Remember him? Who could forget Hannibal the Cannibal. We are struggling with a bit of cannibalization of our own these days: senior living keyword cannibalization.
Because our niche is so small, we have a tendency to write blog posts that involve many of the same keywords and phrases.
While we usually catch our mistake during the editing and optimizing process, we know many senior living providers out there don’t.
We thought it would help our followers to learn a little more about keyword cannibalization so you can avoid making that mistake.
What is Keyword Cannibalization?
In simplest terms, keyword cannibalization is when you have a variety of blog posts and pages on your site that all have the potential to rank for the same keywords and phrases in search queries.
If you aren’t careful, these pages and posts begin to compete with one another for ranking.
The end result is you gobble away your opportunity to rank well for Google searches queries.
It’s a mistake we see people unfamiliar with our industry making. While we have many potential keywords that can help you connect with seniors and their families, they focus almost exclusively on using “assisted living” and “memory care.” Sometimes they’ll get crazy and mix “dementia care” in a few times.
What can you do to avoid this situation?
We have a few ideas.
Avoiding Senior Living Keyword Cannibalization
- Branch out: Instead of focusing exclusively on your services, think about what drives families to the computer to begin the search. Has a parent started fallen? Is a surviving spouse lonely living on their own? Has an adult with dementia started wandering from home? Does a senior need help preparing healthy meals? If you focus on what families are struggling with, you’ll like find many opportunities for expanding your keywords.
- Guide Google: When Google doesn’t know which post or page is the one to rank highest, it may just push both further down the search engine results page. You can help by telling them which one is more important. Identify what your best pages are and use internal links to drive your own traffic to them. That helps Google prioritize that page and rank it higher.
- Create long-form articles: Spend some time auditing your site and looking for opportunities to combine two articles in to one. That gives you a longer, more thorough articles. Google likes those too. (Just make sure your web team redirects the old article links to the new one so people don’t end up with an error message.)
The bottom line is.. don’t be a Hannibal Lecter.
While it’s more work crafting a strategy that doesn’t cannibalize your own keywords, the end result is a site that ranks higher than your competitors.
Drop us a note if you have any questions….