Worried about keyword cannibalization

[TRICORSystems]

I've been reading a lot about keyword cannibalization and I'm worried that some of my sub pages may be pulling rank from my home page.

If I'm trying to rank my home page for the keyword phrase "blue widget manufacturing" and I have sub pages with the titles "blue manufacturing services", "blue widget enginnering", "medical widget manufacturing" is it possible that those pages could be causing me to commit keyword cannibalization?

I'm looking at a lot of the results for my keyword phrase and they don't seem to have additional pages with similar keyword phrases.

Wondering if I should change my titles so they don't look as optimized.

[Horizon]

Hi Brandon,

I had something very similar with my site very recently. Our main area of business is to do with French property, and we realised that we have 4 areas of the site all directly targeting the same keywords. Our homepage was by far the strongest on "French Property" keyword historically, but it suddenly started plummeting down the rankings.

Since we have re-targeted the other 3 areas of the site away from "French Property", our homepage has surged back up the rankings, so there is definitely danger in targeting the same keyword on multiple pages/areas.

The difference between your site and mine however, is that we were targeting almost exact matches. You seem to be targeting slightly different keywords, so I would suggest that you are safe, on the whole. I mean, if you're selling Mars bars, it's going to be pretty difficult not to mention Mars bars on almost every page! One thing I would suggest is your homepage will more often than not rank highest for your site's overall area of business, so make sure you homepage is optimised with your most valuable keyword.

I hope that helps!

Matt

[TRICORSystems]

Thanks for the reply Matt!

I think I may have identified another page on our site that could be optimized for the same keyword phrase, so I made changes to the title and h1 tags along with a review of the content.

I also discovered that on the home page both my h1 and h2 tags were the same. Not sure how much that may of contributed to our recent drop but I'm going to test that out to see if it was an issue.

[Horizon]

No worries Brandon - best of luck!