You may have noticed before that when you search for something on Google, there are two pages from the same domain that appear back-to-back. This is a concept called dual rankings, which simply means two different pages from the same domain are grouped together in the search engine results page. This post will examine how dual rankings work, why you should care about it and how to get your pages to rank in such a way.

Take, for example, the search results for the word ‘cooking’. Ranked #2 and #3 are both www.cooking.com pages. This means that both web pages are optimized for the keyword ‘cooking’.

The major reason why Google would have no problem grouping these two pages together is because they are both deemed as quality pages. The one that’s ranked #2 already ranks steady in that position and #3 would have been near the top 10 results, likely in the top 20-30.

It would be apparent that one should care about dual rankings because often do people click on the first page of search results. As you may know, the number of clicks on the search results decreases with ranking, so having the latter of both pages reach a good position in the top page is extremely important. What you may not know is that getting the second page to rank highly as a dual ranking takes minimal effort, which is why it can be a good idea to identify potential pages for dual ranking. Not only that, this is a good opportunity to greatly improve the position of a webpage that ranks, let’s say, 15 to 3, instead of 15 to 14.

The logic is simple, the web page that ranks lower already has content relevant to the keyword, therefore spending some time promoting the web page with keywords similar as the higher ranked page will let Google know it’s there. Put simply, all that’s needed is some link building for the latter page using keywords for which you wish to achieve a dual ranking.