Splitting one bloated page into 3 ended cannibalization and added 5,200 clicks

Splitting one bloated page into 3 ended cannibalization and added 5,200 clicks

One 4,800-word page was ranking for three distinct intents and competing with itself in Search Console.

— Queries the page ranked for: 140
— Queries where two of our own URLs appeared: 38
— Avg position before split: 14
— Avg position after split: ▇▇▇▇▇▇ 6

We clustered the 140 queries by intent, found three clean groups, and broke the page into three URLs with internal links between them.

Clicks across the trio rose from 3,100 to 8,300/mo over two months. The original URL kept its strongest cluster.

So what: a page ranking for too many intents is usually under-ranking for all of them.

Benchmark of the week: pages competing with themselves on 25%+ of queries average a 5-position penalty versus single-intent pages in our set.