2. The Importance of Keyword Reviews
Another critical component of an architecture audit is a keyword
review. Basically, this involves the following steps.
2.1. Step 1: Keyword research
It is vital to get this done as early as possible in any
process. Keywords drive on-page SEO, so you want to know which ones to
target.
2.2. Step 2: Site architecture
Coming up with a site architecture can be very tricky. At this
stage, you need to look at your keyword research and the existing site
(to make as few changes as possible). You can think of this in terms
of your site map.
You need a hierarchy that leads you to each of your
money pages (i.e., the pages where conversions
are most likely to occur). Obviously, a good site hierarchy allows the
parents of your money pages to rank for relevant keywords (which are
likely to be shorter tail).
Most products have an obvious hierarchy they fit into, but when
you start talking in terms of anything that naturally has multiple
hierarchies, it gets incredibly tricky. The trickiest hierarchies, in
our opinion, occur when there is a location involved. In London alone
there are London boroughs, metropolitan boroughs, Tube stations, and
postcodes. London even has a city (“The City of London”) within
it.
In an ideal world, you will end up with a single hierarchy that
is natural to your users and gives the closest mapping to your
keywords. Whenever there are multiple ways in which people search for
the same product, establishing a hierarchy becomes challenging.
2.3. Step 3: Keyword mapping
Once you have a list of keywords and a good sense of the overall
architecture, start mapping the major relevant keywords to URLs (not
the other way around). When you do this, it is a very easy job to spot
pages that you were considering that aren’t targeting a keyword, and
more importantly, keywords that don’t have a page.
It is worth pointing out that between step 2 and step 3 you will
remove any wasted pages.
If this stage is causing you issues, revisit step 2. Your site
architecture should lead naturally to a mapping that is easy to use
and includes your keyphrases.
2.4. Step 4: Site review
Once you are armed with your keyword mapping, the rest of the
site review becomes a lot easier. Now when you are looking at title
tags and headings, you can refer back to your keyword mapping and not
only see whether the heading is in an h1 tag, but also see whether it includes the
right keywords.
3. Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization typically starts when a website’s
information architecture calls for the targeting of a single term or
phrase on multiple pages of the site. Many times this is done
unintentionally, but results in several or even dozens of pages that
have the same keyword target in the title and header tags.
Figure 1
shows the problem.
Search engines will spider the pages on your site and see 4 (or
40) different pages, all seemingly relevant to one particular keyword
(in the example in Figure 4-5, the keyword is
snowboards). For clarity’s sake, Google doesn’t
interpret this as meaning that your site as a whole is more relevant to
snowboards or should rank higher than the competition. Instead, it
forces Google to choose among the many versions and pick one it feels
best fits the query. When this happens you lose out on a number of
rank-boosting features:
Internal anchor text
Since you’re pointing to so many different pages with the
same subject, you can’t concentrate the value of internal anchor
text on one target.
External links
If four sites link to one page on snowboards, three sites
link to another of your snowboard pages, and six sites link to yet
another snowboard page, you’ve split up your external link value
among three pages, rather than consolidating it into
one.
Content quality
After three or four pages of writing about the same primary
topic, the value of your content is going to suffer. You want the
best possible single page to attract links and referrals, not a
dozen bland, replicated pages.
Conversion rate
If one page is converting better than the others, it is a
waste to have multiple, lower-converting versions targeting the
same traffic. If you want to do conversion tracking, use a
multiple-delivery testing system (either A/B or
multivariate).
So, what’s the solution? Take a look at Figure 2.
The difference in this example is that instead of targeting the
singular snowboards on every page, the pages are
focused on unique, valuable variations and all of them link back to an
original, canonical source for the singular term. Google can now easily
identify the most relevant page for each of these queries. This isn’t
just valuable to the search engines; it is also a far better user
experience and overall information architecture.
What should you do if you’ve already got a case of keyword
cannibalization? Employ 301s liberally to eliminate pages competing with
each other, or figure out how to differentiate them. Start by
identifying all the pages in the architecture with this issue and
determine the best page to point them to, and then use a 301 from each
of the problem pages to the page you wish to retain. This ensures not
only that visitors arrive at the right page, but also that the link
equity and relevance built up over time are directing the engines to the
most relevant and highest-ranking-potential page for the query.
