Verify that your audience is finding the pages you are targeting for specific keywords

We don’t get to decide which page on our sites Google’s algorithm ranks for the keywords that matter to our businesses. Sometimes the keyword we wish we were ranking for—for example—a product page is actually ranking for a blog post about the product...or vice versa.

It’s important to know which pages Google refers users to on your site so you can ensure those users are seeing the correct content for a keyword, having a good user experience, and moving through your desired customer journey.

You can use preferred URLs in Conductor to make sure the that the page you want to rank for a keyword is the content. Before you can report preferred URLs in Conductor, you'll need to add them to the keywords you track.

1. In Conductor, go to the Keywords↗️ report.
2. To help focus the data, choose a relevant or important keyword group from the Select Keyword Groups filter at the top. You might choose a group of keywords based on an important product line, current campaign, or any other set of keywords you want to investigate whether your preferred page is ranking.
   
3. In the table, click the header in the Preferred URL column to sort the table to show keywords that do have your preferred URL as the highest ranked result (those that do have a green check mark in this column).
   
   These are the keywords that are successfully. You can investigate whether the content is structured or written in a way that your other pages are not. Try replicating those aspects in your less successful content.
4. Click the header of the Preferred URL column again to sort the table to show the keywords for which your preferred URLs are not ranking. Consider the following factors:
   • If you are ranking well for the keyword (top 20) and your page is driving traffic, work with what Google is giving you instead of trying to force the algorithm to rank a different page. Consider links you can add or changes you can make to the ranking page to ensure your customer sees the content you want them to—and progresses on your desired customer journey.
   • If you are ranking for the keyword, but not particularly well (21-50), consider if there are optimizations you can make to the page to both improve the keyword’s ranking and put the correct content in front of your users.
   • If you are not ranking well for the keyword (51 or below), you can still look to optimize the current ranking page. However, it will most likely be easier to optimize your preferred URL and attempt to make that page the ranking URL. You can also look to canonicalize or redirect the current ranking URL to the preferred URL to reinforce which URL should rank for Google’s.

What's next?

You can't tell Google what to rank from your site, but you can learn from what Google is telling you. By tracking your pages' performance for the keywords that matter to you, and carefully reviewing your preferred URLs, you can better optimize your content over time.