An old page is ranking for a keyword, but I'd prefer my new page to rank

Question

I recently created a page on my website with compelling content and proper SEO. Now, about 10 days later, I realize that I had another page targeting the same keyword that is a few years old. The old page is not optimized but it's ranking in Google because it's old.

What should I do for the new page to rank?

P.S. A while ago, I wanted to merge two old pages. So I moved the content from one page to the another, deleted the first one and redirected to the one with the merged content. I never recovered from that. Never ranked for that keyword again. So I'm really afraid of deleting old pages.

Answer 1

If the old page has decent content - i.e. it's not duplicating what you've put on your new page, but it complements it - interlinking the two articles could help. For example, on the old article, add a "You might also like..." section that links to the new article (and one or two others if you have a couple of other relevant but not identical posts). Socially sharing the new page may also help a bit, as will linkbuilding.

If it turns out you don't need or want two separate pages - perhaps because the old content is out of date, or the two pages are just too similar - update the old page with the new content, delete the new page, and redirect the new page URL to the old URL. This preserves any incoming links you have going to that page, and also shows search engines you're continuing to improve existing content, which they tend to reward with rankings better than new content - except for certain types of queries, such as news. (If a search engine thinks a searcher may want the latest information, it will rank newly-created content higher.)