Different landing page "stole" keyword.

[SpectraCal]

Hi everyone.

So I optimized and used the on-page grader for landing page A. I got it down from 15 to 9 on its ranking. Weirdly, that keyword and landing page A tanked to 60 on its ranking, seemingly overnight. While this was all happening, landing page B, which was never optimized for this keyword, effectively "stole" the keyword and it now has a ranking of 9 for this keyword.

As I see it, this keyword and landing page B don't match as well as the keyword and landing page A, but I don't want to lose the increased organic traffic I now receive.

Does anyone have insight to this or direct me to an already answered question regarding this?

Thanks a ton,

-Josh

[SpectraCal]

Ruth,

Thanks for the advice and help. I'll run analyses of both landing pages and see why this could happening and then continue to work with page B to further optimize it.

-Josh

[RuthBurrReedy]

Linda has a good point: on-page factors are only one element that determines whether a page will rank for a given phrase. Have you changed your internal linking recently? It could be that your site is sending signals that Page B is much more important than Page A, based on how you're linking to each internally. Page B may also have more external links.

One other hypothesis: Google may be deciding that even though Page A targets the keyword phrase more directly, Page B matches the intent of the search better. Take a look at the other pages that rank for that term - are they thematically closer to page A or page B?

I would recommend altering page B to better serve the new search traffic that you're getting from this phrase, rather than attempting to get page A ranking again.

[Linda-Vassily]

It is hard to answer without seeing the pages in question, but there are ranking factors other than on-page that affect position. Maybe page B was less optimized but had a better backlink profile, for example.