Keyword cannibalization—it’s a disturbing term for a common SEO problem, and it probably affects your business! See if this sounds familiar: you’ve been told by your local SEO company that the best strategy for rising in the SERPs is to produce new and useful content for your business website on a regular schedule in the form of a blog. They’ve come up with a list of keywords you should be targeting that match what searchers are looking for from businesses like yours, and you’ve started using those keywords to craft the kind of compelling content that’s getting you noticed.
Let’s look down the road a bit. The more content you create (i.e., the more your blog article archive grows), the more likely it is that you’ll soon be using the same focus keyword for multiple blog posts. This may not sound like a big deal, but here’s the problem—when you have multiple pages on your website focused around the same search terms, which page is the search engine going to rank highest, and which ones are going to end up getting pushed down the page and out of sight? That’s the issue we’ll tackle today.
Is Your Website a Keyword Cannibal? Probably!
If you have a limited set of keywords for your business that you want to target and an unlimited amount of content to create, you’re going to end up running into some keyword cannibalization issues. Even the best local SEO company can’t avoid this situation entirely, but there are things we here at Big Red SEO can do to make sure your own content isn’t battling itself for top ranking.
Target for Queries and Topics, Not Just Keywords
We’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating—every piece of content you write for your business blog should be targeted not just for keywords, but for the actual queries searchers use to find that content. In other words, your content should be tailored toward answering specific questions your ideal customer has regarding your industry.
By digging down into the specifics of topic and query and differentiating your pages accordingly, you can avoid creating multiple pages that answer the exact same questions and compete for territory in the search engine rankings.
Use Keyword Variations for Wider Reach
Now that we’ve got you focused on user queries and developing topics around them, we can talk about the problem of excessive keyword repetition. While having one unique keyword phrase for each piece of content is optimal, that’s not always possible depending on the industry you’re in. For instance, there are only so many common ways to say you do “window cleaning in Omaha” or “Omaha window cleaning” before you start to strain!
Once you start thinking that you’ve run out of effective keywords, come and talk to us. We’re the best local SEO company, partly because our extensive keyword research process helps uncover the keyword and variations searchers are actually using to look for your services! After we’ve performed this keyword research for your business, we can craft a personalized long-term blog strategy around those queries and topics.
Contact the Best Local SEO Company at (402) 522-6468!
Keyword cannibalization isn’t a new problem in the world of SEO, and it’s not going away anytime soon. While search engines like Google are getting better at actually reading and understanding the web content it returns to searchers (based on what they ask rather than just matching keywords), it’s still good idea to take steps against making pages that compete against each other.
Give our team at Big Red SEO, Omaha’s best local SEO company, a call today at (402) 522-6468! We can straighten out your content strategy to avoid cannibalizing your keywords so your business website can get to the top of the search engine rankings.