Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages
-
Hi everyone!
I've noticed that many of our clients have pages addressing specific queries related to specific services on their websites, but that the Home Page is increasingly showing as the "ranking" page.
For example, a plastic surgeon we work with has a page specifically talking about his breast augmentation procedure for Miami, FL but instead of THAT page showing in the search results, Google is using his home page. Noticing this across the board. Any insights? Should we still be optimizing these specific service pages? Should I be spending time trying to make sure Google ranks the page specifically addressing that query because it SHOULD perform better?
Thanks for the help.
Confused SEO :/, Ricky Shockley
-
Hi Ricky,
This one is always a tough question to answer. It depends on a number of factors, not least of which being your vertical but it will take some creative thinking for sure.\
Unfortunately it isn't something I can even give you broad suggestions on. The questions you need to answer are "who would want to see our services pages?" and once you're comfortable you've got the answer to that, ask "where would they find it helpful to stumble across this page?". It could be an industry-relevant website where your product is a great fit, maybe a relevant forum where someone is literally asking for what your page covers etc.
This is why it's so important to make all of your landing pages genuinely helpful - if the current answer to the first question is "nobody would want to see it, it's terrible" then that should be priority #1 Build something link-worthy and reach out to those niches.
Don't forget good old fashioned competitor link analysis here either. You may find nothing directly in their link profiles but it might spark an idea - I know it's happened to me plenty of times!
-
Hey guys,
Good advice, thank you! My navigation is already pretty flat (as flat as it can be) and I certainly understand the concept of links to deeper pages...but how in the WORLD do you build quality links to a service page?
Almost every link opportunity (sponsorship, directory, curated lists of providers, PR hits etc.) seem to funnel to the home page for local biz in my experience.
Thanks again,
Ricky
-
I have to agree on the link building suggestion. Often when I've heard folks complain about this issue it ends up being due to a dramatically stronger link profile for the home page. If you don't have relevant links pointing to the landing pages, it's quite likely the on-page optimization alone won't be enough.
-
Hi Ricky,
More often than not, when we see this from a new-to-us client, it's because their previous SEO provider put some content on their homepage and drove 100% of the links there but did nothing for the other landing pages.
If you're comfortable dropping your URL in here I'd be happy to take a closer look, but if this is the case for your site, I'd suggest starting by boosting the content on each of your landing pages (to give you an idea, our internal expectation is 1500+ words of quality content per landing page, styled so it isn't a wall of text) and revise your upage titles, meta descriptions and headings as well.
Working on building some links to these pages will also help out quite a bit. Basically, the common mistake is to almost over-optimise the home page, ignore the rest and wonder why it's only the home page that ranks
Similarly, make sure your nav is as flat as possible and links directly to these landing pages rather than just from a broader "services" page or something.
-
Hi Deacyde,
I appreciate the reply but I think you misunderstood my initial question. We've already done this and have services pages properly broken out and optimized for different procedures, but we find that Google is increasingly using the HOME page as the ranking page for service terms even though the home page doesn't mention the service at all.
Thanks,
Ricky
-
Homepages in general do this because we as people put forth the meat of the site on the homepage, sometimes it works for us but often in the SEO world it works against us. Homepages should be optimized for the brand name and keywords related to the company or person, almost like a lighthearted about us page without specifics.
Then you place the meat on the service or product pages, so they have the optimized keywords to signal to crawlers that this page is best suited in case someone searches this keyword.
I'm actually redesigning a site right now because their older site was basically targeting all their keywords on the homepage via product listings and summaries of those products, even though the product category pages had great content that was more indepth and relevant, the homepage is also naturally the highest page rank of the site, so seems to get chosen over lesser ranked pages for keywords they both have.
Take another look at your site and maybe list the primary and secondary keywords you'd want each page to rank for, and make sure those keywords are correlated.
The Plastic Surgeon example for keyword targeting would be:
Homepage - **Surgeon's Name, Company, Florida Based, Plastic Surgery Professionals ( etc ) **
Surgeon Service Page - Miami, FL Plastic Surgeons, breast augmentation, plastic surgery breast augmentations, And other longtail keywords related to this niche.
So when both user's goto the page from serps they stay and convert and when crawlers go through, they find the meat of a search query on the page you want them to find it on.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Home Page Being Indexed / Referral URLs /
I have a few questions related to home page URLs being indexed, canonicalization, and GA reporting... 1. I can view the home page by typing in domain.com , domain.com/ and domain.com/index.htm There are no redirects and it's canonicalized to point to domain.com/index.htm -- how important is it to have redirects? I don't want unnecessary redirects or canonical tags, but I noticed the trailing slash can sometimes be typed in manually on other pages, sometimes not. 2. When I do a site search (site:domain.com), sometimes the HP shows up as "domain.com/", never "domain.com/index.htm" or "domain.com", and sometimes the HP doesn't show up period. This seems to change several times a day, sometimes within 15 minutes. I have no idea what is causing it and I don't know if it has anything to do with #1. In a perfect world, I would ask for the /index.htm to be dropped and redirected to .com/, and the canonical to point to .com/ 3. I've noticed in GA I see / , /index.htm, and a weird Google referral URL (/index.htm?referrer=https://www.google.com/) all showing up as top pages. I think the / and /index.htm is because I haven't setup a default URL in GA, but I'm not sure what would cause the referrer. I tracked back when the referrer URL started to show up in the top pages, and it was right around the time they moved over to https://, so I'm not sure what the best option is to remove that. I know this is a lot - I appreciate any insight anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | DigMS0 -
Why are crawlers not picking up these pages?
Hi there, I've been asked to audit a new subdomain for a travel company. It's all a bit messy, so it's going to take some time to remedy. However, one thing I couldn't understand was the low number of pages appearing in certain crawlers. The subdomain has many pages. A homepage, category pages then product pages. Unfortunately, tools like Screaming Frog and xml-sitemaps.com are only picking up 19 pages and I can't figure out why. Google has so far indexed around 90 pages - this is by no means all of them, but that's probably because of the new domain and lack of sitemap etc. After looking at the crawl results, only the homepage and category (continent pages) are showing. So all the product pages are not. for example, tours.statravel.co.uk/trip/Amsterdam_Kings_Day_(Start_London_end_London)-COCCKDM11 is not appearing in the crawl results. After reviewing the source code, I can't see anything that would prevent this page being crawled. Am I missing something? At the moment, the crawl should be picking up around 400+ product pages, but it's not picking up any. Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Advice on improving ecommerce product detail pages to rank better in google search results.
Hi all, I run an ecommerce website, not a great ranked site, however i want to try and improve the product detail pages. To do this, i am first going to focus on 1 page (this one: http://goo.gl/eS62SU) If i type the product code directly into google.co.uk search i am on the 8th page (see https://www.google.co.uk/#q=hac-hfw2220r-z&start=70) which is a bit poor to say the least. I see this kind of thing for a lot of my products. Hence, i am going to see if over the next month or two i can get this one page moving up the rankings purely with on page optimisation. I would like to ask a couple of things: 1. Is there anything that jumps out at you as to why that product detail page could NOT ever rank well, i.e some code / set up of page etc that prevents google ranking it 2. Any advice you could give that might improve that page in rankings for its product code. FYI - I can not change the dynamic URL, I only have control over such things as product name / summary / features / spec etc any advice welcome
Technical SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
My blog page isn't ranking in Google
Hi, I noticed that my blog page on my site isn't in Google when i search for full URL link http://www.asggutter.com/blog/ instead i see page that isn't even working asggutter.com/sitemap.xml screen shot http://screencast.com/t/6OVFLwL8nTL How i can i fix that. Thanks
Technical SEO | | tonyklu0 -
According to 1 of my PRO campaigns - I have 250+ pages with Duplicate Content - Could my empty 'tag' pages be to blame?
Like I said, my one of my moz reports is showing 250+ pages with duplicate content. should I just delete the tag pages? Is that worth my time? how do I alert SEOmoz that the changes have been made, so that they show up in my next report?
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Why is our page not visible in Google-ranking? www.loseweight.com.
using Wordpress as platform. Using the URL gets into the site,- but seems to be non-existent for public... No comments at all, seems to be "invisible"?
Technical SEO | | gewi0 -
Is it better to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Is it better for SEO to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Technical SEO | | CustomOnlineMarketing0 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10