SEO cannibalization may not be one of the priorities of our project compared to content creation, technical error correction, WPO… However, it is very important that we know how to identify and correct this situation if it occurs and we want to work on it.
Below you can see how to identify this situation quickly and easily using SEOcrawl.
What is SEO cannibalization?
We could define SEO cannibalization or SEO cannibalizations as the situation that occurs when there is more than one URL ranking for a keyword and their distribution of clicks is quite similar. That is, if we have the keyword “cheap cars”, SEO cannibalization would occur when we had:
- The home page positioned for “cheap cars”: coches.com
- A specific landing page: coches.com/coches-baratos/
However, the simple fact that there are several URLs ranking for a keyword does not mean that there is SEO cannibalization . For this to happen, the traffic volume of both URLs must be significant.
Let’s look at this in detail with a practical case analyzing the results of Chess.com.
When do SEO cannibalizations occur?
As we have said, for SEO cannibalization to occur, the percentage of click distribution must be significant and not, for example, 99% vs 1%. On many occasions, Google tests and changes the position of URLs or moves a URL to the top for a few hours or days. Even if this happens, if we do not have a significant percentage of clicks, we will not consider that cannibalization is occurring. To understand this quickly and easily, within SEOcrawl, we can find the distribution of traffic and impressions for each possible case of cannibalization.
Everything could indicate that SEO cannibalization is actually taking place here… However, this is not correct ! By not filtering by country, what we are seeing on the screen is not really cannibalization but simply the different URLs that rank for each country for the keyword “chess”.
If we filter by country, for example Spain, the results are much more different.
How can we analyze this data?
Once we have the data for all the keywords, it’s time to get to work. By default, we’ll see that everything is sorted by click volume and once we open it, we’ll have several options to perform the analysis.
- The first thing we can evaluate is whether there is a very aggressive cannibalization or not. In the case of the image, the first URL has 76% of the clicks and the second 8.2%. The rest have a very low volume, so in principle, we should not worry.
- The second option is whether all the URLs that appear are actually valid and should exist. Sometimes URLs with filters, duplicate pages, etc. slip through here, and this is where we can take advantage of the opportunity to do a thorough cleanup.
And now comes the critical question… How do you know if it is positive or negative SEO cannibalization?
How to identify positive or negative SEO cannibalization?
The answer is quite simple. A cannibalization will be positive when we occupy several positions in the search results and we have good conversion metrics on both pages, while a cannibalization will be negative when we have a page with poor conversion metrics and we have the URL that converts better below it in the search results.
Confused? An example will clear up any confusion:
Positive cannibalization:
- URL example.com/1/ in position 3 with a 10% conversion and 1000 clicks
- URL example.com/2/ in position 4 with a 10% conversion and 750 clicks
Total : 1750 clicks and 175 conversions
Negative cannibalization:
- URL example.com/1/ in position 3 with 1% conversion and 1000 clicks
- URL example.com/2/ in position 4 with a 10% conversion and 750 clicks
Total: 1750 clicks and 85 conversions
As you can see, the URL with the highest conversion should always be first in SEO cannibalizations.
And finally, comes one of the most important parts. Now that we know how to identify them and differentiate between positive and negative, we only need to know what solutions we have to act in each case.
Possible solutions to SEO cannibalization
The most important thing when considering a solution or not before cannibalizations is to understand if something is really needed.
- Case 1: If, for example, we are faced with positive cannibalization with both pages converting well, there is really nothing to do .
- Case 2: If we are faced with cannibalization where the page that converts best is below the one that converts worst, one of the actions that could work best is to eliminate it and make a 301 redirect (permanent).
- Case 3: In the event that negative cannibalization occurs and we want to maintain both results but reverse the order, the optimization would involve adding more content, improving metadata , etc. to reverse the situation.
As you can see, in most cases it will be a matter of cleaning up through redirects and content optimization, thanks to which we can achieve the results we want in search engines.
