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What is Traffic Cannibalization?
Traffic cannibalization refers to a situation where multiple pages on a website are competing for the same keyword or search query, which can result in a decrease in organic traffic and rankings for all pages involved.
In other words, when two or more pages on the same website are optimized for the same keyword or search term, they may end up competing against each other instead of complementing each other. As a result, Google may not know which page to rank higher, and the overall visibility of those pages could suffer as a consequence.
Traffic cannibalization can occur for several reasons, such as poor site structure, duplicated content, or overly aggressive keyword targeting. To avoid this issue, it’s important to have a clear content strategy and to ensure that each page targets a unique keyword or search query. Additionally, consolidating similar pages and creating a clear hierarchy can also help to reduce cannibalization and improve overall search engine optimization.
Paid Search Cannibalization
An example of paid search cannibalization is when Google Ads traffic replaces normal organic traffic for the same keyword. Normally, this is evident with brand name searches. If you are running branded campaigns as a strategy to keep competitors at bay who may also be bidding on your brand name, more than likely you will see a decrease in organic traffic.
The reason is that most visitors do not readily differentiate between ad listings and organic listings. See the Walmart example below. You can see the query “walmart” delivers both a paid listing and organic listing. To the untrained eye, both look similar, and most users would likely click on the paid ad because it’s first. This would directly results in less organic traffic, and you could deduce this by looking at the rate of change in search queries in Google Search Console.
How To Detect Paid Search Traffic Cannibalization
The first step would be to identify the date your branded campaigns began, and isolate your Google Analytics organic traffic reports around this date range and see if there is a noticeable decline. Many websites that are not well optimized for a variety of keywords are going to see most of their organic traffic coming from branded terms. This will be evident in the SEMRush organic keywords report.
Second, you could pause your ad campaigns targeting your brand name. If there is no clear competitor bidding against your own name, then there is likely no need to pay for this traffic since you would be getting the same clicks for free otherwise.
Some brands do require branded keyword campaigns to keep competition at bay. Let’s look at an example when we search for “audi” and we see that BMW is running an ad:
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