In today’s Tech News Tuesday episode, we’re speaking about an article from Yoast about keywords. We’ve talked in the past about how to find keywords, but we often see that people don’t know how to use them with their content correctly. You can install an SEO plugin like Yoast on WordPress sites, and this can tell you how the content you are writing matches the keywords you want to be found for.
Links in this episode: Find and fix keyword cannibalization in 4 steps
Transcript
Welcome to the Get Digital Marketing Results podcast where we give you information and actionable tips to grow your organization.
Bob: Hi, I’m Bob Clark.
Donna: And I’m Donna Botti. We’re with Delos Inc and we make the web work for you. In today’s Tech News Tuesday episode, we’re sharing an article from Yoast about keywords. Now we’ve talked in the past about how to find keywords, but we often see that people don’t know how to use them with their content correctly. We like to install an SEO plugin like Yoast on WordPress sites. This can tell you how the content you are writing matches the keywords you want to be found for.
Bob: That’s great Donna, but one of the problems we see is that people put too many keywords in a single page or a blog post. For the most part, you want to have a page or post rank for a single keyword phrase. Other keywords should have their own pages targeted at them.
Donna: Another problem we see is when a website has multiple pages or blogs, with similar content and the same keywords. This mainly affects growing websites, so the more content you have on your website, the more chances are that the posts and pages start to become very alike. And for the search engines, it’s difficult to distinguish between these similar articles. What happens is you end up competing against yourself for those keywords or phrases, and they all end up ranking lower than they could be.
Bob: So Donna, what can you do about this?
Donna: Well Bob what you want to do is find all of the duplicate content that’s on your site. You can do this by doing a search for your key phrase or word and looking at all the articles that come up. You should be able to get a list of all the ones which are found that have similar content.
Bob: Right, and once you find the duplicates, you should check your analytics to see which articles and blogs have the strongest web traffic, meaning, which pages have shown up most in search results, and what are the clicks and click-through rates, for those keywords.
Donna: So now you have a list of duplicate articles, and know which ones are getting the best performance. You’ll want to decide how to consolidate the content, updated to make it current, and update the publish date to the latest date, and that way you’ll keep the best article that has the most current information. It’s a good idea to delete the other ones. Now, even if the information is extremely current, sometimes it’s a good idea to review it, and update the published date as well. I know when I am searching for things, if I see something that is 5 years old, even if it’s still relevant today I don’t know that, and I sort of think is it out of date, or is this still current?
Bob: An important thing to remember is that when you delete those old posts or pages, you must redirect those URLs to the updated page. That way, you’ll avoid page not found errors. It’s the worst when you search on the web for something, and you’re directed to a 404 error page.
Donna: In the future then, you can continue to strengthen and update the preferred content page, rather than making a completely new page on the same topic.
Bob: That’s it for today’s episode. You can find the link to the Yoast SEO article which has the step by step process on how to fix your duplicate keyword posts, and a transcript of today’s podcast, at DelosInc.com/141. And don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss out on our actionable digital marketing tips to grow your organization.