Why does one page rank while a similar page doesn't?
-
We have a blog post (actually several of them that have the same SEO characteristics) that brings a fair amount of traffic to our site (relatively speaking), and according to Google Webmaster Tools it averages in the top 10 in SERPs for various terms. This page has no external links to it, and very few internal links pointing to it. When I run Moz's On-Page Grader for the various keywords it ranks for, the page get's an F on all of them. It was not optimized for any keyword, and it isn't our best content; it was a blog post written a few years ago and forgotten about and was never promoted in any way. The topic does happen to be about something that people search for frequently. According to the keyword difficulty tool, all of the keywords it ranks for have 40-45% difficulty.
We have lots of other pages on our site that we have tried to optimize and that get A's and B's in On-Page Grader, that have both internal (from the home page and main menu) and external links pointing at them, etc, but they don't rank well at all. Keyword difficulty for these keywords is in the same range, from 37 - 53%.
Why does this one page rank so well when the other pages don't?
Additionally, we have been looking at a competitor who has a page that ranks #1 in universal results for numerous keywords according to SEMRush, yet the page gets an F On-page Grader for those keywords. The page has 3 links to it, all from the same domain and it has a very low domain and page authority. The Domain Authority of this page is 47 and the page authority is 33 according to Open Site Explorer (compared with our DA of 30, and PA of 1), and the social metrics are a bit higher than ours, but neither has a lot (they may have 15 likes to our 10). Why does this page rank so well for them? How can we get our Page Authority higher?
Thanks for any and all help.
-
Hi Greg!
Keep in mind that the On-Page Grader won't really tell you how likely a page is to rank; it'll only tell you how well the page follows best practices when targeting a particular keyword. On-page optimization is only so strong as a ranking signal, and is _really _unlikely to be the factor that determines rankings. It can definitely provide an extra push though!
There are a couple Moz tools I'd recommend checking out to help figure this out. The first is Landing Pages, which intended to help workaround Google's (not provided) keyword data. It'll let you know which tracked keywords are most likely to be sending traffic to which pages, as well as whether keywords you're not tracking are also sending traffic (though it can't tell you which ones).
The second is the Keyword Difficulty Tool, which can run a report called a Full SERP Analysis that can tell you which factors are likely helping the top 10 results for any given keyword to rank. It might provide some insight. Cyrus Shepard made a pretty great video on it here.
Lastly, we've got an article here on Page Authority and how to raise it, but it pretty much comes down to "work on your link profile."
I hope that helps!
-
Thanks Mike. I'm not trying to figure out what keywords drive traffic to our site (we use Google Webmaster Tools and SEMRush to try to get that information), but rather why one page ranks well when others don't. The pages that don't rank well are better optimized than the content that does rank, and we don't understand why. Any help on that would be most appreciated.
-
Greg,
Google taking out their keyword information is quite upsetting. Google webmaster tools however gives you a decent report of top traffic keywords to your site. And SEMrush does a good job as well. You could just pay one months worth to figure this out and pause your campaign until needed again.
Thanks,
- Mike Bean
-
Thanks for replying Mike. When looking at Analytics the page is reached via organic search, and it is a top entrance page. Unfortunately that doesn't tell me why it is ranking so well for various keywords, or why other pages aren't ranking for keywords they have been optimized for. Or am I just missing something obvious?
-
Hello,
I would suggest looking at Google Analytics for your own pages to figure this out. There are many possible ways for people to get to your page and Analytics may show you the exact metric.
If one page is getting traffic through any source it will help it rank.
Thanks,
- Mike Bean
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
A tale of two pages - one ranks great and one doesn't - but they are set up the same way
Hi everyone, First time poster 🙂 I will keep it simple - we have two pages on our website that are set up in the same way (or so we think) but achieve vastly different search engine rankings. We have spent weeks trying to figure out why this should be the case, but to no avail. Perhaps you guys can do a little diagnosis and see what we are missing: for search term: used machine tools www.machinetoolsonline.co.za/buy-used-machine-tools Is working well for us. for search term: new machine tools www.machinetoolsonline.co.za/buy-new-machine-tools is a disaster 😞 In fact, Google ranks our home page which is optimised for other terms, higher. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Delorentis210 -
How do i fix the problem of having 2 url's splitting my rankings?
please excuse my noobness. i have a nice site, www.soundsenglish.com which I built from scratch and learned by doing. It has lots of nice content and it does ok, my rankings are woeful mostly cos of all the mistakes i made building it...i'll fix that stuff. This stuff i don't know about. from my adsense i get 2 listings www.soundsenglish.com and soundsenglish.com wierdly the second one gets consistently higher paying ads although most of the visitors come through the first but they are both the same landing page same content -as far as i can tell. when i try to find rankings, use the seo tools etc i get diferent scores, so whatever it is, it is splitting the sites - can't be a good thing. i have no idea why this happens and i have some inkling that maybe i need something to do with cannonical redirects or maybe a 301 redirect. both of which i have little idea how to do. If that isn't enough naive blundering about for you, i have a little more... it occurs to me that this prpoblem is probably happening with every page on my site, i.e. the 'juice ' is not getting credited onto that one page. this surely means cannonical redirects but even afterreading up on them idon't quite get it. or rather ido but idon;t get how to apply it to my context.
Moz Pro | | soundsenglish0 -
Concerned About Individual Pages
Okay. I've setup a campaign for www.site.com and given a list of keywords. So after the initial crawl we'll have some results. What I'm looking for tho is how do individual pages on my site rank for the list of keywords given. And then be able to go to a screen in seomoz with data for that particular page with recommendations and stuff like that. Is this what's going to happen or do I need to create a campaign for each url i want to track? If all will work as I'd like in the example above, should I then add the second list of keywords that some other pages should rank for? Will it get to be a big mess or can I relate the keywords to pages in some way? It seems like what I'm looking for is what this program should be... Thanks!
Moz Pro | | martJ0 -
Google shutting down Rank Tracking Software? - Raven and AHREFS close down ranking results.
Hi, I was wondering if other people had noticed the (very sudden) closing down of the ranking tools for both Raven and Ahrefs - both of which were major parts of their software. Given the sudden and synced timing my guess is that Google is throwing its weight around and banking on the doors of companies offering ranking software with the threat of a fat lawsuite! What is everyone else using for their rank checking ? Will this impact SEOMOZ ranking results ?
Moz Pro | | James770 -
Why Rank Tracker don't work for 2 days?
It dosen't work just keep reloading and i get error "unable to retreave your ranking" or something like that. Anyone have some answear?
Moz Pro | | sasa0370 -
"Issue: Duplicate Page Content " in Crawl Diagnostics - but sample pages are not related to page indicated with duplicate content
In the crawl diagnostics for my campaign, the duplicate content warnings have been increasing, but when I look at the sample pages that SEOMoz says have duplicate content, they are completely different pages from the page identified. They have different Titles, Meta Descriptions and HTML content and often are different types of pages, i.e. product page appearing as having duplicate content vs. a category page. Anyone know what could be causing this?
Moz Pro | | EBCeller0 -
How does moztrust compare with google page rank?
I have a trial Seomoz membership. I've been comparing my site to some of the competitor websites and Im confused about the moztrust vs google page rank. For instance some of my competitors have higher moztrust but my site has a higher google page rank. Isn't moztrust meant to duplicate google pagerank?? Why would these vary so much?
Moz Pro | | blac67890 -
Does anyone know of a crawler similar to SEOmoz's RogerBot?
As you probably know SEOmoz had some hosting and server issues recently, and this came at a terrible time for me... We are in the middle of battling some duplicate content and crawl errors and need to get a fresh crawl of some sites to test things out before we are hit with the big one? Before I get a million thumbs downs- I love and will continue to use SEOmoz, just need something to get me through this week ( or until Roger is back! )!
Moz Pro | | AaronSchinke1