How to replace an already ranked page with a better, more optimised one?

[Yordan.Vasilev]

Hello peeps! I need your collective wisdom to help me deal with something.

We manage a website that is doing quite well in its niche, however we have the following problem:

Our section landing pages are well established and they rank for a wide range of search terms, including some with a transactional focus. It is obvious that these pages do not cater for users with transactional intent. Our competitors are targeting those transactional keywords with a completely different type of pages, and are winning across the board (annoying but understandable). We have now created a number of pages, which are very similar to the ones that our competitors are using and with an even better on-page SEO score ... WIN! ...well, not so much! Our old section pages are still ranking for the transactional search terms and our new pages are getting very little traction and are having a really slow start.

1. I suspect there is some sort of page cannibalisation going on. How would you address that?
2. Is there a tried and tested way of telling search engines to rank your new page because it meets the search intent in a better way? Please note that we cannot just redirect the old page to the new one - there are structural and commercial reasons for keeping the old page as it is.
3. Is there anything else that I am missing?

Your help is much appreciated.
Thanks
Yordan

[Optimal_Strategies]

Simple answer - use rel=canonical to indicate which article you care the most.

[Yordan.Vasilev]

Hi James,

Thanks for your response!
You are absolutely right! The transactional pages are the ones bringing revenue. We have found a way to push users from the old pages to the transactional ones - it is already in place and seems to work well as we can see in Google Analytics.

The problem is that the old pages are ranking somewhere between position 5 and 10 and the new ones have the potential to be #1 so we are loosing quite a lot. It seems like Google is giving preference to our old, more generic and a lot more authoritative pages over the new ones that are highly optimised for specific terms. Any thoughts, advice, suggestions are very welcome!

Thanks

Yordan