Very different results for 2 different pages

[brianvest]

My site is samhillbands.com

If I search “Book a band in Charlottesville” - This page is returned #1 out of 427,000

https://www.samhillbands.com/bands-by-location/Charlottesville-VA

However if I search "Book a band in Atlanta" -

I do have a result on page 1 out of 16,700,000

https://www.samhillbands.com/bands/retreat-band

But the corresponding /bands-by-location/ page is nowhere to be found:

https://www.samhillbands.com/bands-by-location/Atlanta-GA

Thoughts on what I can do?

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Brian,

Andy's suggestions are good ones, and I'll just add to this that your Charlottesville page exists in a much less competitive market than your Atlanta page, by dint of population alone. Barring any technical issues with the website, it may be that Google simply finds your bands by location page to be too weak to compete in Atlanta.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Brian,

Without doing more digging, it is a bit difficult to say exactly what is going on, but this is normally down to page and search intent.

What this means, is that Google will return what it thinks is the best page for the query (Rankbrain probably doing its stuff) and out of the box, you have little say in this.

However, you can structure your site by building an internal link structure where you give signals to Google, telling them which are your important 'hub' pages. Just make sure you are setup for this because you don't just want to start adding lots of random links that make no sense, as this will work against you.

What it sounds like is that the /bands-by-location/ page doesn't benefit the searcher, so Google is going to try and match a page based on search query and location.

Have a read of this article on building internal links and why they are so important.

-Andy