Wrong pages ranking for key terms

[innermedia1]

Hi,

I have a website that was rebuilt and redesigned earlier this year, and it's struggling to rank. The problem is that the wrong pages are ranking for the key terms. For example, there is a page for 'Loft Conversions Essex' but the page that's ranking is actually the FAQ page (which doesn't mention the word 'Essex' at all).

I have been through all of the usual items, and none of them seem to apply:

• The landing pages have been properly optimised (not overly so), while the pages that rank only contain the terms within the menu (the link that goes to the actual landing page)
• We thought it may be a redirect issue since the site was a bit of a mess before the rebuild, so we removed all of the redirects and resubmitted the htaccess file but that hasn't helped
• Internal anchor text is relevant
• There aren't a huge number of external links to the old site pages, and many of these pages didn't exist at all so I don't think that's an issue
• Most of the pages were built at the same time so there's no real reason why one would have more authority than another
• There are no canonicals interfering with these pages

I can't really canonical these since we do want the pages to rank, it's just that they're all ranking for the wrong thing (so the SERPs are a lot lower than they should be). Most of these pages are pretty new, as I said, so while we have tried smaller content changes I don't think a full refresh will really help.

To make it even weirder, the pages that rank for each term change regularly but it's never the right page. Help!

EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone!

[SwimsuitsDirect.com]

The landing pages may not have been fully indexed yet. It can take weeks for this to happen.

[alecfwilson]

Agreed. I work at a company that builds search engines for websites (TechCrunch uses our search), and one of our biggest advantages over a product like Google Site Search is we'll crawl your site on demand (we're not a competitor to Google's web search product, obviously, so our on demand recrawls aren't an option for SEO ranking). Google, in its attempt to index the entire internet, cannot recrawl your site as soon as you make website changes, nor can it determine perfect relevance for every page immediately upon crawling. Unfortunately, a lot of times, the answer to "I fixed everything, still hasn't helped," is to wait it out. My recommendation would be keep doing what you are doing and work on good, sustainable SEO, and give Google a bit more time to crawl and index the new pages. It doesn't look like there is anything you are doing that is causing the problem, so I don't have a ton more to offer here.

Good luck!

[anthonydnelson]

Judging from your original comment, it sounds like you know what you are doing. Just give it some time.

Sometimes, I find that a FAQ or something similar will rank over a more Category based page because despite being less targeted, the FAQ is full of content and the category page is quite thin in comparison.

Here is what I would do:

• Update the Loft Conversions Essex page to include more content. Better content.
• Build a few external links to that page to strengthen the authority.
• Give it some time.