A regional law firm reached out because two of their own practice-area pages had started ranking against each other instead of against actual competitors. It's one of the stranger problems in SEO because the site looks perfectly healthy until you check Search Console closely.
The Situation
The firm had a personal injury page and a car accident page, written independently by two different people over the years, both targeting almost identical search intent. Google was alternating which one it showed in results, and neither was climbing past position eight or nine.
What We Found
Search Console's query report confirmed it: both pages were being shown for nearly the same set of terms, splitting clicks and impressions between them instead of consolidating ranking signals onto one strong page. This is textbook keyword cannibalization, a term covered in our own SEO glossary, and it's more common on service-based sites than people expect, since every new page tends to get written without checking what already exists.
What We Did
Rather than deleting either page, we merged the stronger content from both into the higher-authority URL, redirected the weaker one to it with a permanent redirect, and rewrote the title tag and meta description to target the specific intent more precisely. We also went through their full site map and flagged two more near-duplicate pages before they became the same problem.
The Result
Within about six weeks, the consolidated page climbed from hovering around position nine to a stable position four for their primary term, and total organic traffic to that page roughly doubled since it was no longer splitting visits with its own sibling page.
The Takeaway
Before writing a new page, it's worth checking whether something close to it already exists on the site. A quick SEO audit against your existing content library catches this early, and it should be a standing part of any content strategy rather than something you only notice once two pages are already competing with each other.
Suspect you might have overlapping pages competing against themselves? Ask Rafenthic for a content audit.