Investigating Keyword Cannibalization

This workflow will help you to investigate possible keyword cannibalization between pages on your site using Keyword Explorer.

Quick Links

• Why You Should Avoid Keyword Cannibalization
• Identifying Keyword Cannibalization on Your Site
• Work Some Excel Magic
• Pages That Target the Same Keyword

As a website grows the content can start to experience topical overlap. When this happens your pages may start battling against each other in the search results. This is mainly a problem when an older, perhaps lower quality, page that doesn’t convert very well is outranking a better piece of content for a target keyword, or when both competing pages are under-performing, and would likely be stronger combined than they would on their own.

To ensure that a site’s best content is ranking well and converting, you’ll want to identify which of your pages are targeting the same keywords. You can then put together a strategy for monitoring and fixing these issues on a regular basis.

Use Moz's Keyword Explorer to explore your site's ranking keywords by following these steps:

1. Head to Keyword Explorer and type in your website URL
2. Select your audiences location
3. Click Ranking Keywords from the left navigation
4. Use the icon on the right to expand the dropdown
5. Reveal Additional Ranking Positions
6. Click on SERP Analysis to view the additional ranking URLs

Export your ranking keywords data for further analysis.

1. Click Export CSV from the Ranking Keywords section of Keywords Explorer
2. Open your CSV in Excel or Google Sheets
3. Select the keywords column
4. Go to conditional formatting and select highlight duplicate values
5. Format as a table and sort keywords alphabetically (so duplicate keywords end up right next to each other)

A single URL can (and usually does!) rank for multiple keywords. That’s 100% fine. It’s when you have two or more separate URLs all competing for the same keyword that you might be better off taking action. For example:

• If the pages are topically similar and could be stronger together, consolidate by combining the content and 301 redirecting one version to the other.
• If the pages are exact or near duplicates (same exact words & phrasing, not just topic), consider canonicalizing to the primary/main version of the page.

We recommend adding this to your quarterly tasks if you’re managing larger sites and publishing new content consistently. Smaller sites may want to review keyword cannibalization every 6 months to one year.

• Learn more about Keyword Cannibalization on Whiteboard Friday
• Learn more about Keyword Cannibalization on the Moz Q&A
• Learn more about Keyword Cannibalization on the Moz Blog