Getting individual website pages to rank for their targeted terms instead of just the home page
-
Hi Everyone,
There is a pattern which I have noticed when trying to get individual pages to rank for the allocated targeted terms when I execute an SEO campaign and would been keen on anyones thoughts on how they have effectively addressed this.
Let me try and explain this by going through an example:
Let's say I am a business coach and already have a website where it includes several of my different coaching services. Now for this SEO campaign, I'm looking to improve exposure for the clients "business coaching" services. I have a quick look at analytics and rankings and notice that the website already ranks fairly well for that term but from the home page and not the service page.
I go through the usual process of optimising the site (on-page - content, meta data, internal linking) as well as a linkbuilding campaign throughout the next couple of month's, however this results in either just the home page improving or the business page does improve, but the homepage's existing ranking has suffered, therefore not benefiting the site overall.
My question: If a term already ranks or receives a decent amount of traffic from the home page and not from the page that its supposed to, why do you think its the case and what would you be your approach to try shift the traffic to the individual page, without impacting the site too much?. Note: To add the home page keyword target term would have been updated?
Thanks,
Vahe
-
Do you still link to the homepage using anchor text containing the keywords you're talking about? Is the service page linked on every page (as I guess the homepage would be)? Have you analysed the backlink profile for both pages and broken it down by site and anchor text?
The homepage is the most visited page on most of the sites I work on, so I wouldn't see this as a problem, only if you have a keyword cannibilisation issue.
-
Hi Alex,
Thanks for the response. I should have clarified to mentioned that the home page keyword target for the home page would be updated. The issue is that the home page get's the bulk of the traffic and keywords, which makes me think that it's an internal linking issue. Ur thoughts?
-
In the majority of cases, each individual page on a website should be targeting unique keywords. If I was you (if it's not too late) and you're getting traffic and conversions from it, I'd keep the homepage optimised for "business coaching" and target the other pages with another term (for your example page, maybe something closely related to "business coaching"). Read up on keyword cannibilisation.
The search engines will rank whatever page they think is most appropriate for a particular term. So if you have been committing keyword cannibilisation that could explain why. The homepage probably has a higher Page Authority than the subpage so this will naturally give it a boost over other pages targeted to the same phrase.
If you don't want the homepage to rank for that term, replace the term on the homepage with something else and hope for the best that the other page will permanently replace it. Also keep the Penguin update in mind with regards to any link building and over optimised onpage tactics.
-
Hi Vahe
I hope Below 2 Links will help you :
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/7-simple-deep-linking-tactics-you-ought-to-use/43236/
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 Disappears From Google - But Rest of Site Still Ranked
As title suggests we are running into a serious issue of the home page disapearing from Google search results whilst the rest of the site still remains. We search for it naturally cannot find a trace, then use a "site:" command in Google and still the home page does not come up. We go into web masters and inspect the home page and even Google states that the page is indexable. We then run the "Request Indexing" and the site comes back on Google. This is having a damaging affect and we would like to understand why this issue is happening. Please note this is not happening on just one of our sites but has happened to three which are all located on the same server. One of our brand which has the issue is: www.henweekends.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Why is my website not ranking? Has A grade on-site from Moz.
I have a website that I am trying to get to up the SERPs. However the site isn't appearing in the search - even when I search for the business name. The site is http://www.jl-engineering.com/ The keyword targeted is DPF Cleaning. Could anyone explain to me why the site isn't showing at all - and how to fix this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWD.Advertising0 -
Weird rankings on my website, can't figure it out
Hey guys, One of my post popular pages for "Rust Hacks" use to be - http://www.ilikecheats.com/01/rust-cheats-hacks-aimbot/ Now when searching Google for site:ilikecheats.com rust hacks This page shows as the highest ranking - http://forum.ilikecheats.com/forums/221-Rust-Hacks-Rust-Cheats-Public-Forum What's weird is it seems the entire front end (Wordpress site) isn't ranking well anymore on page #1 of Google and the forums are ranking better currently. I did have a huge penalty from backlinks last year but cleared it. I got Yoast to do a site review and I'm cleaning up everything now. I also cleared most of the bad links via the disavow tool. Another example is when I search for "warz hacks" the forums show up in 4th place but the main website isn't showing at all back to page 10. If I search site:ilikecheats.com warz hacks the links directly to the main site doesn't show until page #2. So is this still a penalty that is carried over or is something else going on? Can't seem to figure it out, thanks in advance for looking. 😃 Any ideas what's going on and why the main pages no longer rank - http://www.ilikecheats.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Draden670 -
Dealing with Redirects and iFrames - getting "product login" pages to rank
One of our most popular products has a very authoritative product page, which is great for marketing purposes, but not so much for current users. When current users search for "product x login" or "product x sign in", instead of getting to the login page, they see the product page - it adds a couple of clicks to their experience, which is not what we want. One of the problems is that the actual login page has barely any content, and the content that it does carry is wrapped around <iframes>. Due to political and security reasons, the web team is reluctant to make any changes to the page, and one of their arguments is that the login page actually ranks #1 for a few other products (at our company, the majority of logins originate from the same domain). </iframes> To add to the challenge - queries that do return the login page as #1 result (for some of our other products) actually do not reference the sign-in domain, but our old domain, which is now a 301 redirect to the sign-in domain. To make that clear - **Google is displaying the origin domain in SERPs, instead of displaying the destination domain. ** The question is - how do we get this popular product's login page to rank higher than the product page for "login" / "sign in" queries? I'm not even sure where we should point links to at this point - the actual sign in domain or the origin domain? I have the redirect chains and domain authority for all of the pages involved, including a few of our major competitors (who follow the same login format), and will be happy to share it privately with a Moz expert. I'd prefer not to make any more information publicly available, so please reach out via private message if you think you can help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leosaraceni0 -
How can I rank a national site for local terms
Hi All I have a website that covers all parts of the UK and I wish to be found for terms such as "car for sale London" "car for sale Manchester" and so on. In the past I have created separate landing pages for each town and city but with the quality score of a page becoming more of a ranking factor it is hard to make 300 + town pages interesting and useful. Is it best practice to do what I am doing and improve the quality of each of the pages or would I be better off removing the old pages and using some other technique to rank for the local searches? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
Home Page Got Indexed as httpS and Rankings Went Down.
Hello fellow SEO's About 3 weeks ago all of a sudden the home page on our Magento based website went down in rankings (from top 10 to page 3-4 Google) and was showing as httpS - instead of usual http. It first happened with just a few keywords and a week later any search phrase was returning the httpS result for the home page. When I view cache for the home page now it (both http and httpS versions) it gives me this http://clip2net.com/s/2OtPS We are not blocking anything in robots.txt Robots tags are set to index,follow There are hardly any external links pointing at the home pages as httpS This only affected the home page - all other pages rank where they used to and appear as http Has anybody ever had a similar problem? Thanks in advance for your thoughts and help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ddseo0 -
Changing keyword target on home page? Will it work?
I have a site that is in the financial services niche and has around 20 pages talking about different services. I want to change the goal of the site and now just target Insurance. The current home page is a simple introduction to the website, I was going to change this to target the insurance keyword and put around 500 words content on the front page. I was also going to change the Page Title, Description and H1 tags too. My question is will the front page then rank for that keyword once google recrawls the site? Could I damage the PR of the site or any other factors from changing the front page. Here are some stats about the site 11 years old PR 3 Page Mozrank 5.58 Page Moztrust 5.61 Domain Mozrank 2.29 Domain Moztrust 3.17 Thanks for your help guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Getting 260,000 pages re-indexed?
Hey there guys, I was recently hired to do SEO for a big forum to move the site to a new domain and to get them back up to their ranks after this move. This all went quite well, except for the fact that we lost about 1/3rd of our traffic. Although I expected some traffic to drop, this is quite a lot and I'm wondering what it is. The big keywords are still pulling the same traffic but I feel that a lot of the small threads on the forums have been de-indexed. Now, with a site with 260,000 threads, do I just take my loss and focus on new keywords? Or is there something I can do to get all these threads re-indexed? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StefanJDorresteijn0