Landing Page Nowhere In Site on SERP

[bradhodson]

This post is deleted!

[justin-brock]

It seems as though Google thinks a different page on your site is more relevant for the query "roofing software." I found http://www.jobnimbus.com/roofing-crm-and-project-management-software/ in the top 10.

If you want the other page to outrank this one, then I'd evaluate your internal linking structure, optimize all the on-page factors you can (ex., use "Roofing Software" in the H1 for example), and try to get some offsite links to that page in particular.

[bradhodson]

Hi Justin!

Many thanks for the response. Up until about a month ago we've had "Roofing Software" in the H1 but decided to change the H1 to try to increase conversions. We'll add it back and see if that helps to get it ranked in the meantime.

All other on-page factors are optimized as far as we can tell, we'll see if we can make any adjustments to our linking structure, and will continue to build offsite links where possible.

Thank you!

[RobertJakobson]

Hi Brad,

sorry for being polemical, promise me you will not downvote Way back in 2007 Matt Cutts wrote about displaying only a minimum amount of links per domain necessary (https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

"For several years Google has used something called “host crowding,” which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name."

That was 7 years ago. Almost 8. Nowadays Google can quite easily parse the content and structure of videos, PDFs, different documentation file types, PowerPoint files and so on.. understanding and comparing html structure, images and the layout on the page is the easiest thing for it's algorithms.

I can perfectly understand the need for different landing pages. But I think you are misguided in wanting to rank multiple versions of them when they are so similar. A different use case can be made for paid campaigns when conversion percentages can differ widely with a change of a word or the order of words but when ranking very similar content is still very similar content to everyone's eyes, including the Google bot.

May be an alternative course would be to choose the canonical one, amongst all the similar landing pages that is meant to rank and have all the others meant for your banner or paid advertising etc.. campaigns point to it via a canonical url?

If you are still determined on going forward with multiple versions of what is essentially the same page, try incorporating new ranking factors to differentiate the one that needs to rank or rank higher:

• add an unique layout and images to the page you want to rank higher.
• add Semantic SEO schema.org product mark-up (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146750?hl=en) to both pages. When you have two very similar pages offering the same thing, try to make the offer unique for each page. By offer I mean the bait ("30 day free trial"..)

 

[bradhodson]

Hi Robert,

This makes a heck of a lot of sense. A couple of years ago it made sense for us to use two different pages that were targeted to each keyword, but now with Google's semantic updates they can both do well for two (and more) related keywords.

Given our current situation, we would much prefer the page (roofing-software) to rank as opposed to the one that's currently ranking. Given that the one that is currently ranking is older (probably the reason it's ranking instead of the other), would you think it would be a good idea to 301 from the currently ranking page and merge the existing ranked content with the page that isn't ranking in order to try to rank the other page instead?

Or does it make more sense to try to use the ranked page? W would be willing to do this out of necessity, but the other keyword is much better performing for us.

What is the best practice in this instance?

Thank you!

[RobertJakobson]

Hi Brad, you are right according to Brian Dean's extensive list of 200 Google ranking factors:

Although Google prefers fresh content, an older page that’s regularly updated may outperform a newer page.

I am hesitant to recommend doing the 301 redirect, even though it is the right thing to do. Google Support does state at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en#4

To address these issues, we recommend you define a canonical URL for content (or equivalent content) available through multiple URLs. You can do this for Google Search in a number of ways:

It goes ahead to recommend both setting a canonical URL and updating your sitemap and, after that, doing a 301 redirect. So it seems both work. It depends on whether you want to keep the older link accessible, in which case a canonical URL will do the trick or if not, then the 301.

Before doing the 301 redirect I would do a more extensive analysis of both of these pages. Perhaps with the tools that Moz Pro provides right here. There probably are unseen factors.

PS! The Google Support link above also answers your question of what is the best practice.

[bradhodson]

Thanks so much, Robert!

We'll start by setting the canonical URL to the page we want to rank and see what happens over the next little while, then decide on moving forward with the 301 after we have some more data.

Thanks again!