Automated Content Cannibalisation Checker!

If you're not aware, in the SEO world, 'content cannibalisation' is a form of website 'cancer' that can seriously affect your website's ability to perform well in search results (traditional or AI).

Content cannibalisation happens when the search engines rank more than one URL for any given keyword search term. This means pages that you want to perform well (for said term) don't perform as expected/hoped because the search engines (traditional or AI) serve up other pages on your site.

In some cases this might not be a problem.

But in others it could be seriously impacting your intended goals (and all your hard work/investment) for important pages on your website.

From an SEO's perspective, content cannibalisation hasn't been that easy to detect. For a long time it's been a painstakingly manual process to discover so would often get forgotten about or ignored.

So I'm very excited that we finally created an automation that can discover it on demand and update an Airtable that means we can easily filter, group and sort what we've discovered!

While the scenario appears straightforward enough, it was way more complex than it looks. (Yet another example of "the 'devil is in the detail"!).

It is also quite an 'expensive' scenario in terms of operations/credits as it wants to look through 100s of GSC keywords. Then it needs to repeat certain modules that cycle through all those keywords for it to work properly. (We are exploring how we can reduce the cost with up front filters but that's my perfectionism streak kicking in!).

The important thing is it's not a scenario you need to run often. So compared to the manual cost of doing it, in our opinion it's a scenario with a high ROI.

And a big win in terms of helping us filter datasets with 1000s of keywords into a manageable number of genuine content creation priorities.

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Automated Content Cannibalisation Checker!