This blog discusses what keyword cannibalization is, how it affects local SEO for dentists, and practical ways to prevent or fix this issue.
Many local SEO beginners assume that simply having a lot of web pages means a higher chance of ranking well on queries. But the truth is that adding more and more pages without proper planning can actually negatively affect your SEO efforts. This is especially true for websites that have multiple pages with similar content. If this is something you’re guilty of when doing SEO for dentists, you’re placing your dental website at risk of keyword cannibalization!
In dentistry, several teeth that crowd at a particular area are concerning. These teeth push against each other, causing discomfort, pain, and misalignment in patients. This is a great analogy for keyword cannibalization, which happens when two or more pages on your dentistry website compete against the same keyword.
Read on to learn more about how keyword cannibalization can harm your dental site’s local SEO results, along with effective ways to solve this issue.
Table of Contents
What Is Keyword Cannibalization and How Does It Happen?
Keyword cannibalization causes internal local SEO competition within your website. Instead of working together to improve your website’s overall SEO results, your pages would try to surpass one another in rankings. This rivalry confuses search engines about which page should appear higher in search results, thus, harming your organic growth.
But why does keyword cannibalization happen in the first place? In most cases, this issue stems from a lack of a definitive content strategy. Let’s say your dental SEO plan involves having different content creators. If your team lacks coordination, they will likely create pages that share the same primary keyword without realizing it. On top of that, as your website continues to grow, you and your team may be tempted to create various pages to target top-performing keywords.
If you want to achieve successful SEO for dentists, it’s essential that you’re proactive in content creation. You need to always ground your actions in strategy. Ignoring your existing keyword strategy will often end up in an overlap of focus, resulting in keyword cannibalization.
How Keyword Cannibalization Affects Local SEO for Dentists
Now that you understand how keyword cannibalization happens, you may be wondering, “Is this issue really that bad?” The answer depends on how this impacts your local SEO rankings.
Even if your dental website has several high-ranking pages, there are noticeable signs that point to keyword cannibalization. One red flag is having fluctuating rankings for your pages that target the same keyword. That’s a sign that search engines cannot determine which web page is more relevant to an online search. The result? A less-than-stellar dental SEO performance. Instead of having a high-ranking page, the algorithm ends up distributing the ranking potential among multiple pages.
In addition to making SEO for dentists less effective, keyword cannibalization can harm user experience. For instance, you have many pages targeting “teeth whitening services.” From that keyword, potential patients may end up on one of your old blog posts that mentioned that phrase instead of your main services page about teeth whitening. Although they will still arrive at your website, you’ll more likely prefer that they read that they find your services page faster.
Also, note that keyword cannibalization can dilute your dental website’s authority. This is because search engines view overlapping web pages as having lower credibility.
Lastly, keyword cannibalization can lead to wasted resources. Since you’re trying to rank high for the same keyword, you’re likely to cover the same topics within different web pages. That means you’re also inadvertently narrowing your website reach.
For all of those reasons, keyword cannibalization becomes a critical issue plaguing SEO for dentists.
Keyword cannibalization harms your dental SEO, impairs user experience, dilutes site authority, and wastes resources.
Spotting Cannibalized Keywords
Now that you know how harmful keyword cannibalization can be to your local SEO rankings, it’s time to learn how to prevent and fix this issue.
The first step is to identify the keywords that have internal competition. To do this, you must first perform a local SEO audit. When looking for pages with keyword cannibalization, you shouldn’t stop at finding duplicate keywords. You must also assess if those pages are fulfilling a closely similar intent.
Imagine that your dental website has two pages called “Emergency Dental Services” and “24/7 Dental Care for Emergencies.” While the latter adds a more nuanced detail by suggesting round-the-clock services, most of the content is likely structured towards the same keyword. That creates an overlap that makes it difficult for search engines to index the two pages. This situation highlights the value of creating a spreadsheet when improving SEO for dentists. Doing this makes it easier to track your dental website’s existing pages and the keywords you’ve assigned them.
If you want a more efficient way to detect this issue, using online tools is the key. One promising tool is the Semrush Position Tracking tool. With their paid services, you can unlock the cannibalization report feature. The process involves setting up your domain and entering the keywords you want to track. After that, this tool can provide a breakdown of the affected keywords and the pages that share keyword rankings with other pages.
Is your dental practice not ready to invest in such a tool? Don’t worry; Google Search Console is also a viable option. It has a performance report feature that allows you to check the pages with high ranking on keywords. If you see two or more URLs ranking for the same query, that’s a clear sign that those pages are competing against each other.
These tools offer a more efficient way for you to detect issues before they harm your local SEO efforts.
Actions We Do NOT Recommend
There are a couple of methods we don’t recommend when it comes to handling keyword cannibalization. Based on our experience as a local SEO agency for over 20 years now, we found that these practices are better skipped:
Page Deletion
The first thing you may think of to deal with keyword cannibalization is deleting the pages you don’t consider as primary. But, just as good dentistry tries to salvage as many teeth as possible, good local SEO practices strive to save valuable content as much as possible.
Deleting a page can cause broken links. This adversely affects user experience and your dental SEO performance. To preserve your SEO efforts, we recommend opting for a more sustainable solution, like merging similar pages.
Just like good dentistry preserves teeth, good local SEO means saving as much of your content as possible.
Canonical Tags
A canonical tag points search engines toward the primary page. While this method sounds helpful, it’s only effective for dealing with multiple pages that have the exact or nearly the same content. That leads to missed opportunities to better rank in local SEO for dentists as you would rather not use the existing page to try and rank for a keyword variation.
Noindex Page
Using a noindex tag is your way of instructing search engines not to index a particular page. While it is an immediate solution to keyword cannibalization, it’s not built for a long-term fix. These tags will hide your content from search engine crawlers. Hence, you’ll lose the potential ranking power that the page would have contributed otherwise to your overall local SEO ranking.
Dynamic keyword insertion is also a bad idea as it confuses users and search engines alike and will likely make your content seem inconsistent.
The Best Way to Handle Keyword Cannibalization and Get Better Local SEO Rankings
With all that said, merging your pages and consolidating content remains the best way to fix keyword cannibalization. Instead of deleting or noindexing pages, our Orange County digital agency believes it’s a much better idea to convert them into a single page that covers the topic in a more in-depth manner. If you think you’re about to create web pages that cover a similar topic to an existing page, highlight a different aspect of the subject matter in each one.
Fixing issues that harm your local SEO rankings can be a challenging ordeal. But fortunately for you, dental SEO experts are just a call away. Zero Company Performance Marketing is a seasoned local SEO agency with over two decades of experience optimizing websites for search engines like Google. We have helped more than 2,500 businesses overcome or avoid keyword cannibalization and other issues that impede their online growth.
Book a free consultation today to learn how we can help you achieve the best outcomes for your local SEO for dentists!
