To earn and maintain good page ranks, landing pages must be designed to serve users' search intents effectively. The presence of two or more similar landing pages addressing the same search intent confuses the search engine as to which one to display in the search results. As a result, two pages of the same website compete with each other and might alternately appear in the search results for the same keywords, at different positions. With each page switch, one page drops in position, making it impossible for either page to keep or grow its ranks. This issue, called keyword cannibalization, can be spotted by analyzing ranking data from the Rank Tracker.

Content Audit (through its integration with the Rank Tracker) collates these issues, or optimization opportunities, to make it easier for you to analyze them and take necessary actions, such as re-organizing content, or de-indexing pages with overlapping content. It shows you if there are more than one URLs of your website ranking for the same keyword. It also provides key information to prioritize these issues, so that you can invest your efforts in the best opportunities.

On the Content Audit dashboard, you can see the list of cannibalization issues that have been flagged based on the keyword data from the last 30 days.

Content Audit shows all the keywords that have two or more landing pages that ranked for the same keyword in the past 30 days, accompanied by keyword data such as search volume and % Clicks.

You can see a rank range that indicates the highest and lowest ranks of the competing landing pages in the last 30 days which gives you a quick glance of how serious the issue is. Alongside this, the relevant metrics, such as Opportunity, help you decide which ones to address first based on the improvement they would bring.

Clicking on the keyword opens a sidebar that gives you a more detailed view of the issue, with the number of page changes that have happened in the past month, and the corresponding change in ranks. You can also download the HTML of the crawled pages that had the best rank of all time, and in the past 30 days.

SEOmonitor's Rank Tracker provides the ranks and the landing pages of all the tracked keywords on a daily basis. If a different landing page ranks for the same keyword, it registers the event. If the landing pages for the same keywords change two or more times in a 30-day window, the Rank Tracker flags a cannibalization issue. All such events are collated under the Content Audit section, so that you can see the issues and key metrics for each, all in one place.

For instance, we see here that two pages are ranking for the keyword "letter of recommendation", resulting in the keyword having fluctuating ranks, the highest being 24 and the lowest being 96. The page "How a Letter of Recommendation Helps Your Job Search" has the all-time best of 9, but with the other page "Recommendation Letter Sample" ranking for this keyword at 24 in the past 30 days, the former has lost its position.

With these details, you get the insights you need, to take appropriate action to fix the issue, such as differentiating the desired page, optimizing each for separate topics, or de-indexing the other pages. The overall opportunity for each issue gives you all the information you need, to weigh the issues, prioritize them, and channel your efforts towards the ones that potentially impact your organic traffic the most.

Once you've assessed and taken steps to resolve the issue, you can mark it as Reviewed.

Content Audit helps you quickly and easily see all the cannibalization issues where more than one page ranked for the same keyword in the past 30 days. It gives you everything you need, such as search volume, ranks, and Opportunity metrics, all in one place, so you can prioritize these issues to channel your SEO efforts efficiently.

Learn more about effective strategies to address keyword cannibalization in our comprehensive article.