Check your header tags, titles, descriptions, and wording. When doing that, also ensure that your content is around the same reading level and language style as the audience you want to reach.
Look At The Overall Site
Another thing is to consider the site overall.
Having one or two quality pages is good, but what about other topics that work for the same audience and would be interesting for them to read once they finish the page they’re on? This applies to ecommerce, publishers, and everything in between.
Are you using AI and LLMs to create content? You should probably delete that content immediately if you didn’t go in and edit it to have information only a human with experience would know.
If you’re using LLMs to create content, you’re recycling the knowledge already out there versus adding something new. It is the same as scraping four or five sites and using an article spinner to produce the output.
Is there thin content that is also in the category or being recommended? Delete that, too. Same with recommended articles from third parties and ad networks.
Having a couple of good-quality pages is great, but if the person clicks on the next article and it is thin, outdated, or inaccurate, you’re providing a bad experience, and some algorithms may use sitewide classifiers.
Those thin and spammy pages that do not educate and provide solutions impact the high-quality pages.
If all else is equal between you and another site, these low-quality pages could be the deciding factor if your high-quality page makes it to page one and who stays on page two if all else is equal.
The same goes for page and site speed. Yes, they matter, but not that much unless you’re a publisher.
Do Everything Right And You Should Get There
Sometimes, you can do everything right and have the best experience, but Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, or Naver doesn’t bring you up to page one or top positions. Then you magically jump there, as do other pages during a core update.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for moving to the top five positions from page two, but by doing everything right, you should eventually make it there.
Fix the issues above and then keep working on it. Eventually, it pays off, and you’ll likely see your site and pages start hitting page one and going to top positions when you’ve fixed enough.
If you’re on page two, that means your page and your site have some quality that is trustworthy.
Now, it’s a matter of fine-tuning that experience so that it can become a page one result. The above tip should help you diagnose what could be better; once done, it’s a waiting game if your experience is already there. I hope this helps.
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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal