You know that your wedding photography blog is your best tool for passively marketing your business. Keyword research is the foundation of optimizing your blog posts for SEO. If you’re really excited about a keyword, you may want to use it to optimize multiple posts. But can you have too much of a good thing? In the case of keywords, you can! It’s called keyword cannibalization. This post explains what it is, how it might be hurting your SEO, and how you can fix it.

What is keyword cannibalization?

According to Yoast, keyword cannibalization is when you optimize multiple posts for the same keyword, and they end up competing with each other. Your website cannibalizes itself. Gross, right?

Why does this matter? Unless you have really strong domain authority, Google is likely to only show one or two results from your site per query. When you have multiple posts competing against each other, they hurt your rankings. Instead of at least one of your pages showing up, you might be knocked out of the search results altogether.

There are other reasons that Google doesn’t like multiple posts optimized for the same keyword. According to Search Engine Journal, Google assumes your content lacks depth and breadth. You’ll also end up splitting your click through rate (CTR) among multiple pages instead of one robust page, lowering your authority. All of this is bad news for your SEO. 

How do I fix it?

There are a few ways to fix keyword cannibalization, including consolidating content and restructuring your website. It’s much easier to avoid keyword cannibalization in the first place. 

Here’s where this can get tricky for your wedding photography blog. Say you photographed a wedding at a venue that you love. You want to rank in the Top 10 in search results for that venue, so you may be tempted to write multiple blog posts optimized for the venue name. That’s when cannibalization strikes!

Instead, write one blog post optimized for the venue. Then incorporate the venue into article-style posts and, possibly, on other parts of your website. The point is to avoid optimizing for the keyword more than once but to show that you have related information elsewhere. This is just one reason why publishing regularly is so important!

Do you still want direction on the best approach to your blog? Reach out to learn how House of Nash can help.