An Influx of Content
It’s known as content influx.
While every business working on improving their website’s visibility online is told that content is king, the best websites avoid instilling too much content into their blogs.
Let’s look at that ‘free will’ question again. If you’re running a philosophically oriented website, how easy would it be to inundate your website with articles on free will, attempting to capitalise on the sheer number of people wanting to know the answer? If the content is high quality and SEO-friendly, surely this means your answers will be bumped up the rankings, right?
Well, no. If you’re writing quality content over and over again about a similar topic, the chances are that you will suffer from ‘keyword cannibalization’.
This happens for many businesses. At most, you might find three identical domains pop up in a Google search, but even this is an unusual occurrence.
Cannibalization is an SEO issue that occurs when multiple pages on a website target the same topic and keywords. If you do this, you will effectively be competing against your own content, harming the SEO performance of each by turning them all into losers, rather than distinguishing one clear winner.
Consumer Overload
You also need to think about your readers. This is one of the most common pitfalls in business SEO campaigns: focusing too much on being Google-friendly rather than user-friendly. Because Google likes content – and specifically, well-researched and polished content – it’s easy to post blog after blog, attempting to get into Google’s good books.
But what are the readers gaining from these blogs? Are they relevant to them as consumers? Are they engaging? If you bump up your content with no good reason, other than to optimise your site for SEO, you will subsequently bump up your bounce rate, and fail to land the conversions that make your business profitable in the first place. This will simultaneously harm your SEO campaign, as your content becomes more formulaic, less engaging, and therefore, less authoritative.
Users aren’t stupid. In the world of 2024, nearly everyone knows what SEO is and how it works, which means it’s easier to spot manipulative blog uploads and irrelevant keyword stuffing. If your users think that your content is being catered for an algorithm, rather than for them, then they will quickly switch off and leave your content reader less.
Getting Around the Problem
So how do you solve this? How can content be king, but too much content be a killer? When it comes to keyword cannibalization, a good trick is to introduce a hierarchical site structure. Just think about news sites. They upload new content every day, and yet many tend to perform exceptionally well from an SEO standpoint. This is because they have created a hierarchical structure that helps Google discern what is really important.
To do this, you need to figure out your most relevant articles, and then insert internal links that point users towards them. This shouldn’t be an automated procedure, but a hand-picking of content that is both useful to your readers and clear for Google.
You can also work to combine your content. If you’ve realised that your blog is a mansion full of countless articles and topics – but they’re too high-quality to throw away – then simply combine similar articles together to create one superior blog post. You can do this by discerning which URL receives the most traffic, deciding on a new, innovative message, combining and rewriting other articles, and then reshaping the article for republication.
This is a great way to sharpen up your website from an SEO standpoint, but in the future, it’s important to remember what blogs are really for. Make sure that your content is regular but meaningful for the reader. Introduce new topics, new ideas, and try never to tread on old footprints. If you do this, you’re not only going to make Google happy, but your readers too.
