As a business owner, you may have heard that you should be adding blog posts to your website. But you may not be aware that your blog posts could potentially hurt your website search engine optimization (SEO) instead of helping it. It is a common misconception that more pages with the same targeted keywords can boost your search engine rankings and put you at the top of the list.

The reality is that simply is not the case. In fact, the exact opposite holds true. Using a specific term or phrase as a keyword throughout multiple pages can end up harming your SEO. Your multiple pages could end up competing against each other for that higher ranking. So you are only fighting yourself to climb that mountain as the recognized authority for each page is diminished.

This is called Keyword cannibalisation and can definitely impact efforts when marketing small businesses online and we will explain it further here.

What Exactly is Keyword Cannibalisation?

In short, when you try to benefit from pushing the same keywords into different pages in the hopes of gaining more traction with search engines like Google, you are cannibalizing your own page results. In essence, you are sharing your efforts with all your pages instead of focusing them on one page.

This is giving Google the option to choose between your pages when faced with a search from a potential visitor, which may lead them to the wrong page that is not specific enough for what they were seeking.

The Effects of Content Cannibalisation on Your SEO

There are a number of ways that your SEO can be affected by keyword cannibalization, which can result in lost traffic, improper search results, and lost sales:

• Diminished Authority – With multiple pages running the same keyword, you are competing against yourself and lowering the overall authority you would have with a single focused page.

 

• Link and Anchor Text Dilution – Your backlinks are being split among multiple locations instead of one. Plus, your internal links are unfocused so visitors are being sent to various locations.

 

• Devaluation by Google- Your main authority page can be seen by Google as having less relevant information than one of your other pages, leading Google to choose the wrong page based on your keyword placement.

 

• Less Crawling- Search engine spiders crawl websites to match keywords to searches and present results. If you have multiple pages with the same keyword, these page crawls become irrelevant as the same information is being picked up. 

 

• Poor Page Quality- Too many pages with the same keyword is a sign to visitors that your information is thin and tells Google that the content doesn’t necessarily match the keyword on each page.

 

• Lower Conversion Rate- With one of your pages bound to convert sales better than others, you are watering down your potential to have as many visitors to that page as possible.

You can fix your keyword canibalization problem by consolidating your pages to create better content and more authority. As well, you can add more landing pages that have a greater focus on specific targets.

It’s hard enough to climb the search engine ladder so don’t fight yourself with keyword canibalization. Spend the time to use many keywords if you want to have multiple website pages working for you.