Internal competition? This is how to spot it early
Every website owner or online marketer has experienced it: internal competition within organic search results. Internally competing pages keep your website from reaching its maximum potential for the keywords that are affected. What are the dangers of internal competition, in which cases does this phenomenon arise and why do you want to solve it early? Using our data, we zoom in on keyword cannibalisation.
Expertise SEO
Door Anique Schoot
The data used from our own clients has been anonymised in this article.
What is keyword cannibalization?
Content cannibalization involves 2 or more URLs from the same website competing for position in the organic search results for a particular keyword. This conflict occurs when it is not clear to Google which page within the domain best matches the search query.
Graph 1 – This is what a ‘healthy’ position progression without internal competition looks like.
Graph 2 – This is what a position progression with keyword cannibalization looks like.
What causes content cannibalization?
In an ideal situation, for each relevant search intent, a website has a clearly defined page that covers that topic. Keywords attached to that search intent all rank on that page in that case, and the better optimised the page is, the higher the positions will be.
In reality, it is often all just a bit more nuanced. Relevant topics are not so easily delimited and overlap with each other to a greater or lesser extent. In other cases, the website may not yet possess a good page optimised for a specific relevant topic. Or maybe (e.g. after a new algorithm update) for some keywords, Google simply does not (anymore) understand that they are in fact synonyms of each other, or the search engine actually does consider non-synonymous words as overlapping.
Whatever the reason, it happens often enough that Google shows not one but several URLs from the same domain for a given keyword, alternately or simultaneously. When they alternate, we speak of keyword cannibalization, or internally competing pages. This can occur on any website, no matter how successful you are.
Graph 3 – Dutch web giant Bol.com suffers from content cannibalization for keywords with a significant search volume of 90,500 per month. It lacks an overarching category page and, because the hreflang tag is not set correctly, products from the Belgian and Dutch domain are competing with each other.
Graph 4 – A major retailer like Coolblue.nl struggles with keyword cannibalisation too. In this example, several category pages overlap in search intent.
The danger of keyword cannibalisation
Why is internal competition such a problem now? After all, don’t you rank for your relevant keyword? That’s true, but in essence, keyword cannibalisation means that Google does not understand your website properly or that your website is not sufficiently optimised for the topics relevant to you. This affects your performance, and the impact on your traffic and conversions can be significant.
Graph 5 – Until the end of December, the category page is displayed and the website ranks around the top 10. From the moment it is no longer clear to Google which page is most relevant, we see positions shoot down and become more erratic.
From problems to opportunities
If you do already own an appropriate page for the topic, with internal competition, Google occasionally displays other pages that do not match the search intent well. Perhaps one of your blogs ranks instead of the desired commercial page, causing you to miss out on a lot of relevant traffic and potential conversions. This probably means you need to optimise your desired page better, or there is a technical issue playing out in the background that needs to be addressed.
Moreover, Google prefers websites where only one page clearly matches the search query, which translates into lower positions on average in keyword cannibalisation. When internal competition is resolved, we often see this directly reflected in skyrocketing positions as well.
Chart 6 – Until September, 2 informative pages rank alternately with fluctuations. Once a commercial page is created that matches the search intent, positions shoot up.
In some cases, internally competing pages allow you to identify new opportunities. If you see that several just-not-relevant pages are indexed for a particular keyword, you may wonder whether you have an appropriate page within your website at all. If this turns out not to be the case, this is a great opportunity – if interesting enough – to create this new page.
Graph 7 – Another example where internal competition was solved by creating a page that completely matches the search intent behind the keyword.
Do you spot the bottlenecks in time?
Left or right, internal competition is something you want to solve. Before you can do that, however, the problem has to be identified, and preferably as early as possible. Often, the conflict starts dormant and you only notice it when it is actually too late: when your traffic is already starting to drop.
Without the right tooling, it can be difficult to spot keyword cannibalisation in time. The most useful way of detecting this problem is to grab historical search position data, either in raw data or displayed in graphs. This way, you can check whether multiple URLs were displayed for the same keyword in the past period, and investigate whether they are sitelinks (positive) or a conflict (negative).
Need help spotting internal competition within your domain? Request a no-obligation internal competition analysis from Aspen Digital. We have been building our own database since 2013 with the daily, historical position data of now more than 25 billion SERPs in every industry. This collection of big data lends itself perfectly to early mapping of internal competition, so that we can provide you with all points of improvement immediately.
