What to do when Google ranks the wrong page for your keywords

You have taken all the steps that you think are necessary to rank a page for a specific keyword-and then another page on your website will display that keyword.

This is a frustrating but common problem. When the “error” page appears, for some reason, Google has not identified your expected page as the best traffic destination.

Although your expected page may be the best destination, logic does not apply here; only algorithms determine the ranking, and various SEO techniques can try to correct it.

With the appearance of the “error” page, your user experience may be affected, your conversions may decrease, or your bounce rate, click-through rate, or engagement metrics may be lower than they should be.

Thankfully, there are a few steps you can take to solve this problem. let’s see.

How to improve page ranking signals for specific keywords

Step 1: Evaluate the user intent of your focus keywords

User intent It is essentially a person’s goal when he enters a search term in Google.

In the past year or two, it has become critical to ensure that the pages you want to rank for queries match user intent.

• Is the goal to buy something? (trade)
• Is the goal to find a specific website or page? (navigation)
• Is the goal to find useful information to further answer your question? (material)

Tailoring your content to your intent is essential.

For example, if your focus keyword is “best budget laptops of 2021” and you want your product page or category page to rank for this, then you may not have a chance.

In the example above, you can clearly see that all the top-ranking sites are from third-party aggregators and review sites, which list a comparison of the best laptops.

In fact, no manufacturer or retail website ranks on page 1 for this, so you need to completely move your attention away from this keyword or understand what you are working on to better align it.

Step 2: Evaluate the content on the page

Once you make sure that your content meets the intent, you can continue to make sure Related page content optimization.

Some questions you might want to ask yourself for further analysis are:

• Is my main focus keyword in the title of my page?
• Did I quote my main focus keyword in the description?
• How does the length of my copy compare to the top 10 or top 20 sites?
• Does the competitor’s website use shared semantic keywords that I need to incorporate into my page?
• Does my page answer questions that users might need to know more about this topic?

SEMrush Writing Assistant and Clearscope are two excellent tools that can help you analyze and answer the above questions.

Step 3: Evaluate your internal links

Link signals tell Google that pages are important, so make sure you have a sufficient number of pages on your website Back to connect Go to the page you want to improve.

Try to add 3-5 internal links from pages related to topics with high authority.

A quick way is to go to Ahrefs, enter your domain, and navigate to the “Homepage”.

Author screenshot, November 2021.

This will tell you which pages are the most authoritative on your site, and then you only need to find the most relevant pages and add a link to the target URL.

Bonus tips: You can actively use internal anchor text, so please use your focus keywords as the anchor text for internal links.

Step 4: Evaluate your external links

The same rules apply to external links and internal links.

Links indicate to Google that sites and pages are valuable, so if you have a large number of external links pointing to wrong pages with specific keywords, it will affect your ability to rank the correct pages.

If this is the case, please contact these sites and ask them to link to the correct page.

Similarly, if you don’t have any external links to the correct page, it will send a message to Google stating that the page is worthless and should not be ranked well. This may be as simple as performing a link assessment to solve your problem.

Step 5: View your user data

Is the bounce rate of related pages high?

Low click rate?

Bad conversion rate?

If people land on relevant pages and leave quickly, or are unable/unwilling to browse the page and convert, it may affect your overall ranking.

use Google Analyticss or Hotjar software to understand the user data related to this page, and then redesign the page to avoid any problems encountered by the user.

How to downgrade or reduce the current ranking signal of a page

Once you increase the ranking of the page you are trying to boost, you actually need to downgrade the page that is currently ranking for your search term.

I know this violates almost all SEO doctrines, but in order to ensure that the relevant pages can be ranked, this needs to be done.

You can do this by removing all traces of keywords and their related terms from non-related pages.

Then, refactor your internal links to keep them away from this page and point to the correct page.

The same goes for external links: contact some webmasters and ask them to redirect the link to the correct page.

If all else fails, use a 301 redirect

If all of the above steps fail, use 301 redirects. Just delete the wrong page and use a 301 to redirect to the correct page you want to index. This will tell Google that you have permanently moved the old page to the new page, and any rights held by the old page will be transferred to the new page, giving it more push.

“Wrong” page ranking can be fixed

When an error page pops up for your target keyword, this is a very common problem that will have a negative impact on your user experience.

However, following the simple steps above, you should be able to solve the problem and get traffic to the page you want.

As your traffic starts to reach the right destination, the end result will be a better user experience, and you should start to see improved engagement metrics.

More resources:

Featured image: Shutterstock/Zouls