Why Your Best Page Is Trapped on Page Three

Page three is not a failure, it is a diagnosis

A page on page three is doing something right. It was crawled, judged relevant and ranked above millions of others. It is also invisible, because almost nobody goes past the first page. Page three is a diagnosis with four possible causes, and they have different cures.

Cause one: the page is thin

Search engines rank pages that demonstrate they know the subject. A page of two hundred words on a topic with established competitors loses because it has less to offer, not because it is wrong.

The cure is depth, not padding. Answer the follow-up question the reader will have. Add the example, the caveat, the number. Two hundred useful words become nine hundred useful words and the page moves.

Cause two: nobody links to it

A page with no external links and no internal links is a page search engines have little reason to trust. It may be the best answer on the internet and rank nowhere, because ranking is partly a popularity contest and you have not entered.

The cure is to make it linkable and to link it yourself. The second half is free: point your own pages at it, in the navigation if it deserves it.

Cause three: it matches the wrong intent

This is the one owners miss, and the second article in this series is entirely about it. A page that teaches when the query wanted a product will rank low, not because it is bad but because it is not what was asked for. The cure is to change what the page is - or to build the page the query actually wants and link the two.

Cause four: it is competing with itself

Two pages on the same site targeting the same phrase will usually both rank badly, because neither gathers the full signal. Search engines pick one, and often pick the weaker. The cure is to choose the stronger, fold the other into it, and redirect. One page at position four beats two at position eleven.

How to tell which one it is

Look at the query the page is closest to. Then:

• Check the length and depth of the pages above it. If they are substantially

longer and more detailed, it is cause one.

• Check whether anything links to it. If nothing does, it is cause two.
• Check whether the top results are the same kind of page. If they are not, it

is cause three.

• Search the phrase and see whether another of your pages also appears. If it

does, it is cause four.

Diagnose before you write. The most common wasted effort in search is rewriting a page whose real problem is that nothing links to it.