SEO Working GREAT! Although Keyword Rankings Only Directing to Home Page.

[Funk-Creative-Media]

Since I've become a fellow MOZer I've seen an increase on my sites and proud to say that ALL of my clients have now accomplished 1st page rankings on at least 2 of their top 3 keywords. Yes, I am as stoked as them.

Although I am a bit worried because as I rank keywords and test them on Google and engines alike all of our rankings direct to the homepage.

I am essentially new to SEO. So as happy as I am to be doing something right I'm worried I'm losing the end user. By having them need to Search our site/menus/blog for the keywords/phrase that got them to us will turn most searchers away. They want the content now. What am I doing wrong?

My pages are pretty specific so I never cared to use rel-canonical's...I dont have duplicate content, other than your typical footer/side bar consistent info. So I'm curious where I've gone wrong.

Little history on my sites: I Use Joomla 2.5 & 3.x. I manage seo details through sh404seo. I've cleaned all duplicates I can up other than what these dynamic cms generate by just using one. I've done fairly well and all my pages rank A for moz's onpage grader for the keyword optimized around.

Any help is appreciate, THANK YOU!

[JaneCopland]

Hi Bryan,

From a generic point of view, not having seen the other sites (the guys above have some great points about the example site given), there are a number of reasons a site's home page might rank instead of its product pages / speciality pages. The most common is that a site is not very strong, but the strongest page on the site (inevitably the home page, bar extreme circumstances like a very popular blog) is just strong enough, and its content is just relevant enough, for Google to want to rank it. This is very common for new websites - Google figures, "this site is great, better rank it for x, y and z queries", but the internal pages don't yet have the authority to rank on their own.

Link development and good linking throughout the site can help this situation change, although there are some established sites that still suffer from it. You'll see this happen for even some competitive queries - at my former agency, we once had a client who ranked well for [car insurance] in one particular country, but it was always the home page, not the car insurance page, that ranked. Changing that balance was a timely process of building authority into the site's deeper pages.

You can also have a situation where a site is accidentally targeting competitive terms with two or more pages, called keyword cannibalisation. This old post is still relevant in regards to how to deal with this.

[Fuel]

Hi Bryan,

After reading this thread and visiting your site, I wanted to point out that (again, as someone who has never been to your site) there are many places that I was expecting to find more information / expecting a hyperlink to another page and I was mistaken.

For example, on the divorce page (http://www.barnumlaw.com/divorce.html) the list (property division, etc) is highlighted in a blue color and made me think I could click for more information. These lists appear throughout the site. It might be a case where if, hypothetically, these specific lower level pages were ranking and people went and did not find the information they were looking for (as happened to me when seeking more information), they bounced off the site, sending negative signals to the search engines. I see that you have google analytics the site so you should be able to breakdown landing pages and bounce rates and work to optimize those pages to be more useful.

Additionally, adding a search function to the site might give you more insight on what people are searching for when they arrive on your site so you can work to 1.) Make sure that information is on the site, if it is relevant to what services your client offers and 2.) Work to make sure that content is optimized for these popular search queries. If there is a trend where many people are searching for a certain law, etc, then perhaps adding a page to the site would be helpful. If it's a more specific query, this could be a good opportunity to add content to the blog on that topic.

Hope that helps.

[kwoolf]

So let's first fix that issue with your FB code:

"Given URL is not allowed by the Application configuration.: One or more of the given URLs is not allowed by the App's settings. It must match the Website URL or Canvas URL, or the domain must be a subdomain of one of the App's domains."

And after running your site on GTMetrix, there's a lot that could be done to improve site performance, and speed is a certainly ranking factor.

Now, on to key words. I imagine you have a lot of them for this site, as your site pertains to many areas of law. Are there any key words you're looking to rank for any particular page? This should have been my first question. Oh, and are you taking about the links that appear in SERPs for key words you're testing? Just want to be clear and not assume anything (like I commonly do here).

Anyway, share some of those key words and pages and I'll see if I can find anything.

[Funk-Creative-Media]

So like I said there are several sites in question. Which Is why I believe its something 'I' have done rather than what Google may be deciphering. But lets do a more newer site of mine in which I'm still actively trying to finish optimizing and design. It was a quick launch site but soared up to first page rankings.

http://www.barnumlaw.com

I'm sure all my sites will have the same issue if we can figure this out here. I'm looking through my sh404seo settings in Joomla. But I dont change any default settings other than omitting categories in link titles.

[kwoolf]

Bryan,

Can you share the site? I imagine you have a lot of content on your homepage(s), or perhaps the sites in question are relatively small. Consider landing pages for some of those key words. If you're selling BBQ ribs and BBQ chicken sandwiches, optimize two separate pages with specific key words for each. In that case, a search for just BBQ will likely lead a visitor to the homepage URL.

On the other hand, Google might have just analyzed traffic to your site and figured out that most people end up on your homepage soon after entering your site from another page. Hard to say, really. Share some more about the specifics so we can take a look.