Stop Competing with Yourself: Fix Keyword Cannibalization with WriteText.ai

If you’re an eCommerce business owner, you know how important it is to optimize your website for SEO to improve visibility and attract customers. However, there’s a sneaky SEO issue that could be undermining your efforts—keyword cannibalization. This happens when multiple pages on your site target the same keyword, causing them to compete against each other in search engine rankings.

In this blog, we’ll answer what is keyword cannibalization, explain why it’s harmful to your eCommerce SEO, how to spot it, and provide actionable tips to prevent and fix it.

Why keyword cannibalization hurts your eCommerce SEO

Keyword cannibalization can significantly harm your eCommerce SEO in several ways:

• Lower Rankings: Your product pages compete for the same keyword, reducing the chances for any one product to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Wasted Crawl Budget: Google’s crawler spends time indexing duplicate or competing content rather than focusing on your top-performing pages, making your site less efficient.
• Poor User Experience: When multiple pages cover the same product or category, it can confuse users and affect their decision-making process. Instead of providing them with the best possible information, the pages end up competing for their attention.
• Diluted Content Authority: Content authority becomes diluted when multiple pages target the same keyword, weakening your site's ability to rank effectively.

How to spot keyword cannibalization in eCommerce

Identifying keyword cannibalization in eCommerce SEO starts with analyzing your keyword strategy:

• Use Analytics Tools: Leverage Google Analytics and Google Search Console to identify pages that rank for the same keywords. This will help you spot potential SEO problems.
• Check for Overlap: Look for pages targeting identical or similar keywords. For example, if you have two product pages targeting "running shoes," there’s a high chance of keyword cannibalization.
• Conduct Keyword Audits: For a more streamlined process, use WriteText.ai's keyword cannibalization monitoring, which automatically tracks keyword performance across your pages. It flags any overlap in the keywords used, helping you identify and address keyword cannibalization more efficiently.

Keyword cannibalization and WriteText.ai

WriteText.ai introduces version 2.1 with keyword cannibalization monitoring, designed to help eCommerce businesses stay on top of their keyword performance.

Here’s how WriteText.ai helps streamline this process:

• Identifying keyword cannibalization within the same store/domain: WriteText.ai automatically tracks keyword performance across all pages within a single store or domain, ensuring that keyword cannibalization between different content types (product pages, category pages, and others) is easily identified and fixed.
• Tracking across multiple stores: If you run more than one webshop, you can toggle the "Track across webshops" option to compare keyword performance between your stores, helping you identify potential competition between different webshops you own.
• Tailored frequency & monitoring settings: You decide how frequently keyword checks should run (e.g., every 30 days). WriteText.ai automatically tracks keyword performance, reducing manual work across your webshops.
• Credits and scheduling: WriteText.ai provides an estimate of the credits required for upcoming checks and gives you visibility into the scheduled dates for the next execution. This ensures you stay informed and avoid missing any critical keyword performance updates.

This new feature helps minimize self-competition between your pages, helping to focus your SEO efforts and boosting rankings effectively. By helping you handle keyword cannibalization, WriteText.ai enhances your SEO strategy and ensures that each page contributes to your site’s overall visibility and search engine ranking.

Best practices for avoiding keyword cannibalization in eCommerce

To avoid SEO problems related to keyword cannibalization, follow these best practices:

• Conduct thorough keyword research: Make sure each page on your eCommerce site targets unique, relevant keywords.
• Content mapping: Create a content strategy where each page focuses on a specific keyword. Avoid reusing keywords across product pages.
• Use variations of keywords: For similar products, use keyword variations to target specific features or customer segments (e.g., "blue sneakers for men" vs. "blue sneakers for women").
• Regular audits: Conduct periodic audits to check for keyword cannibalization, especially if your product listings are expanding over time. WriteText.ai's new keyword cannibalization tracking will help you identify and resolve cannibalization issues automatically, ensuring that your pages don’t compete for the same keywords.

Final thoughts

Keyword cannibalization is a critical issue that can derail your eCommerce SEO strategy. With the launch of WriteText.ai’s new keyword cannibalization monitoring settings, preventing and fixing SEO problems like cannibalization has never been easier. Whether you’re managing one or several eCommerce stores, WriteText.ai’s automated tools allow you to monitor your keyword strategy, adjust your approach, and ensure each page is optimized to its full potential.

Optimize your eCommerce SEO and eliminate keyword cannibalization today by using WriteText.ai. Start creating SEO-friendly product descriptions that drive traffic and sales!