Is ranking for this keyword important to you?

If your page isn’t ranking in the top 20 for its target keyword, it’s probably going to take a lot of time and effort to crack the first page. After all, it’s usually harder to boost a page by 20+ positions than it is by just one or two.

For that reason, you need to decide whether the effort is really worth the reward—and that means asking yourself how important ranking for this keyword is for your business.

If the keyword is not particularly important…

Plug the page into Google Search Console to see if it’s attracting any organic traffic.

Excerpt of Top pages report results

If it is attracting organic traffic and you want to keep it, leave the page as is and exclude it from future content audits.

If it isn’t attracting organic traffic, follow this process:

Affiliate marketing whatsapp number list has a simple premise. Just like Batman and Robin, vendors team up with affiliate marketers for mutual gain, making it a win-win for many business owners.

Flowchart showing process for pages not attracting organic traffic

Note that if you’re redirecting the page, you should redirect it to a similar page (e.g., /link-building-tactics/ → /link-building/).

TIP

It’s also best practice to update internal links after you delete a page. Here’s how to find these links using Ahrefs’ Site Audit (you can use this for free with an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account):

Crawl your site

Go to the Link Explorer tool

Enter the URL of the page you just deleted in the search box

Set the dropdown to “Target URL”

You’ll then see the locations of all internal links to that page:

Link explorer report results

If the keyword is important…

You need to figure out why the page is not ranking and take action. Often, this will come down to grossly mismatched search intent—at least in part. If that’s the case, you’ll probably have to go back to the drawing board and rewrite the content from scratch.

However, there could be other reasons the page isn’t ranking, such as a lack of backlinks, a SERP dominated by well-known competitors, or something else entirely. For that reason, if you’re not sure why it isn’t ranking, check out our step-by-step guide to ranking higher on Google.