connection to your brand than retweets or likes do. This is a useful key performance indicator (KPI) for your brand’s overall performance in growing your audience.

5. Twitter – Top Follower

The top follower is the follower with the highest number of followers of his or her own who has been following you during the last month. Your top followers are the ones who have the greatest potential to spread your tweets to others by liking or retweeting them.

6. Twitter – Top mention

This is the tweet in which you were tagged with the most impressions using your @handle. The users behind your top tweets are often good candidates for possible influencer marketing campaigns as they have a significant number of followers and are engaged with your brand.

Instagram Metrics – The Basics

Over two billion people use Instagram once a month, making it the fourth most popular social app worldwide according to the Business of Apps. With a new focus on video formats, Instagram can be an effective platform for brands looking to drive brand awareness and engagement, especially among those over 35 years of age. Let’s see the top metrics to keep an eye on using Instagram analytics.

1. Instagram – Impressions

This is the number of times your post was shown to your audience. Instagram analytics breaks down this data further by showing the impressions that came from hashtags, from home, or  profile. Good hashtag use will help improve your post impressions.

2. Instagram – Reach

Another key metric to gauge campaign or post-performance on Instagram is reach. This refers to the number of individual users or unique accounts who saw your post.

3. Instagram – Content interactions

This looks at the actions people take when engaging with your content including likes, comments, shares, saves, and replies. This is the total number of user actions taken directly on your post.

4. Instagram – Explore

Instagram’s Explore feature allows users to find new, relevant content from accounts they may not be currently following. It works by Instagram’s algorithm curating content based on similar accounts or content interacted with and includes photos, videos (see a guide to IG video formats for more information), Reels and Stories. Instagram’s insights will show the number of users reached through the feature who are not currently following you.

5. Instagram – Accounts reached and accounts engaged

These metrics show engagement with your feed and posts. Accounts reached is the number of unique accounts that have seen your content at least once and includes social media demographics such as top countries, top cities, top age ranges, and gender.

Accounts engaged refers to the number of unique accounts that have interacted with your content and provides a breakdown (like above) of each.

Pinterest Metrics – The Basics

Pinterest is the place to be for brands that share great images or visual content. With the majority of users being female, it’s ideal for companies that want to appeal to that audience and is particularly good for fashion, beauty, decor, DIY and food brands. Let’s look at the key metrics to focus on using Pinterest analytics.

1. Pinterest – Pins

Pins are bookmarks that people use to save content they love. These can be videos, images, or products. Pins are searchable and clickable so marketers can use them to drive people to a website or landing page to drive engagement and conversions. Tracking the number of pins shows you the average amount of daily content pinned from your website so you can understand pin clicks and click rate.

2. Pinterest – Saves

Once known as repins, the Saves feature allows people to pin or save your content onto their boards. This then allows followers to see it in their feeds and gain your content greater exposure and reach. Tracking the average number of daily saves is a good way to see how your content is performing.

3. Pinterest – Impressions & Engagement

Like any social media network, impressions and engagement are important metrics to track on Pinterest. These show you the performance of your visual content on the platform. A high Pin impression rate means your content is resonating. The Engagement metric shows the total number of engagements your Pins get such as saves, Pin clicks, carousel card swipes, collections clicks, and Idea Pin forward/backward swipes.

4. Pinterest – Top converting pins

This is a useful metric to track as it tells you which content is performing well and can allow you to dig deeper to find out why. Is it because it is a video or does it offer a solution to a problem or is it linked to an influencer?

TikTok Metrics – The Basics

As the newest platform in town, TikTok has gained over 1 billion users in just 5 years and made $4.6 billion in revenue in 2021 alone according to the Business of Apps. This popularity is down to its easy-to-use platform and entertainment value.

It’s also a platform that allows users and brands to go viral, gaining followers and raising brand awareness along the way. Forecast to undergo change to its usability for businesses in 2023, let’s look at the metrics that you should track on TikTok (make sure you have a Business account to access analytics).

TikTok divides its analytics into four tabs:

• Overview
• Content
• Followers
• LIVE

1. TikTok – Overview

The ‘Overview’ tab allows you to see a range of metrics in one place including Engagement, Followers, and Content. It’s a great way to get insight into the key metrics for your TikTok account.

Here, you can see video views and profile views (which show how many people looked at your profile and is good for brand awareness if that’s a KPI for your business). It also shows data on shares, likes, comments and followers.

2. TikTok – Content

The Content tab is all about the performance of your video content. It provides data on total video views and trending videos along with likes, comments and shares on a video.

It can dig deeper by telling you the total play time and average watch time along with the reached audience and the number of people who watched the full video. These metrics will help you understand what video content is engaging your audience.

3. TikTok – Followers

This tab will tell you more about who your followers are. It includes details on gender, location and follower activity which tells you when your followers are active. There is also videos your followers watch and sounds they listened to.

4. TikTok – LIVE

Live video is a big part of TikTok and is a great way to drive engagement and earn rewards or get free gifts like Diamonds. The tab shows metrics such as total views and time along with viewer count and unique viewers.

5. TikTok – Hashtag performance

People love hashtags on TikTok and so monitoring performance can be helpful. Hashtag views shows the number of times a hashtag has been watched. You can also search for a hashtag in the ‘Discover’ section to get an idea of what’s popular or trending.

You can read ‘How to Use Hashtags Effectively on Social Media’ for more information or tips.

LinkedIn Metrics – The Basics

LinkedIn turns 20 next year and it has evolved to be a popular social media platform with over 875 million users worldwide. Seen as the leading B2B platform, it’s also a place where people can build and advance their careers. Let’s find out how to use LinkedIn analytics to track the performance of your B2B campaigns.

1. LinkedIn – Visitors

Visitor analytics will show you who is visiting your page and help you spot dips and peaks to see what content is resonating. Use filters here (page views, dates, unique visitors) to dig down into your visitor profile like job function, seniority, company size, and industry.

2. LinkedIn – Followers

The Follower feature on LinkedIn shows you the sources and demographics of those who follow your company page. This metric will let you know who is following you and the best ways to engage with them.

3. LinkedIn – Impressions & Engagement

Impressions are the number of times your post has been seen. This metric is important as it shows you how many times your content is seen and increases the probability of an interaction with it. Also, track unique impressions as it counts the number of unique LinkedIn users that see your post.

On LinkedIn, the engagement rate is calculated by adding the number of interactions, clicks, and new followers gained, divided by the number of post impressions. Including this in your analysis will give you an overall picture of how content is performing.

4. LinkedIn – Competitor

This feature is under the ‘Analytics’ tab (currently limited to some users) and can compare follower metrics and organic content metrics. It will help you gain insight into your competitors’ followers and find out more about the type of content that works for them.

Next Level Social Media Metrics

With extra digging and calculation, you can gain some more valuable data and formulate digital marketing KPIs to help quantify how well your social media strategy is performing from an awareness, engagement, and customer satisfaction point of view. Let’s look at five next-level metrics for social media marketing that you should consider tracking.

1. Follower Growth Rate

It stands to reason that as internet access continues to grow worldwide, brands can expect to see a proportional rate of growth in their social media audience. So, quantifying the speed at which your brand is gaining followers is important, as is comparing your growth rate to your competitors.

This represents a shift in thinking from asking “How much is our audience growing?”, to asking “How fast is our audience growing?” If you see a flattening of your social media audience growth rate, it may indicate that you need to take action to counteract the trend.

To calculate your audience growth rate, add up your net follower growth on all platforms for the previous month. Divide that by your total audience on all platforms and multiply that by 100 (to get it as a percentage).

For comparative purposes, you could think of doing the same calculation on your competition’s social media platforms.

2. Social Share of Voice

Social Share of Voice (SSoV) compares social media mentions of your brand in relation to all of your competitors. It’s a useful way to see how visible, how relevant, and how ‘top of mind’ your brand is within the marketplace.

Begin by measuring all direct and indirect mentions of your brand during the month, using your handle or your name, across all social media platforms. (Social media monitoring and analytics tools can simplify this process.) Do the same for your competitors. Divide your total mentions by the total mentions for all brands (including your own) and multiply it by 100 to arrive at your share of voice percentage.

3. Amplification Rate

Amplification rate is the ratio of shares per post to the number of overall follower. So it shows the rate at which followers share your content. It’s a KPI that reveals your audience’s willingness to be associated and engaged with your brand.

The higher your amplification rate, the more your followers are expanding your reach for you. You can calculate the amplification rate by dividing a post’s number of shares by your total number of followers and then multiplying by 100 for a percentage.

4. Virality Rate

There’s far more to measuring the quality of a post than the number of likes it has received or the number of times it was shared. One post’s ability to go ‘viral’ is reflected by calculating the percentage of how much it was shared out of the total number of times it was displayed. The calculation is simple: the total number of shares is divided by total impressions and multiplied by 100. This is the virality rate.

Let’s say that one post got 400 likes but it was shared by 2,000 of the 20,000 people who saw it. This shows more potential than another post that received 1,000 likes. But was only shared by 2,000 of the 200,000 people who saw it.

5. Social sentiment

While social share tracks your share of the conversation on social media, sentiment tracks feelings and attitudes. So when people talk about your brand online, do they say things that are positive or negative?

Calculating social sentiment requires analytics tools that can process and categorize context and language such as TalkWalker

Upgrade your social media analytics powers

If you use social media marketing (as most brands do), it’s essential to understand the data behind the content. DMIs social media marketing will give you the in-depth knowledge and we will increase your online presence.

Some SEO topics are speculative, and keyword cannibalization is one of them. Different opinions exist: some people say it is a serious issue, whereas others are not even sure about its existence.

So, what is keyword cannibalization? Does it really impact a website’s ranking? Let’s take a closer look at the phenomenon and find out when it is an issue and when it is not. In case it is, we should know how to detect and fix it.

What is keyword cannibalization in SEO

Keyword cannibalization is a ranking issue when several pages from the same website compete in search results for one keyword, hurting each other’s ranks. Keyword cannibalization occurs when different pages appear to be optimized for the same query, and Google cannot identify which of them is more relevant. As a result, these pages compete with one another in organic results, and none of them can get to the top positions.

The SEO term was coined from the marketing concept of product cannibalization: this is when a company loses in sales because it has introduced a new product, replacing an older one.

The pretext for inventing this term appeared in the early era of search optimization. In those times, people believed that it would be easier for their websites to rank if they created many pages targeting the same keyword.

Further on, Google introduces several updates, one of them called the Site Diversity Update, seeking to limit the presence of a single domain in one SERP. This improvement aimed to diversify search results and increase organic competition.

At present, host crowding and domain clustering filters prevent multiple same-domain pages from appearing in the organic listings. In the past, you could find five pages from the same domain in the top 10. Today, Google shows two pages from the same domain on a SERP, in rare cases a little more.

Today, search engines can define quite precisely what a page is about. Moreover, search engines go far beyond keyword density, guessing the search intent and pages’ relevance to a query. If Google finds several relevant articles on the same website, it will show them in the SERP. But would those pages cannibalize each other? Well, it depends.

What is NOT keyword cannibalization

An average page occupying the first position on a SERP for a popular keyword can also rank for about a hundred other keywords. No wonder the landing page may intersect with other same-domain pages targeting similar or the same keywords.

How to detect keyword cannibalization on a website

Now, let’s look at the cases of keyword cannibalization that turn out to be a problem that ruins SEO efforts. In such cases, your ranks may suffer as well as CTR, conversions, and other crucial site metrics. The most dangerous thing about keyword cannibalization is that it is hard to notice it immediately.

The simplest way is to run the site: search for your keyword. Google will show all your site’s pages drawn into the SERP by this query. Take notice of the URLs with similar titles and content.

Once again, you can search for your keyword and remove the domain clustering filter, setting the value to &filter=0 with the search. It will reveal more pages in the SERP triggered by the query. This can be a clue to where to make changes for each page to start showing up on its own.

If you need supportive evidence to prove keyword cannibalization is in action, you can check your ranks and spot cases when multiple pages are ranking for the same queries. Next, you should find out whether the pages hurt each one’s ranking.

Briefly, you will be looking for multiple pages ranking quite low for the same query in the SERPs and changing their positions frequently.

This task may look somewhat complicated unless you have a ranking tool for it.

How to fix keyword cannibalization

There are several ways to fix SEO content cannibalization. You might need to use any of those that suit your case or combine different methods.

Consolidate pages

This method fits when you have several pages on the same topic. Analyze their content to select interesting details on each page. Then rewrite the landing, taking the most useful content and merging these pages into a better in-depth piece.

You may delete the unneeded pages. However, if they have some ranking power, it’s better to set up proper redirects to the new landing page.

To make your landing page more relevant to the target keyword, use SEO writing tools to increase their chances for optimization success. Content Editor in WebSite Auditor is a nice solution to help you do this. Just paste your existing URL or add a new one and paste the target keyword. Content Editor will give you all the helpful data based on the competitive analysis of the top 10 ranking results.

Add internal links to increase a page’s prominence

Internal linking is crucial for getting SEO done right. It shapes a website structure and helps search engines better understand the importance of site pages. The more backlinks a page has, the more prominent it seems.

Fix duplication issues

Duplication issues are not strictly about keyword cannibalization as such, but it works similarly: search engines cannot figure out which page to show out of several identical. Of course, Google may try to identify which page is the main one. But it will also take a bit longer for Google to discover and sort out all these duplicated pages.

Make certain that your site is clean from duplicate issues by.

In certain cases, often happening on e-commerce or multi-locale websites, duplicate content can be fixed by canonicalization. The rel=”canonical” tag tells search engines which page from several duplicates to show in the SERP. Moreover, the canonical tag consolidates link signals for similar pages into a single URL.

Thus, make sure to use the right canonicals to show search engines which pages you want to appear in the search results. Here Google provides detailed instructions on how to define canonicals.

Why keyword cannibalization is bad for SEO

Let’s take a closer look at the negative aspects of keyword cannibalization. So, why is keyword cannibalization so bad for SEO? Some of the reasons are that it leads to:

• Loss of traffic and conversions. As your landing page competes with another one in a SERP, it will undoubtedly receive less traffic and, consequently, fewer conversions.
• Loss of content value and website authority. Seeing too many pages from a website on the same topic, especially when they appear thin and insufficient, users lose trust in the expertise and authority of the site creators. And so does Google.
• The dilution of link value. Several pages optimized for the same keyword — intentionally or not — will receive less ranking power from links. This way, the link juice gets split between multiple URLs instead of being consolidated into one.

This negative impact will eventually make your SEO efforts just a waste of time and resources. So, the best approach here is to audit your pages for cannibalization issues, fix them, and try to prevent them in the future.

How to prevent keyword cannibalization

Whether you are just starting to build a website or thinking about creating a new page, you need to foresee cannibalization occurrences at the very beginning.

1. Research keywords with a focus on intent.

So when you search for target keywords for a new landing page, think about what intent a chosen keyword bears. In the process of creating new content, make sure to cover this intent. This will increase the probability that the landing page will be found relevant for this keyword.

2. Analyze SERPs for intent and ranking factors.

SERP analysis is closely connected with the previous point. Before creating a piece of content for a landing page, analyze the SERP for the target keywords. This step will save you lots of time and effort in the future.

Examine what types of content are shown at large for a given keyword. What intent does it cover? No wonder it would be hard to rank well for an informational search query if your content covers transactional intent, etc.

3. Track keyword positions.

Keyword mapping is an often underrated but great solution. Together with a content strategy, it may help you prevent keyword cannibalization and understand what content you will need to create in the future.

You may use a keyword mapping spreadsheet with your existing pages and assigned keywords, combining them with a content plan.  Or, to make it simpler, use the keyword mapping tool.

4. Audit your site regularly.

Site issues are generally a heavy drawback for SEO. Many Tools lets you run regular site audits: just set up an automated task to run a check-up on autopilot, and the tool will scan your site and even deliver the report to your inbox. As for keyword cannibalization, pay attention to duplicate issues, site structure, internal links, and anchor texts.

Conclusion

To sum up all of the above, here are the essentials of keyword cannibalization:

1. Multiple pages ranking low for the same query, and whose rankings fluctuate heavily, is a sign of keyword cannibalization.
2. Keyword cannibalization is hard to detect, but with position tracking, it can be done faster.
3. To prevent keyword cannibalization, focus on intent-based keyword optimization and audit your site’s SEO health regularly.

Even with high-quality content, all efforts may go awry with keyword cannibalization issues. This is not something on the surface, and losses may come unnoticed for quite a while. So, stick to thoughtful keyword planning, check SERPs, and audit your content regularly, and keyword cannibalization will never happen.

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