Publishing multiple posts targeting the same keyword confuses Google about which page to rank, tanking your traffic. Create one pillar page per topic, link supporting articles to it, and track your content library to avoid duplicates. If you already have cannibalization, merge similar posts or redirect them to your strongest piece.
Today we're going to talk about this blogging mistake that you should avoid.
It's so funny. So Eric and I talked to a lot of bloggers that when you're starting off, you're getting little to no traffic. Over time you get some traffic, and that some traffic could be a few thousand visitors, 100,000 visitors. Either way, your traffic starts growing. But then after a while, as you keep blogging, you keep promoting your content, you're just like, my traffic's flat. Why is this? And when Eric and I look at a lot of these blogs and these blogs are hitting us up, we notice one common trend. And that trend is people are continually blogging about the same topic over and over again. For example, if Eric has a blog on, I don't know, marketing, right? Which he actually funny enough does. And he keeps talking about SEO in every single article. And one article would be like, what is SEO? Second article is the beginner's guide to SEO. Third The next article is how SEO works. The next article is advanced SEO tactics. Yeah, it's great that the blog is on marketing and SEO, but in Google's eyes, they're going to be confused and be like, wait, are all these blog posts targeting the same keyword SEO? Which one should we actually rank for the term SEO? And it causes cannibalization and actually hurts your rankings. And it causes confusion and Google doesn't know which ones to rank where. So you actually get less traffic in the long run.
Yeah. So funny enough, we have a page on digital marketing agency and that's where we don't want the traffic to go to. We used to have the number 1 ranking for that keyword and we don't have it anymore because it goes to this other, it's like this big resource. And it's now we're like rank 14 for it or whatever. But the point here is that this other page is, which we don't want to be ranking for, it's cannibalizing because it's actually a better resource. And we want like our homepage or one of our services pages to be ranking for. What you want to be doing instead, I think one of the solutions here is to— Brian Dean talks a lot about power pages, or we can talk about the pillar posts, that type of stuff. So you actually have the pillar page ranking for, and you have the lower pages maybe. So you have one piece on what is SEO, right? And then you have all these other pieces on SEO dynamics, schema markup, all that type of stuff. But those pieces all rank back up to the pillar piece, the main piece over there. And so you want all the signals pointing to that, the one page that you want to be ranking for. Yeah, you don't want to over-optimize. And I think what you can do as well is internally make sure that you have a, what we call a content library. So we have all our content in there. So our team knows not to be reproducing the same content over and over because that tends to happen once you start to build up some volume.
Yeah. And anytime you have new ideas, just log into your blogging platform or your WordPress, search for some of those keywords and make sure you don't have a post that's specifically on that topic and you should be fine. And that'll help reduce how much cannibalization you do have. If you've already cannibalized a lot of your content, you should consider combining your blog posts and using 301 redirects.
Yeah. Or you might have to just delete it if it's not that useful.
Yep.
Cool.
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