Destruction by slug change

[chainazo]

I made a post about pet-food (this is the actual slug) and my ranking was a mess, but by chance with that same text I got a good ranking in cat food (fluctuating position 5 to 8).

Since I was ranking well in cats I decided to polish the texts (all traces of pets disappeared and everything was focused on cats) and made many other changes, but I could never get past the 4th position (I've been like this for months).

The question is, if I change the slug from pet-food to cat-food, will I completely destroy my ranking?
I've read about the subject and the theoretical answer is yes. But I would like to know if in practice that change is powerful enough to make the ranking drop and perhaps never recover.

Or would it be better to start a page from scratch with the slug cat-food and compete there?

[sanjeevk89]

First, you need to check competitors' ranking in the 1st to 3rd position. Do research work on their content, domain authority, and backlinks.

Second, if you change the URL slug to cat-food, you need to add a 301 redirect to the old slug, i.e. pet-food. Sometimes, Google takes time to transfer all the link values to a new one, and in this, you can lose your current ranking as well.

If the current page is already ranking for the cat-food on the first page, it will be a difficult task to rank another page for the same keywords.

[chainazo]

Done, thanks sanjeevk89