Consolidate Cannibalising Content with Redirects
The concept of cannibalising content is something that a lot of people struggle with. To makes things a little easier to understand, I'm going to give you an example...
Ok, so you've got two pieces of content and they're covering a relatively similar topic. Let's just say that these are the titles of the two content pieces:
- Understanding The Healing Properties of Herbal Tea
- 17 Ways That Herbal Tea is Good for You
In this example, the big keyword that you could be focused on ranking for is "Herbal Tea", which is searched for 22,200 times per month.
In this example, article 1 ranks number 5 on page 1 of Google for "Herbal Tea", whilst article 2 ranks at the top of page 2.
If I were to ask you which you would rather have:
- Both article 1 ranking #5 and article 2 ranking #6 at the same time on page one.
- Article 1 ranking #3 on page 1 and article 2 not appearing in Google at all.
A lot of people would choose option 1. I mean, it's better to have more real estate on the first page of Google rather than jump two places and lose a whole other listing, right? Wrong.
If you take a look at the image above then you'll see the breakdown of the average click-through rate by position on page 1 of Google.
Using the "Herbal Tea" example, we could estimate the following amount of traffic each month for each of these positions (based on 22,200 searches per month):
- 6,660
- 3,552
- 2,220
- 1,554
- 1,110
- 666
If we ranked at both positions 5 and 6 we could expect a total of 1,776 monthly visitors. Now, let's compare that to losing article 2 completely and just having article 1 rank at #3: 2,220 monthly visits.
That's a 25% increase in visits.
When to Consolidate Content
As I've explained above, it's better in terms of traffic generation to have one higher ranking piece of content than two lower ranking pieces. As well as this, you've got to take into account that to rank two different pieces of content you're going to have to spread your resources across two different assets.
Consolidating two pieces of content together by adding a 301 redirect to the lower-performing piece is often an incredible simple and quick SEO win that you can implement.
One of the main reasons why you'll see a boost in rankings is because any links that go through to your underperforming piece of content will now redirect through to your higher-performing content, adding to the existing links it already has and making it more authoritative in the eyes of Google.
That said, this isn't a decision you should take lightly.
Whenever you're evaluating whether to consolidate an underperforming piece of content, you'll want to dig deeper into the following:
- How old is the content? If you've only recently published it then you may need to give it time to see how it performs before jumping to conclusions.
- Does it bring through traffic outside of organic search? Maybe the content brings through a lot of referral traffic or traffic from social media, so you could end up losing out on some valuable traffic by consolidating it.
- Is the content ranking well for other keywords? Outside of the main keyword you're looking at, does the content rank well for other keywords that bring through traffic? If so, you may need to reconsider.
- Are there any other uses for the content? Is this piece of content converting much better than your main traffic-driver? Is this more of a brand-level/educational piece that adds more value to your buyer persona?
Make sure you thoroughly evaluate all of the above areas before rolling out any redirects.