Hi Adrian,
Thanks for getting in touch with us.
It just means your category archives have more authority than your single posts. That is why they are showing up for your keyword even without you optimising them.
Please note that ranking on Google depends on so much more than just your on-page optimization. You could have the perfect article and still struggle to break the top 10 in SERPs. Here are some of the factors Google considers when ranking you:
1. Your website’s authority
2. Your content’s quality and how better it is than the other article currently ranking.
3. How competitive the keyword is.
4. How many backlinks you have and if they are better than what the other guys ranking for that keyword have.
5. Your website’s crawlability.
6. Frequency of new content and content updates.
7. So much more that there is a dedicated blog post on it by Brian Dean 🙂
https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
I would recommend that you keep at it and work on acquiring more links to your single posts to break into the top SERPs and rank above your own category archives. One of the easiest methods for doing this is by building more internal links to the single posts.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Hello,
I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?
Thank you.
Hi Adrian,
You have to make sure you are not targeting the categories for the same keywords you are targeting single posts for. You would risk keyword cannibalization:
https://moz.com/blog/identify-and-tackle-keyword-cannibalisation-in-2019
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Hello,
Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.
If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you.
