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