Keyword cannibalization - blog posts vs. site content

[jcph]

As an example, I am trying to rank for the term "ice cream". I have site content pages that relate to "chocolate ice cream", "vanilla ice cream", etc.These content pages have been SEO optimized using best practices.

Would I be ruining my SEO work if I begin to publish blog posts for the same keywords that my content pages target? Am I basically forced to find alternative keywords and only target one page per keyword?

[TakeshiYoung]

Gotta disagree with this one.  Creating high quality blog content with the same keywords you are targeting on your products page can be a good strategy.  The blog post will add more content related to your keyword on your site, increasing relevancy.  It's also a lot easier to build links to a blog than a product page.

Just make sure to link from the blog post to the product page, and the product page can get a boost.  If you rank really high in Google, you could even get 2 listings for that keyword.  If for some reason the blog content outranks the product page, you can just take that same content and throw it on the product page with a canonical from the blog post.  If all else fails, you can 301 redirect it.

[EGOL]

Ice cream is a broad and deep topic and you could write a lot of blog posts without running out of unique material.  Every blog post that you write should be about a topic that is different from anything else that is already on your site and be interesting, informative and perhaps humorous as well.

If your site (and pages) are powerful enough google will display two, three or more of your pages in the top ten.

I spend a lot of time writing content that most people would consider to be cannibalizing - and it brings in a lot of longtail traffic and takes traffic away from my competitors.  I do it intentionally.  There's no sin about it.

[jcph]

I understand. So basically my evergreen content page can be domain.com/chocolate-ice-cream (targeting "chocolate ice cream")

My blog post page can then be domain.com/blog/top-10-chocolate-ice-creams, which is in effect targeting for "Top 10 Chocolate Ice Creams". Additionally, within the post it would be ideal to reference and link to the evergreen content page as is appropriate.

This method would in effect be targeting the keywords:

• chocolate ice cream
• Top 10 Chocolate Ice Creams

By doing so this will help the site rank for these 2 terms, and overall for the head term Chocolate Ice Creams.

[ZacharyRussell]

Hello,

By creating blog posts on the content your trying to rank for is a very smart move, actually, if it is done right. When your writing a blog post on Vanilla Ice Cream, every time you write about a page that relates on other content on your website, for example, if you mentioned ice cream, place a link there to your ice cream page. Also, with blogs, a very powerful tool is to have a  "related posts" section, not only does this help build an internal linking structure, it also can interest readers to read other articles or content on your website.

Remember not to go overboard with focusing on keywords, you need to make sure that your website is friendly to the readers. If you are forcing yourself to change the structure of the content to change the keywords your optimizing for, it may lose it's readability. Google, along with many other search engines have put a lot of time into semantic cues, so they may infer that even though your not using the same keyword (something like Popsicle instead of ice pop), they can infer that your referring to the same thing.

My recommendation is to place a link on the blog post to the page you want to rank, and you should be okay,

Hope this helps

Zach

[jenmcardle]

Would I be ruining my SEO work if I begin to publish blog posts for the same keywords that my content pages target? Am I basically forced to find alternative keywords and only target one page per keyword?

In short, yes.

When Google provides search results they need to search trillions of pages to determine which result is most likely to satisfy a user's query. One of the key components of their algorithm is relevancy. If you have a page titled "chocolate ice cream" and then a blog article with the same title, which result should be returned to a user who searches in Google for "chocolate ice cream"?

If you offer multiple pages with the same keyword focus you run into an issue called cannibalization. You can solve that issue by narrowing the focus of one of the pages. For example, the main page on your site is what I would refer to as "evergreen" content. 10 years from now someone can read that page and the information is likely still valid. Your blog often offers fresh content which is more time sensitive. Some possible topics for an article:

Top 10 Chocolate Ice Creams in the world

Lowest Calorie Chocolate Ice Cream

Chocolate Ice Cream Recipes

I would also recommend being very careful when providing content on two similar keywords. It takes a level of expertise to do it in such a way that it adds value to your site. One helpful step is to use anchor text. If you write an article on "Chocolate Ice Cream Recipes" then one time in the article when you refer to "Chocolate Ice Cream" present it as an anchor link to your main page.