Identify potential cannibalization between different subfolders on your site

If your organization has an international presence, your website might use subfolders to break out content by country and language. For example, your URL structure might look like /en-us/ and /en-uk/ for your US and UK content. This is a best practice for international websites but it can also confuse Google as to which page it should rank for a keyword, and cause keyword cannibalization. It can be tough to monitor this over time and to prove to your organization that this is happening.

You can use Conductor to monitor for this potential keyword cannibalization and see the impact it has on your site’s search performance. The Market Share report provides a high-level view of the market share a different international subfolder takes from your own content. The Rank Comparisons report then lets you dive deeper into the keywords that are ranking on page 1 of the search results, which you can review in the Keyword Details: Visibility report.

Before you begin

To complete this workflow, you must be tracking a specific subfolder as a web property in Conductor and not the entire domain. You’ll also need to set up another international subfolder as a comparison web property, which won’t be possible if you already track that content through a root domain in Conductor.

To set the other international subfolder as a comparison web property in Conductor, go to Web Properties↗️, and then add the international subfolder you want to monitor as a comparison web property. As you are configuring the comparison web property, select it as a SEO Competitor for your tracked web property.

1. In Conductor, go to Market Share↗️. You can now see this international subfolder listed as a comparison web property, and see how much of the top 1, top 5, or page 1 market share they own.
2. In the table, locate the international comparison subfolder and click the View Ranks link to go to the Rank Comparisons report. 
3. In Rank Comparisons, click the Their Exclusive quick filter above the table to identify keywords this international subfolder outranks your subfolder for on page 1 of results pages.
4. For these keywords (or a sample of keywords you identify as high-value for your subfolder), click each in the report to jump to the Keyword Details: Visibility report. For each keyword, you can use Keyword Details to monitor this subfolder’s performance in the results to see if you start outranking them or if they continue to outrank you.

What's next?

With this information in hand, you can create an action plan for how to make sure your content shows up higher in results:

• Monitor your subfolder versus the international subfolder for these keywords to see if the cannibalization resolves naturally.
• Implement hreflang tags (if you have not already).
• Add geo-IP detection to your site so users can navigate to the correct content.
• Optimize your content for unique keywords to differentiate the pages.