Is this keyword cannibalization?

[SEOMet]

So I have a pretty authoritative website, in which for typical low volume/low competition keywords, new posts sit directly on the first page in a couple of days.

But here's the thing: Recently I found a really sweet keyword to rank for easily, which is an equivalent of "best cooking tools for teens".

I thought it would be an easy top 2-3 because literally only the top 1 link on google had that exact keyword on the domain, the rest of them (2-8) had "best cooking tools for kids".

I published this post almost three weeks ago, but it still sits in page 4-5!
I contrast, other articles I published even more recently, with more competitive-looking first pages, are already sitting on positions 3-5 of the first page. So it's not an algo update issue.

Something else has to be at work here, and I wonder if it is some kind of keyword cannibalization.
But for me it feels strange, because I don't even have a post covering "best cooking tools for kids" which might compete internally.
So maybe Google uses "kids" and "teens" interchangeably as synonyms, and I am actually competing with both keywords results at the same time?



Just for the sake of experimentation, I will publish another post focusing "best cooking tools for kids", and see which one ranks higher for both keywords!

Any thoughts?

 

[Chris.Roark]

Just an after thought: have you check your G analytics to see who your target audience is? Maybe you don't have a lot of content geared towards teens, so google doesn't see you an as authority in that segment.

This is just a hypothesis, you have to research and check the difference between you and your competitors.

 

[SEOMet]

Just an after thought: have you check your G analytics to see who your target audience is? Maybe you don't have a lot of content geared towards teens, so google doesn't see you an as authority in that segment.

This is just a hypothesis, you have to research and check the difference between you and your competitors.

That is true, I dont have much content geared towards teens. But the rest of the results that outrank my "teens" page with their "kids" page dont have it either.