(Need helps here!) Can homepage and other internal pages (services) rank high together on Google?

[Raymondlee]

Hi Moz community,

Recently I am working on our website's SEO. Our company is a marketing agency. We provide general marketing services and also web design. Here is the content of our homepage and internal pages (specific services).

• Homepage (marketing agency)
• Internal page #1 (XXX marketing service)
• Internal page #2 (YYY marketing service)
• Internal page #3 (web design)

I suggest to my supervisor that we could make some improvement and optimize different keywords for these 4 pages, respectively (homepage, internal page #1 #2 #3). However, my supervisor holds a different point of view that homepage and internal page#3 cannot rank both high for their own keywords because web design is not as related to marketing.

So I did some research and look for some top-ranking marketing agency guys who also offer web design.  I found their internal pages about web design service rank pretty bad for their own web-design-related keywords.

Here are my thoughts and guess (please correct me if I am wrong):

• Google takes everything into account and deems web design to be kind of irrelevant content to the website, so the internal page for web design will not rank high.
• The internal page has so much lower power than the homepage so it got outranked by the guys whose homepages are all about web design and development.

My question is: In above case, can homepage and other internal pages (our services) all rank high together for their own keywords?

I know what I wrote is kind of confusing...But I really need help here and want to solve this problem badly. Really appreciate any help!! Thank you in advance!

Best,

Raymond

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Raymond,

Great question and I think you've summed most of it up correctly with this point:

• The internal page has so much lower power than the homepage so it got outranked by the guys whose homepages are all about web design and development.

To clarify that point though, it's not necessarily that search engines just inherently see the home page as being the most important (this is true to an extent but it's not a massive deal), it's moreso that home pages tend to have the most content and backlinks pointing to them. This is the real reason they tend to carry more strength.

Combine this with the fact that a lot of marketing agencies put a lower priority on getting their web design terms to rank and you've got the situation you're seeing here.

We're a perfect example of this actually. We're a digital marketing agency and rank very well for our SEO terms but until recently haven't really cared to rank for the other services we do since they were of little importance to our business model. A few months back we started pushing another of our services a bit more and those rankings came up from ~ page 5 to page 1/2 so far and climbing.

It's proof that you can rank other pages on your website but also that so many of us rank well for specifically terms because it's all we're really trying to rank for

This isn't just a single anecdote I'm basing my advice on either. We have a client volume into the triple digits and our campaigns are built to rank them for a range of products/services that they offer using specific landing pages for each and we're very successful at doing it. So long as you're not making your home page and a separate landing page target the same terms, there's absolutely no reason why a subpage can't be ranked if done correctly.

Good luck!