It’s actually satisfying to know that your website is ranking on your targeted keyword in search engines. But what happens when you discover that the page that you wanted to rank for a particular keyword isn’t the same page that the search engine is ranking till now or what happens when Google ranking wrong page? However, it’s another page of your site. Besides, the content which you wanted your audience to view wasn’t on that page.
Suppose the page doesn’t fit best with what you have expected. But, one thing is clear it’s targeting your audience. So, the entire audience that visits your site from that newfound keyword is not what you want. In general, this type of situation leads to less interaction or a higher bounce rate than initially expected.
But, you don’t have to worry at all, as this problem happens with every website owner and it’s fixable too. So, let’s see how to fix the problem when Google Ranking Wrong Page for a keyword.
5 Tips on What to do When Google Ranking Wrong Page
Read the easy to follow five tips to improve your Google wrong ranking for keywords.
Tip 1: Understand your user perspective
In general terms, User intent is defined as a goal or motive that the person has when they type something on the search bar. In short, it’s a search term that mostly focuses on the user’s focus.
Over the past few years, it becomes vital to ensure that the page you want to rank on a search engine matches user intent. Well, it can further explain as follows-
- Is the user’s main goal is to buy something? (Transactional)
- Or the user wants to find a particular website or blog (Navigational)
- Whether the user looking for a particular answer or any type of helpful information (Informational)
So creating your content as per the user intent is crucial. For instance, if your focus keyword is “best laptop computers” and where you want your product or category page to display or rank at the top of the page. But unfortunately, when you type such a keyword, it shows third-party websites or reviews sites where you can see the comparison of such laptops’ features instead of your product site.
Thus, if you want to make your retail website rank on the top page, you have to shift your focus keyword or research more about your page-related keyword.
Tip 2: Analyse Content
Once you are assured that your content is now matching with the user intent, you can move to your content to check whether it’s relevant according to your page. Well, in such a case you should ask a few questions to yourself.
- Is the primary focus keyword present in the title of the page?
- Have you mentioned your primary keyword in your Meta description?
- Check the length of your content and compare it with Top 10 or Top 20 ranking sites.
- Do your competitor sites use some shared semantic keywords that you need to use on your page?
- Does your page answer questions that your users seek and in such an easily understandable language?
Here are two tools that can help you analyze answers to all the questions you’re asking currently. These tools are SEMrush Writing Assistant and Clearscope.
Tip 3: Check Your Internal Links
Well, links actually help improve your page, and they also tell the search engine that this page is important. So, make sure you get plenty of pages on your website that link back to your page, which you want to improve or rank higher.
You can also try adding 3-5 internal links from particular relevant pages of high authority websites. An easy way to do this just go to Ahrefs, type your domain, and maneuver to “Top Pages.”
It will provide you with in- depth knowledge about which page is most authoritative as per your site. Then, you need to find the most relevant pages and add that link to your target URL.
“A quick tip- Focus on the internal anchor text. You can be cocky here. So, use your focus keyword as the anchor text of an internal link.”
Tip 4: Evaluate Your External Links
Well, the same rule applied in the external link also. Since links inform the search engine that the particular website or page is valuable, if your website has an ample amount of external links directed to the wrong page pointing to the specific keyword, it would affect your entire website.
If such cases happen, then communicate with those sites and ask them to re-link to your correct page.
On the other hand, if your page hasn’t received any external links that direct your website, it would send a message to the search engine that this website or page isn’t valuable. Then, it becomes difficult for you to rank on the search engine. However, it can be fixed by creating backlinks.
Tip 5: Focus On Your User Data
Does your page or website have a high bounce rate? A low click-through rate? Or a terrible conversation rate?
Well, you need to be careful if such things happen on your website. In other words, if users are landing on your website or a relevant page. But, they quickly leave that page or unwilling to navigate to the bottom of the page. Then it would affect your website overall rankings.
So, for that, you have to use Google Analytics or software like Hotstar to know your user data. Hence, you can redesign your page to avoid those problems that your users are generally experiencing.
How To Reduce A Particular Page’s Present Ranking Signals?
Till now, you have seen how to rank your page. Once you successfully manage to rank your page well, you need to downgrade that particular page that unwantedly attracts your target audience.
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Well, this is against SEO teaching techniques, but it’s mandatory as you don’t need to bounce back your audience again. So to fix this issue, you need to ensure that non-relevant page ranking should reduce.
It’s not rocket science. It’s simple as you can remove all the targeted keywords and related terms from your non-relevant page. After that, again restructure your internal linking. So this time, they can point towards your correct page. The same goes for external links as well. You just need to contact some webmasters and ask them to redirect the links to your relevant page again.
In case everything fails, you can also take down your non-relevant page and use a 301 redirect to maneuver from the old site and connect to the page that you wanted users to see.
Even you can create a new page and URL or take the content from that page, so it doesn’t have any link to that non-relevant page. So, it will solve your external links problems. Since any page that points to your non-relevant page would redirect to your relevant page. So your page can rank easily.
But, make sure when you recreate the page, just modify the content so that there won’t be any plagiarism. As such a case, the search engine doesn’t avoid your 301 and easily redirects it to the relevant page. So it’s just like moving from one location to another, and you can continue your ranking to your original page.
Conclusion
It’s a big issue when your page ranks for wrong keywords, which eventually affect your traffic. But, if you apply the right solution, then you can fix such problems too. Further, it is such a great opportunity to create new content and expand your rankings and online presence.