Can pages compete with each other? Inbound links & domain authority, How to determine problem areas?

[SheffieldMarketing]

Heyy, I'm having some pretty big SEO issues.

We have had some drops in our ranking. We're 5th page or worse depending on location for a few of our keywords that we used to rank well for.  There are all sorts of random non relevant sites outranking us for the term "stickley" and "stickley furniture"

One thing I noticed is that we are ranking for a different page for each keyphrase. Our home page is ranking for "Stickley" and our stickley page is ranking for "Stickley Furniture" Is this normal? I guess Google is just picking what it see's as what's more relevant. Is it possible that these two pages are "competing?"  Do similar phrases linking to different pages cause pages to "fight" or unevenly disperse link juice?

I'm having trouble knowing which page I should send inbound links to since Google seems to be linking similar keywords to different pages. How much should I stress about which pages I receive links on? Is it true that any inbound link to a site site will help increase its overall domain authority and overall SEO?

What should I be focusing on? I've added 301 redirects for non WWW as well as tried to make the pages well optimized for SEO. Should I just add more related content to the pages?

I know backlinks are important but I'm having a really hard time figuring out how to get links that aren't just spammy forum post footers or junk directory submissions.

The thing that bothers me is we were ranking well and then suddenly are way back. We have never done any black hat SEO of any sort.  I feel a bit stuck and confused at the moment

Thanks in advance for any help!
-Amy

[AgentsofValue]

Amy - a few ideas here:

• you might be dealing with what's called 'keyword cannibalization' here.  It helps to have a clear plan of what keywords you'll be focused on for every page on your site.  It's tempting to stick a bunch of keywords on every page and into your meta tags for every page - but sometimes less is more.  Just focus on the 2 to 3 keyword phrases that most accurately describe any page.  Make sure those keywords show up in some form in the title and H1 tags on the page.

After you do all of that optimization, I also like to run a tool like the Screaming Frog Seo Spider, to see if there are any pages across the site that have exactly the same or very similar title tags.  If you have more than a few pages, it can happen very easily so it makes sense to go back and double check that later.  You can sometimes discover two or more pages on your site that actually have very similar content.  In a case like that, pick the better one, add any relevant content and 301 redirect the old page.

• in terms of linking, you can go a long with just by doing good internal linking.  Try to make the links to your pages match the target keywords as much as possible.  For inbound links, a large portion of your links will naturally be brand links to your homepage.  Focus as much as possible on 'good' links, from vendor partners, industry associations, and trusted blogs.  There are lots of strategies for getting these kinds of links.  They require some effort / outreach - but will serve you much better in the long run than a few hundred irrelevant forum links or directory submissions.

After that, make sure you've signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, submitted a sitemap, and make sure you don't have any issues with slow site loading or canonicalization (where the same page is referenced with slightly different URLs).

Hope that helps - without looking at the site too closely, that's the best advice I can give.