Optimized Page Not Ranking for Head Term
-
We have a primary donation page that we've tried to position well for the term 'Donate' and some of its longer-tailed derivatives.
The page has plenty of high-quality backlinks and internal links, and hasn't had any manual actions taken against it. The backlink profile is fairly good from what I can tell, definitely not mainly spam.
The issue is that it doesn't rank for 'Donate', at all really. For 'Donate Online' and 'Donate Canada', it ranks roughly #3-4 across major Canadian cities, but we're not even in the top 100 for 'Donate'. There are pages and domains that are way less optimized, with much weaker backlink profiles, that are ranking well ahead of us. It's not a noindex or robots problem, as the page ranks fine for many other terms. We also have a strong domain with around 660k backlinks according to MajesticSEO.
Here's the URL in question: http://www.redcross.ca/donate
I'm hoping someone can help us diagnose what could be going wrong with this term specifically and how we can get this page into the SERPs where it belongs. Any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks in advance!
-
You're probably not using google.ca. It ranks slightly lower on google.com.
-
Hi Keri,
See my response to Andy below. I agree that the keyword isn't essential, and not even that great, I'm just more curious as to why; actually ranking it for the term isn't as critical as my initial question made it sound
-
Hi Andy,
I fully agree with both of you. I should've prefaced the question by saying that this isn't a big issue on my end, just something I found very strange. Still hoping to diagnose it, just so I know how to deal with the problem if it comes up down the road with a more relevant intent-heavy keyword. Sounds like the consensus might be 'it's just too broad.'
-
Hi Josh,
Keri has asked the same question I was thinking about when reading this.
One thing to consider around this is that SEO isn't just about getting people to your site - it's about getting the right people. I personally would be looking for phrases like "charitable donations", "charity donations", "donate to charity", etc. Those people that are searching for those phrases have one clear action in mind, whereas "donate" could be anything, including people just looking for general information.
-Andy
-
I'm going to answer your question with another question. What kind of value does a referral for 'donate' give you? Is such a broad keyword one that is going to bring you in the right type of person, or are you better off building content regarding the terms that convert better or target more qualified searchers?
-
Personalization?
I have you at 5-6
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
-
Ranking without use of keywords on page & without use of matching anchor text??
Howdy folks. So, here is a dilemma. One of competitors of ours is somehow ranking for a keyphrase "houston chronicle obituaries" without any usage of these keywords on the page, without any full or partial anchor text match ("chronicle" is not used anywhere). The rest of competitiors' rankings make sense. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Taken a canonical off a page to let it rank with new unique content - what more can I do?
A week ago, I took a canonical off of a page that was pointing to the homepage for a very big, generic search term for my brand as we felt that it could have been harming our rankings (as it wasn't a true canonical page). A week in and our rankings for the term have dropped 7 positions out of page 1 and the page we want to rank instead is nowhere to be seen. Do I hang fire? As such a big search term, it's affecting traffic, but I don't want to make any rash decisions. Here's a bit more info: For arguments sake, let's call the search term we're going after 'Boots', with the URL where the canonical was placed of /boots. The canonical went to the root domain as we sell, well... boots. At the time, the homepage was ranking for Boots on page 1 and we wanted to change this so that the Boots page ranked for that term... all logical right? We did the following: Took off mentions of Boots from meta on the homepage and made sure it was optimised for on the boots page. Took the canonical off of /boots. Used GSC to fetch & ask Google to recrawl "/boots". Resubmitted the sitemap. Do I hang fire on running back to the safety of ranking for boots on the homepage? Do I risk keyword cannibalisation by adding the search terms back to the homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kelly_Edwards0 -
Glossary/Terms Page - What is the best way?
We have a glossary section on our website with hundreds of terms. At the moment we have it split into letters, e.g. there one page with all the terms starting with A, another for B etc.. I am conscious that this is not the best way to do things as not all of these pages are being indexed, and the traffic we get to these pages is very low. Any suggestions on what would be the best way to improve this? The 2 ideas I have at the moment are Have every term on a separate page, but ensuring there is enough copy for that term Leave as is, but have the URL change once a user scrolls down the page. E.g. the first page would be www.website.com/glossary/a/term-1 then once the user scrolls past this terms and onto the next one the URL would change to www.website.com/glossary/a/term-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Best way to improve page rank
I notice many small business sites seems to have a page rank of 3,4, or 5 which don't appear to be doing a great deal of SEO on their websites. i.e these are very basic sites with a little static content that rarely changes, no blogs or particular links. Does having a high page rank still mean your will achieve better search engine positions? whats the best way to improve page rank for small business sites? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
How do I increase rankings when the indexed page is the homepage?
Hi Forum, This is a two-part question. The first is: "what may be the cause of some rank declines?" and the second is "how do I bring them back up when the indexed page is the homepage?" Over the last week I noticed some declines in several of my top keywords, many of which point to the site's homepage. The site itself is an eCommerce site, which had less visits last week than normal (holidays it seems, since the data jibes with key dates). Can a decline in traffic cause ranking declines? Any other ideas of where to look? Secondly, for those keywords that link to the homepage, how do we bring these back up since a homepage can't be optimized for every single keyword? We sell yoga products and can't have a homepage that is optimized for keywords like "yoga mat," "yoga blocks," "yoga pilates clothing," and several others, as these are our category pages' keywords. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0 -
What causes internal pages to have a page rank of 0 if the home page is PR 5?
The home page PageRank is 5 but every single internal page is PR 0. Things I know I need to address each page has 300 links (Menu problem). Each article has 2-3 duplicates caused from the CMS working on this now. Has anyone else had this problem before? What things should I look out for to fix this issue. All internal linking is follow there is no page rank sculpting happening on the pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBrent0 -
Well Ranked National Site - Need Local Rankings
We are a virtual company doing business in 30 states nationwide. All our business is done via the phone, fax, email and express mail. Back in 2008 I optimized our small 8 page website for our key terms and was able to rank the site #1 nationally for our main keywords. (I did a 6 month consulting gig for the company). The site remained #1 in Google until last year when some serious competitors entered the space and knocked us down to the middle of page one. Then with the Panda update #1 & #2 we have seen our traffic drop 50% mostly due to not receiving the City + Keywords rankings any more. I have now been hired full time to bring us back but my question is this Do I need to build out city specific pages on the existing website? Do I need to buy keyword specific domains and create microsites? Do a combination of both? I would love to do both but I have to prioritize my efforts. Any thoughts would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FidelityOne0