@ksanyok5Two of your pages may be competing for the same Google query. A 10-minute check
One pattern we keep seeing when we look at small sites: a query gets decent impressions, but the site sits on position 15 to 25 and never climbs. Often the reason is not the content or the links. Google is switching between two of the site's own pages for that query, and neither one collects enough signal to rank.
How to check it in Search Console: open Performance, set the last 3 months, click a query you care about, then switch to the Pages tab. If two or more of your URLs show impressions for that one query, they are splitting it. Typical pairs are a blog post and a service page, an old and a new version of the same guide, or a category page and a product page.
What to do: pick one page as the owner of the query (usually the one that converts, not the one with more impressions). Merge the useful parts of the other page into it and 301 the old URL, or keep both but give them clearly different intents and titles. Then point internal links for that phrase only to the owner. Do this before you spend anything on links, because links to a split page get split too.
SEO Radar flags these pairs automatically, but the manual version above works fine on any site. Have you found pages on your own site fighting each other, and did merging them help?
Comments2
A blog post and a service page quietly splitting the same Google search is probably sitting on most small business sites right now. Could you share the number behind "we keep seeing": out of the sites SEO Radar has scanned, what share had at least one pair like this, and how far did the owner page usually climb after the merge?
Fair question, and I don't want to put a number on it that I haven't counted properly. "We keep seeing" comes from going through client and prospect sites by hand, not from an aggregate query over all Radar scans yet. I'll pull both numbers from the scan data (share of sites with at least one split query that has real impressions, and where the owner page sits 4 to 6 weeks after the merge) and post them in this thread once they're done.
2 comments
A blog post and a service page quietly splitting the same Google search is probably sitting on most small business sites right now. Could you share the number behind "we keep seeing": out of the sites SEO Radar has scanned, what share had at least one pair like this, and how far did the owner page usually climb after the merge?
Fair question, and I don't want to put a number on it that I haven't counted properly. "We keep seeing" comes from going through client and prospect sites by hand, not from an aggregate query over all Radar scans yet. I'll pull both numbers from the scan data (share of sites with at least one split query that has real impressions, and where the owner page sits 4 to 6 weeks after the merge) and post them in this thread once they're done.