Strange Key Word Results on Google

[Drew.Friestedt]

I'm trying to rank for the keywords "Chicago General Contractor"

My landing page is https://3fconstruction.net/chicago-general-contractor/

However, in Google a variant page on my site (How to apply for a General Contractor's license - https://3fconstruction.net/how-to-apply-general-contractors-license-chicago/) that is optimized for "General Contractor License Chicago" is coming up first and the target page does not even seem to appear.  I've forced a google crawl of my site and the page still does not appear. I've used the moz on-page grader and results of the target page are good.

I'm perplexed and wonder if google is preventing the target page from appearing.  Any thought on how to fix this?

[JohnSammon]

Hey Drew,

I'm sorry to hear about the trouble. I suspect that the issue relates to your inner linking structure

https://3fconstruction.net/chicago-general-contractor/ (3 inner links pointing to the page)

https://3fconstruction.net/how-to-apply-general-contractors-license-chicago/ (135 inner links pointing to the page)

One of the things that will help will be to increase the amount of internal links pointing to the chicago-general-contractor page.

[Drew.Friestedt]

Hi John, thanks for looking at this!  That seems to make sense, but the target sit, https://3fconstruction.net/chicago-general-contractor/ does not even seem to appear anywhere in search results when I search "Chicago General Contractor".  When I search "Chicago General Contractor 3F" we appear on page 1.

So it seems like we are getting penalized for something.  Is there any way to research that on my end?

thx!

[JohnSammon]

Hey Drew,

I would try the inner linking to see if that helps first. If that doesn't work, I'd build links to the https://3fconstruction.net/chicago-general-contractor/ page. I don't think you are being penalized but I'll defer to the other SEO gurus who help on the Q+A.

Thanks!