Cannibal Content: Is Your Content Eating Itself Alive?

// By Althea Fung //

Competition is an essential part of healthcare marketing — it leads to innovation, helps improve the customer experience, and (hopefully) staves off complacency. In the battle for ranking in digital healthcare marketing, there is one competitor organizations should never go up against: themselves.

Unfortunately, companies don’t just compete but get eaten alive, by their own digital marketing efforts, in part, because of content cannibalization. Content cannibalization, sometimes called keyword cannibalization, is a process in which a website devours its own presence within search engines. This typically happens when a single website has multiple pages targeting the same keyword or theme. By targeting the same keywords, your pages are forced to compete with one another, bringing down the ranking potential of each page.

It’s easy to see how this problem can occur, especially as more hospitals are becoming part of health systems. Approximately two-thirds of nonfederal hospitals in the U.S. are part of a health system, according to the 2018 edition of Hospital Statistics from the American Hospital Association. That’s up about 14 percentage points from 2013 stats. With each hospital comes a website to fold into the larger brand. And potential internal competition.

While it is easy to create the problem, finding a solution can prove much harder.

Do Your URLs Tell Google What the Page Is About?

Jonathan Catley, director of sales and marketing, MD Connect, Inc.

Jonathan Catley, director of sales and marketing at MD Connect, Inc., a Boston-based healthcare digital marketing firm, suggests starting with the basics.

“There are many facets of content cannibalization — from duplicate content to having multiple overlapping content campaigns. For integrating organizations, the best place to start is with the URL structure,” Catley says.

URLs are often the first thing Google sees from a website and are the foundation of effective site hierarchy. Catley says URLs should be simple and relevant to let search engines and users know where the parent folder — the slashes you see between text in a URL — is and what is on the page.

For example, https://www.hospitals.com/cancer/blood-disorders/aplastic-anemia is clearly a page about aplastic anemia, a blood cancer that is treated by the fictitious “Hospitals” hospital. Having a simple URL also helps reduce the risk of posting duplicate content that can occur when using automatically generated links and sitemaps.

Narrow, Focused Content Improves Search Ranking

Catley recommends incorporating keywords in the URL to focus search results. He notes that the keyword or phrase in the URL should be the exclusive topic of the page. So https://www.hospitals.com/dermatology/alopecia should be exclusively about services related to treating sudden baldness, not all scalp-related conditions. Internal linking should guide users from one page to another. He says targeting too many phrases or going off-topic diminishes the value of the page.

In a post on the MD Connect blog, Catley explains further the value of using narrow keyword phrases to improve search ranking. “When Google’s algorithms crawl sites to rank search results, they’re looking for individual pages — not entire sites. Hospital marketers are more likely to find success by creating landing pages that meet narrower search criteria than trying to improve the rankings of their entire site. By concentrating specific keywords on one page or microsite, providers increase their chance of showing up in search engine results pages (SERPs).”

He adds: “By dedicating a separate page to each of these topics, marketers are providing Google with more options to show in search results. This is especially effective when using long-tail keywords — detailed phrases like ‘varicose vein treatment Los Angeles’ — which target patients who are further along in the conversion process.”

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

He also warns against keyword stuffing — an SEO technique in which keywords are placed throughout metadata and the content in an attempt to improve ranking. “I think people do this because they think more is better, but with this, that is not the case. Google can recognize keyword stuffing. Though it’s not as common a practice as it was two to three years ago, it is still something people do,” Catley says. “Keywords have to be natural. It has to be part of the subject matter and flow naturally in the article.”

In recent years, keywords, though still important, have taken a backseat to content quality as a factor in search engine optimization — and content cannibalization. A 2016 SearchMetrics study found that 53 percent of the top 20 queries have keywords in their title tag, and less than 40 percent of landing pages have keywords in their H1. This number is dropping year-over-year.

Give Users Quality Content in the Right Context

When focusing on content, Catley advises eliminating duplicative copy. For institutions with multiple locations that treat the same condition or offer the same services, he says it’s best to have a singular condition or service page to represent all the locations. Within a condition or service, take a narrow view to give the user a quality content experience.

“You have to think of the user experience. If a person types out a keyword query, they expect results on that keyword,” he says. “A lot of times the biggest mistake you’ll see is a person goes to a page — let’s say MD Connect Hospital orthopedic services. On that page, it will break down that we do shoulder, knee, and hip repair. That’s it. By taking that content a little deeper, having a page for shoulder, having a page for hip, having a page for each, so on organic results users aren’t just seeing your general orthopedics page, they are seeing the content they’re looking for to answer a specific concern.”

In a 2016 Google Q&A session, Andrey Lipattsev, a search quality senior strategist with the company, said content was one of the most important Google ranking factors. With RankBrain, Google’s machine-learning artificial intelligence system that is used to help process search results, context matters in rankability. Marketers focusing on content context not only give themselves a leg up in optimization but also in addressing and eliminating instances of cannibalization.

“Patients are out there looking for answers to questions about treatment options,” he adds. “If you’re providing content that doesn’t answer any questions and is just there for keywords to stuff, then you have a bigger problem than cannibalization. Having content written to be consumed in the right context only improves the experience and the results in search.”

Althea A. Fung is a digital content strategist and healthcare journalist. She is a senior editor at NewYork-Presbyterian.