Gesha Coffee Co had two pages quietly working against each other. One was built for long-term office coffee rental. The other was built for short-term event hire. Both were chasing the same “coffee machine hire” and “rental” searches, and Google couldn’t tell them apart. So it kept doing the sensible thing from its point of view, and the unhelpful thing from Gesha’s: it picked one of the two pages more or less at random, ranked it deep in the results, and left the other one stranded.
This is keyword cannibalisation, and it’s one of the most common SEO problems we see on established websites. The frustrating part is that it doesn’t look like a problem. Both pages exist. Both are technically “ranking”. Nothing is broken. You just aren’t getting the leads you should be, and there’s no obvious reason why.
Here’s how we found it on Gesha’s site, what we changed, and what happened next.
Content Overview
What is keyword cannibalisation?
Cannibalisation happens when two or more pages on your site target the same search term. Instead of one strong page, you end up with two weaker ones splitting the authority, the links and the relevance signals between them.
Think of it like sending two salespeople to the same meeting with slightly different pitches. The client gets confused about who to talk to and what your product is, and neither closes the deal. Google faces the same problem. When it sees two pages that both look like a reasonable answer for “coffee machine hire Perth”, it has to choose, and it often chooses badly. Sometimes it even swaps between them week to week, which can be why your rankings and traffic feel like they’re bouncing around for no reason.
The fix isn’t more content, it’s clearer boundaries. Each page needs one job, and the site needs to make that job obvious to both Google and the person searching.
Spotting the problem on Gesha’s site
Gesha sells coffee a few different ways: wholesale beans to cafes, commercial machines for purchase, long-term coffee setups for offices, and short-term machine hire for events. Four related services, and as the website grew there was little attention to how it would effect the other pages on site.
When we audited their service pages, two stood out as fighting each other:
- /workplace-coffee-solutions/, meant for ongoing office rental and supply
- /coffee-machine-hire/, meant for short-term event hire
On paper these are different services, in the search results they were a mess. We pulled the rankings for every commercial hire and rental term and mapped which page Google was choosing for each one. For “coffee machine rental”, the workplace page sat at 64 and the hire page at 27, so the page that should have owned that term was being beaten by its own sibling. “Commercial coffee machine hire” had the workplace page at 71 and the hire page at 23. “Office coffee machine rental”, a term that should have belonged clearly to the workplace page, was sitting back at position 47.
Almost everything commercial was parked between positions 20 and 80. For a business that sells these services every week, that’s a lot of demand landing on page three, four or five of Google. Nobody’s looking down there.
Two other issues showed up in the same audit. Neither page had a meta description, so Google was guessing at the snippet it showed searchers. And the event page URL, /coffee-machine-hire/, was generic. It gave Google no signal that the page was specifically about events rather than long-term hire.
The fix: give each page one job
The temptation with cannibalisation is to merge the two pages into one. We didn’t, because they serve different customers. Someone kitting out an office for two years and someone hiring a machine for a weekend expo want different things. If you serve both customers and there’s enough people looking for what you sell, then the answer is always separate them cleanly.
We rewrote the heading structure on both pages so each one signalled its role from the H1 down. The workplace page leaned into “long-term rental”, “office” and “supply”. The event page leaned into “short-term”, “events” and “hire”. We added FAQ sections to both that answer the real questions people ask before enquiring. They also catch the long-tail searches the main headings miss, like “what’s the minimum rental period for an office coffee machine”.
We wrote proper meta descriptions for both pages, so the search snippet reflected what each page offered instead of leaving it to chance. We added internal links between the two pages, so a visitor who landed on the wrong one could self-correct. That also helped Google see the two were related but distinct.
The biggest signal, though, was the URL. We changed the event page from /coffee-machine-hire/ to /event-coffee-hire/. A URL is one of the clearest hints you can give Google about what a page is for. “Coffee machine hire” wasn’t telling it anything useful, while “event coffee hire” draws the line the site needed. URL changes have to be handled carefully so you don’t lose the rankings you already have. Done properly, though, it’s one of the highest-impact moves available.
Before
After
Worried your own pages might be overlapping? Our team is happy to take a look. Start with our SEO services and we’ll go from there.
What happened next
The changes went live in mid-April. Here’s the before and after, comparing the roughly three and a half months either side of the update.
The event page was the headline, impressions climbed from about 9,700 to over 14,000 as it started showing up for far more searches. On the specific terms, the movement was dramatic:
- “office coffee machine rental”: position 47 to number 1
- “commercial coffee machine hire”: position 28 to number 2
- “coffee machine hire”: now ranking number 2
- “coffee machine event hire”: number 1
- “coffee machine rental Perth”: now sitting at number 2
The right page is also winning the right terms now. Hire and event searches resolve to the event page. Office and long-term rental searches resolve to the workplace page. The two have stopped competing.
The workplace page improved too. Clicks more than doubled, from 27 to 62 over a short period, and its click-through rate climbed from 0.26% to 0.73% as the new meta description and clearer positioning did their work.
The best confirmation didn’t come from a rankings tool. It came from Gesha. In a recent email, their marketing manager told us they’re now getting a high level of organic leads through the event page following the updates. Rankings are a means to an end, and the end is enquiries landing in the inbox.
How to tell if this is happening to you
You don’t need a full audit to get a first read on whether your pages are cannibalising each other. A few signs worth watching:
- You have several pages targeting similar terms. Multiple service pages, or a pile of old blog posts covering the same topic, are the usual culprits.
- Your rankings bounce around for a term with no clear reason. That’s often Google flip-flopping between two of your pages.
- A page you’d expect to rank well is stuck in the 20s or beyond, while a less relevant page of yours is bringing in customers.
If that sounds familiar, the fix usually isn’t writing more it’s to decide what each page is for, making that obvious, and sometimes consolidating what shouldn’t have been separate in the first place. That’s a core part of how we approach SEO strategy, and it matters even more now that AI overviews and local search reward sites that are unambiguous about what they offer.
Cannibalisation is one of those problems that costs you leads, month after month, without ever showing up as an error. Gesha’s pages were never broken,they were just competing.
If you suspect two of your own pages are getting in each other’s way, get in touch and we’ll help you sort out which page should own what.
Ryan Wilson
Marketing Team Lead
