Why does one page rank while a similar page doesn't?

[mukunig]

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.

[MattRoney]

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!

[mukunig]

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.

[Mike.Bean]

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

[mukunig]

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?

[Mike.Bean]

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