In this tutorial, I want to share the method that I have been using for a few months to detect keyword cannibalizations on my client’s websites.

The old method: Finding keyword cannibalizations with Ahrefs

Before I used a slightly less efficient method with Ahrefs, a tool with thousands of possibilities. The method to find keyword cannibalizations with Ahrefs is more cumbersome and certainly less accurate than the one I am going to explain in this article.

Identifying keyword cannibalizations could be done with Search Console too, but again this could be a very laborious method as well.

[irp posts=”25584″ name=”How to Perform the Best Keyword Research with Free and Premium Tools, 2019″]

The new method: Detect keyword cannibalizations automatically with Google Drive spreadsheets

The main idea of this new method is to be able to find keyword cannibalizations almost automatically.

Install the Search Analytics for Sheets add-on

We only need to link our Google Drive account with our Search Console account. In this case, we will use Search Analytics for Sheets.

Adding it is very simple: Go to the menu bar, click on ‘Add-ons’ and select ‘Get Add-ons’.

There we search for ‘Search Console’ and install the add-on:

The add-on will ask you to select which Google account you want to use. Select it and allow the add-on to access the needed data. You can give access by clicking ‘Allow’.

Detecting keyword cannibalizations

I have decided to search for cannibalizations on our AWD blog. After importing the data on our spreadsheet, I finally found keyword cannibalizations (in Canada) for “SEO specialist”. I have no idea if this query has searches or not, but it works as an example of how to get this data:

I will not talk about how to solve keyword cannibalizations in this post, as there are many very interesting articles about it.

If we order it differently, for example by a query, then we must sort the country. When the country is repeated in an exact keyword is when there is keyword cannibalization.

The first column is the one that will mark the alphabetical order. Select this from ‘Group By’.

Things to keep in mind

I always use the last 15 or 30 days. If we select ‘by default’ we are likely to find a history of cannibalization larger than the current ones we have on our site. Even more, if we had a problem of this kind that we have already solved.

Another interesting thing is the filters. We are likely to get results from countries that do not matter to us, so if our website is large we can also filter by country. We can also filter by exact query or by a word that appears in the search, as well as by URL (exact URL or URL that includes a specific word).

These filters are activated by pressing Add Filter and there we select if we want to filter by Query, Page (specific URL), Country (country or countries), Device (the type of device) or Search Appearance.

We can use the current page, a new sheet or an existing tab to write or overwrite the results, and you can also select the number of cells (I use ‘Everything’).