Tip: Boost organic traffic by addressing keyword cannibalization in your articles

If your website has multiple pages fighting for a similar keyword, you've got keyword cannibalization. Or do you? Increase organic traffic by identifying cannibalization issues through search intent (not just the keyword), then consolidate the culprits.

According to Joshua Hardwick of Ahrefs, you only really have cannibalization when doubling up on a keyword hurts your site's organic performance — and since pages often rank for lots of different keywords, it doesn't always do that. This is important because if it isn't hurting performance, then taking action on one of the articles could result in lost keyword rankings. The key is to find pages that not only have similar target keywords, but also have the same search intent, as those will probably have similar long-tail keywords as well. To identify cannibalization issues, most of us will be able to get by with a content audit, as they're pretty easy to spot on smaller sites, but other methods are outlined in Joshua's article too. Once you identify issues, consolidate by redirecting the more outdated page or combining the pages into something new. When Ahrefs did this with two cannibalizing articles, their organic traffic for the remaining article nearly quadrupled the original combined traffic, and their ranking went to #1 — all within about 6 months. Don't forget to swap any internal links that point to the deprecated article. And keep in mind that generally speaking, you should not noindex, canonicalize, or de-optimize the page.

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