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Fixing cannibalisation so a Salesforce partner could finally be quoted

Zivoke had over four hundred URLs competing with each other and no single authoritative page for anything it sold. Consolidation multiplied traffic value more than fivefold and put the brand on Google's AI surfaces for the first time.

Company
Salesforce consulting partner
Category
Enterprise Salesforce services
Duration
11 months
Services
Technical SEO, AEO, GEO
Results after eleven months
5.4x
Monthly organic traffic value
+140%
Keywords in Google's top three
88%
Fewer ranking URLs after consolidation
2
Google AI surfaces now citing Zivoke, from none

Measured in Ahrefs against a fixed September 2025 baseline. Fewer ranking URLs is the intended outcome here, not a loss.

01

Problem

Zivoke is a Salesforce managed support and consulting partner, working across enterprise planning, implementation, integration and operations. Its buyers are technical, its deals are considered, and the queries that matter are narrow and commercially valuable.

The site was competing with itself. Multiple landing pages targeted identical queries, so ranking signals were fragmented across pages that should never have existed in parallel. On-page scores were weak across the board and technical health was poor enough to interfere with how both search engines and AI systems could extract anything from the site. The backlink profile was too thin to support the domain against established competitors.

The consequence was a site with 413 ranking URLs and almost nothing to show for it. Ninety-five percent of those URLs sat beyond page one. Five keywords held a top-three position. And on Google's AI surfaces, the ones that now sit directly above the organic results a buyer sees, Zivoke was cited zero times.

02

Baseline

The September 2025 snapshot is the story in four numbers. A large index, almost none of it working, and no presence at all on the surfaces where an enterprise buyer now starts a vendor shortlist.

413
ranking URLs, many competing with each other
95%
of ranking URLs sat beyond page one
5
keywords in Google's top three
0
citations on any Google AI surface

Engines tracked: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Copilot and Grok. Zivoke registered four citations in total, all of them on ChatGPT and Copilot, and none on either Google AI surface.

03

Strategy

Nothing could be built until the site stopped arguing with itself. The order was fixed: decide ownership, consolidate, then rebuild the pages that survived. Three principles.

A

Decide which page owns which query

A full re-audit mapping every URL to a keep, consolidate or redirect decision, each one traceable. Ranking signals split across near-duplicates do not help any of them; they weaken all of them equally.

B

Cannibalisation is an AEO problem, not only an SEO one

Answer engines cite one URL per claim. Facing four versions of the same page, an engine has no obvious candidate to quote and will generally quote a competitor instead. Consolidation is a precondition for being cited, not just for ranking.

C

Rebuild only the pages that earn their place

Eight to nine optimised service pages across the categories Zivoke actually wins, structured for a technical buyer scanning to shortlist and for an engine looking for a clean, liftable answer.

And what we deliberately did not do

We did not add pages. On a site already competing with itself, every new URL is another candidate diluting the same signal and another thing for an engine to choose between. The count had to come down before anything sensible could be built back up.

04

Execution

SearchAxe ran the consolidation and the rebuild. Consolidation work is unforgiving if it is done without records, so traceability was built into the process rather than added afterwards.

  • Ran a complete site re-audit identifying every URL contributing to cannibalisation.

  • Mapped keep, consolidate and redirect decisions for each one, with full traceability for later review.

  • Implemented redirects across the pages splitting ranking signals for identical queries.

  • Rebuilt site architecture so ranking power concentrated on a single authoritative page per query.

  • Built eight to nine optimised service pages across Zivoke's core win categories.

  • Wrote the blog for dual optimisation, built to rank in Google and to be extracted by AI answer engines.

  • Resolved on-page SEO errors and technical deficiencies across the site.

  • Executed a backlink strategy targeting topical, relevant placements.

05

Results

Zivoke now ranks with 88% fewer URLs than it did and earns more than five times the traffic value from them. The AI numbers remain small in absolute terms, but the composition changed: the brand is now cited on both Google AI surfaces, where it previously appeared on neither.

Metric
Sept 2025
July 2026
Monthly organic traffic value
$122
$655
Monthly organic sessions
70
173
Keywords in top three
5
12
Keywords on page one
20
34
Ranking URLs, lower is better
413
48
URLs stranded beyond position 20
343
3
Google AI Overviews citations
0
1
Google AI Mode citations
0
1
Referring domains
233
549

Source: Ahrefs. July 2026 used as the last complete month; AI citation counts sampled across the period. AI citation volume for Zivoke is small and volatile month to month, peaking at ten citations in May 2026. Domain Rating declined over the period despite referring domain growth, and link profile quality is the current focus of the engagement.

06 · The part that transfers

Lessons for consulting and services firms

Cannibalisation is a citation problem

Answer engines quote one URL per claim. A site running four versions of the same page gives an engine no obvious candidate, so it quotes someone else. Consolidation is a prerequisite for being cited, not merely for ranking.

Fewer URLs, more visibility

Zivoke ranks with 88% fewer URLs than it did a year ago and earns over five times the traffic value from them. Page count is not an asset, and running a site as though it is gets expensive quietly.

Traceability makes consolidation survivable

Every keep, consolidate and redirect decision was documented at the time it was made. Without that record a site this tangled cannot be safely unpicked six months later when one page unexpectedly drops.

Every engine is a separate scoreboard

Zivoke was cited on ChatGPT and Copilot at baseline and on neither today, while appearing on Google AI Overviews and AI Mode for the first time. Presence on one engine tells you very little about the others, which is why they have to be tracked separately.

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