Charlie says: “My Additional Insight is around how to tackle keyword cannibalization and how that can help you combat Google's updates, particularly the most recent ones.”

You’re talking about cannibalization there, so what specific aspect of cannibalization?

“The terminology has become quite broad recently. Essentially, it's around search intent, having too much content on the same subject and keywords. And the benefit that can have in terms of an overabundance of isolation, obviously, not having keywords and having content compete with each other on your site.”

And how do you establish if you've got too many pages on a particular topic?

“So I think, as I may have mentioned, a few weeks in talks I've done, this kind of content is king or queen philosophy that's emerged, that's been around for a long time now, since Panda, which is creative over an oversaturation of content that SEOs have created by essentially creating too much content on the same topic. So, the best way to establish it is in your data is in your Search Console data and Analytics data. As you can see, that site has created tons of content on the same subject, usually to try and rank well for that keyword. It's counterproductive now because you end up with lots of content fighting each other for that same terminology. So yeah, Search Console is the best way to establish that, although there are some pretty cool tools out there now, AI-powered ones that can help establish that as well.”

Feel free to mention a few of those if you want.

“Yeah, so Keyword Insights are the ones I mentioned a lot in my talk. I talked about these things quite a lot. Because I love the tool, the UI is great, and the AI is great. And I find it's quick and easy to establish things and get implementable reports. But you feed your Search Console and keyword data into the tool, which uses AI to see what Google's indexing adds to help you cluster your keywords. So you can work out what you need to keep, your keyword gaps. And essentially, we get what is the extent of cannibalization. That's a good one. And it complements the manual work that you do yourself within your data and your analytic tools.”

Yeah, I was going to talk about manual work as well. It's important, I guess, even though the AI results seem superb on the face of it. You have to do that manual review to establish that it's relevant for you and your business and that you are not missing any opportunities.

“Absolutely. We'll all agree now that letting AI do the work, with no QA, no QC, and just implementing whatever that AI tool spits out, would be extremely dangerous. The good thing about the Keyword Insights as you feed in your analysis is that it clusters that for you and essentially saves you 100s of hours that you'd have to spend sifting through tons of data and keywords. Still, it does it at the click of a button and based on what Google currently returns in the SERPs. So, it's not like we think these keywords might be related. It's quite well; Google is associating these keywords. Therefore, you might want to class them as a cluster, so it's all fed by your initial keyword research and manual SEO work. So, it doesn't replace the SEO intuition side of the manual work. It just saves you a lot of time in clustering that data.”

So, for an SEO that hasn't used this keyword insights tool, essentially, the best way of getting started is doing keyword research in another tool and then taking this data and putting it into Keyword Insights.

“Yeah, they recently released an update whereby you can do keyword research within their platform. It's not that they're saying you should do that because they create an environment where you don't have to leave their suite and go off to different tools. It does keyword research similarly to Keyword Planner, Semrush, or your other tool. But the functionality is still very much there. And that's still the way I do it. You upload a CSV of your own keyword research into the tool. And then it lets the AI do its thing, and cluster all and give you the reports you need to create a content strategy.”

Do you have to pre-categorize the keywords you put in, or is this done automatically?

“I always do. I like to do that as a point, just because of my other tools. It helps them with all sorts. But no, you don't have to at all. That's the beauty of this all. It will take the keywords it will see all of Google's returning for those terms, and cluster them accordingly. So, instead of keyword categories, these clusters are based on search intent and Google's results.”

Okay, based on search intent, Google results are also based on keyword volume?

“Yeah, that's the two fields you need in your CSV are keyword and volume, then the tool will do the rest.”

About cannibalization, maybe using an e-commerce site as an example, you often get a category page or a product page that happens to be ranking or ranking more than another target landing page. So, you have other pages on your site that you must have. Should you attempt to de-optimize those pages to rank the other page?

“Yeah, exactly that it does. A lot of this cannibalization is caused by what I refer to as my presentations, PDP versus PLP, which is people who work in e-commerce. We’re familiar with the product description page versus the product landing page, whereby it’s very easy to go aggressively on your keywords on your product pages. I’ve had clients do it because they've been told to work your keywords and to copy, or a company does it quite easily and naturally. Before you know it, your product page has more mentions of that keyword than the category page, so de-optimizing the product pages for the head term can often be prudent.

And that's where the review system aspect comes in: your product pages, of course, units can be natural in that they'll contain keywords, and that's fine. And if your product pages rank well for your keyword, we won’t dismiss that. However, you ideally would want your category pages, if you had terms, and your product pages to like to rank for the longer tail stuff in terms of de-optimizing those product pages for the keywords a bit. And optimizing those product pages for the review system stuff. The product reviews, guidelines and specifications, dimensions, comparisons, that product related stuff that Google rewards, and has done through the recent updates.”

There used to be such a thing as double listings, and you could look to optimize multiple pages and hope to get multiple listings. Is that not so prominent anymore?

“No, I've, I tried to find some examples of that for my recent talk. And I couldn't find any of them. Google had the kind of indented ones as well for a while. And Lily Ray did some really good analysis on that. And I'm not sure if that was a test that Google abandoned a little bit. I've seen very little evidence of that, even on sites like Amazon and eBay. Now you're seeing that they're not even getting double listings as much as they were. So, I'm not sure if that's an effort by Google to keep things clean and tidy or if it’s just the fact that that's the way that the kind of health records and updating the product review date has ended up returning things. But there’s very small evidence of that now, so ensuring you haven't got competing content is important. If you're only going to get one URL that's considered per term, you need to make sure that it's optimized accordingly for that specific search intent, which is the key thing there.”

You mentioned using Search Console to determine if multiple URLs compete for the same term?

“Yeah, so that's a really quick and easy way to do on a keyword. I mean, if you're doing an audit across the site for your cannibalization, it will take you quite a while, and the quickest way to see how many landing pages you've got ranking for a query is in a Search Console report. And for big e-commerce sites, I mentioned in my talk that some cannibalization is fine. If you've got a site and you're ranking in first and second, or second or third for a term, then that cannibalization isn't necessarily hurting you. Although, we're saying that's quite rare now. But you know, you're going to go in Search Console, you're going to click on queries a landing page, you are going to see ultimately, a few pages there, because there'll be a bit of flux, it could have been some of the contents newer, could be that some of the content has been revised. And there was a little flux during updates, but you’ll see several landing pages there. But I'd say if you could see two, or maybe three, there was quite considerable traffic, and there's been quite a lot of fluctuation. It could be Google's. We’re struggling to work out which one it should rank for that term. And if they are, you know there’s a definite case for consolidation.”

And sticking with e-commerce and maybe using the fashion industry as an example. Traditionally, you've got male and female sections and branded items that may be covered across both males and females. What are your thoughts on dealing with cannibalization issues there if that's the case?

“I think Google's got more and more sophisticated at working out things like that in terms of that content intent thing, and certainly wouldn't advocate having to write reams of content, talking about male versus female for those instances, but I think if you've got your simple things like your title tags, your headers, and the content is specific enough, then on a product level, you should be fine. Your SEO basics are in order as long as you've got caught. Then, in my experience at Missguided, we released them as the male brand for quite a long time. We didn't see too many issues if your SEO basics were in order. And you noticed not loads of content, but enough content there, too. I trust Google with that a little bit, I'd say.”

You mentioned the word intent a couple of times as well. How do you go about bucketing certain keywords and all similar attempts, similar kinds of phrases you're targeting on a particular page? And if you're determining a different intent for different pages, how do you determine the specific intent you have in mind for that page?

“So this is why there's a mix between manual auditing and common sense, or looking at the result for that page. And you can quite quickly see if it's informational, transactional, or commercial. There are quite a few tools out there now that have intent. The issue with that now is that all the tools use slightly different terminology so that Sistrix will use what and why, and then, I use Advanced Web Ranking for why keyword rankings and their intent features are pretty good. And that's the terminology I go for. Depending on the last keyword crawl, it will show you if that intent has changed, which is crucial because Google will change the intent behind the keywords. Sometimes, they'll have an informational result for a term. And you might see that they switched to commercial or vice versa. So, that's key, but the tools do help. The thing with that is you will have a few different tools or use slightly different terminology. But I think for your vanity or head terms, I think to keep an eye on things manually, every SEO is checking. They’re checking the results for their kind of head terms anyway. But yet, the tools out there do help in terms of that change in intent. So, you can quite quickly see how the intent behind that tone changed, especially after updates and things where you'll tend to see after a core update, then what Google's intent management term has changed quite a bit in Google's eyes.”

You also talked about utilizing the review system. What do you mean by that?

“So, that's what was historically the product review system, which still exists, but they've broadened it now to be the general review system, which is essentially, in terms of the work that I do, this is what I use as my criteria for optimizing product pages, or PDPs, whatever you'd like to call them. But essentially, it's one of the few things out there where Google gives you a checklist of things to do. And they'll reward you provided you've got your, you know, your technical elements and site health in check. Make sure you take advantage of the product review on dates, which I think are a couple of times a year. We can do quite well out of them by using those criteria, putting good content briefs together, and then working with the client on how to use some of your expertise here to show this product. The best way can be quite useful for sites that sell other people's products because it's about comparing products, for instance, or what makes this new product better than its predecessor and things. The product review update is what that review system is about. They’ve just added a few more experience-related things to that.”

What’s something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“Well, I'll keep it on theory. It is just this kind of content for content’s sake. I think we weren't talking about ChatGPT. That's not what this podcast is about. I think there will be a huge saturation again on top of the saturation of all digs, which is famed for poor content. I think content strategy needs to become more focused, less is more strategy, which good SEOs have been doing. I've had that approach required for a while. But we should have recent updates now with how sophisticated the algorithm is, with the kind of flux and the winners and the losers. I think this obsession with creating content for content’s sake and having X amount of articles a month on certain topics and keywords is over. This gets to that strategic focus. And sometimes, it's fine just to be happy with the content you've got on-site and focus your efforts elsewhere. So yeah, that's less time on on-site training wherever you get more substandard content, and be more strategic about that. And, hopefully, you use the sort of themes that I've discussed there to help Google.”

So, by getting your content more focused, do you mean being very defined in your niche in which you operate as a website as a business, then strategizing out the content that relates to that and only focusing on that particular type of content?

“Absolutely, yeah, you know that search intent is key. I strongly believe that if you ever get your contact, it has worked well with the client, has been well informed in research and SEO, and is technically structured nicely. If you’re happy with that, then if you've got a good commercial page, some nice supporting articles, and some nice guides, that is probably enough. And I think that's still this obsession. What more can we do to boost this keyword cluster or theme? It might content may not be the answer to that, even if you've got your technical elements in it.”

SEO may not be the answer. Is that what you're saying?

“Well, sometimes it is a hard conversation to have with the client, but it's a case of letting Google come to terms, get to grips with that content, honour it, and process it properly. And the more you keep refining and changing and because you're getting itchy feet, you could change that actually would have worked, so the patient's game in a way but trusting your strategy, and if you're confident that the technical, the creative and the data analysis aspects of your concentration is in check then, yeah, less is more, essentially sometimes.”

Charlie Whitworth is the founder of Whitworth SEO, and you can find him over at whitworthseo.com.