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This seems to be very common... home pages should outrank deeper pages, yes?. Are there any external backlinks (from relevant, authoritative sites) to your deep-content landing pages? Perhaps all your credibility resides on your home page. Have you done any off-page SEO for the landing pages?

Here is a technique that may work for you.

In Google Analytics, you can go to:

Acquisition...
Keywords...
Organic...  (Or paid)

Sort by highest bounce rate.

You may see a lot of one-offs that may not be very relevant, so it's useful to add some filtering.

So, set some advanced filters, such as:

Site usage... Bounce rate... greater than 50

Site usage... Visits... greater than 5.

Which may filter out some of the noise.

Sort by bounce rate to see the highest bounce rate keywords.

Remember that more than half will be not provided, probably, but this will give you a sampling of keywords with the highest bounce rate.

Also, perhaps the bounce rate is high because they found what they wanted to know on that page very quickly. Sometimes a satisfied visitor bounces.

Voted +1 for Ricky's response, good suggestions. Have you looked http://www.blogengage.com/ for ideas? Depending on your market specifics, you may need to design more tailored strategies and tactics.

I have been using GSERP.com for several months now, and it seems to be reliable and accurate. It is free, in beta-test, with no pricing plans yet announced. The rankings correlate well with actual Google search query results, and are updated on a daily basis.

It has a few quirks, such as the graphing feature usability (not being able to deselect all and then select specific keywords, you have to deselect keywords one-by-one, as far as I can tell.) Also, be sure to set your default country correctly.

The GSERP results are downloadable, which makes it handy to keep track week-to-week and month-to-month and compare results with the average SERP rankings you see in Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools.

There are several other good rank tracking tools, but most cost $50 per month, more or less.

1% response rate is much lower than I would have expected from public libraries. Have your respondents given you any feedback?

A more personal approach may have much better results. You could have your local staff ask a parent to visit the library and speak to someone in authority, starting with the reference desk, who are usually very helpful. Ask the parent to get the name of a person who has authority to add this type of content to the library's website, and approach them directly. That may even be the library reference desk staff. Give the parent a briefing and something to deliver to the library staff.

The library may be more responsive to a library patron, a local parent, who would recommend your services.

The reputation and integrity of the major players would be at stake here. If they changed their user agent identification (to spoof Googlebot or Bing or whatever) that could be detected, and they would be castigated. The crawler IP address and its user agent ID would be out of sync...

If you have many inbound links or landing page traffic for the old page URLs, will you be redirecting those old URLs to your new URLs?

Hi Adnan,

If I understand your question, you have a page for each specific product, yes? So, you may want THAT page to rank better than most of your OTHER pages, for a specific search query relevant to the name of that product?

This is a very common issue for any shopping cart system. So, any good shopping cart CMS would be SEO friendly enough to ensure the product name is used prominently in the page title tag, and in an H1 or H2 heading tag, IMG alt tag, etc... Then, it's up to you to have a high-quality and relevant product description (page text) that uses good SEO for your important and related keywords and interesting content. That is what's important for on-page SEO.

I am not yet sure how hummingbird would affect this, just use the basic SEO good practices for on-page content, and you should do well.

The question then becomes, have you prioritized your keywords, including long-tail, for each product and it's own webpage? Have you optimized your content accordingly?

Hope that helps.

Jared has added some good points. Have you looked at your competitors? Understanding how and why their sites outrank your site? Have you prioritized your entire list of potential keywords and search queries?

Have you looked at Ahrefs, MajesticSeo, AuthorityLabs? It may depend on your specific keywords, whether or not you will find historical data with any given tool.  Also, your historic ranking (average SERP ranking) can be available in Google Webmaster Tools / Google Analytics.

Ricky,

One question.. All things being equal (and they never are) are you certain that the ONLY change that Google sees is the WWW change?

There are so many ranking factors that can be involved when creating a new site to replace an old site, such as keywords in the context of each page, keywords in Title tag, Meta description, text-on-page, IMG tags, etc...

Was this a direct port of the old content of each page, Titles, Descriptions, etc?  Page-for-page?

What about the IP address of the web host, and whatever Google thinks about that neighborhood.

There are so many factors to consider that could explain a change in SERP ranking.  Rankings can fluctuate up or down, day-to-day, depending on hundreds of factors, including whatever the competition may be doing...

A house built on sand? Low quality pages will not attract natural links. Without good content, there's no there, there.

Build a quality site with good content, and useful design, relevant to your prospects and clients needs, before you do anything else. Deliver value first.

Even with fewer links, a site with higher quality content can often outrank a site that has more links, and will also be more link-worthy.