"keyword" - rank the home page or sub page domain.com/keyword?
-
One of my clients has a pretty decent website that ranks 1st place for most major keywords in their line of business.
EXCEPT one keyword that i've been struggling to get 1st position on Google (currently 2nd).
My problem is:
let's say "tennis shoes" as a keyword
the home page of course has several other shoes listed but I've seen that Google took my home page and made it 2nd position (on 1st page). Where the section domain.com/tennis-shoes is on 2nd page of Google.
My question is should i rel cannonical from the /tennis-shoes section to the home page so it focuses more on the specific keyword that i need to get the home 1st? Or should i leave the home page generic and focus more on /tennis-shoes to get that 1st position?
What do you Moz'ers Think?
-
Wouldn't the other pages get less value because the home page has a clear focus on a specific keyword?
Don't want the rest of the pages that are solid on 1st position to get affected because the home page doesn't relate as much to them.
-
I would do BOTH!
-
Hi ennovation
You say "other than building links" but it may be that is where you need to focus your efforts next. It sounds like the on-page stuff may already be done well and that your efforts so far have helped the product pages rank number 1 for their keywords. Perhaps the home page has multiple inbound links to it containing anchor text "tennis shoes" and that is why it is outperforming the product page?
As link related factors are belived to be such a large element of the algorithm it sounds like it would br prudent to spend time on this area next.
-
I'm thinking the same. The only problem is the rankings on page /tennis-shoes. The page is completely optimized so other than building links i don't know what to do. Wouldn't it be better to slightly optimize the home page so the home page is tennis shoes then the rest are related sections.
P.S. other pages ex: /golf-shoes rank 1st place so no need for targeting home page on those specific sub pages
-
I'd leave the homepage generic and focus on /tennis-shoes. You can't optimise your homepage for every keyword you want so splitting them up on their own dedicated page is your best option.
DD
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
-
How much keyword density for Google?
I have several pages on one site which have gone down during the past few months. They keyword density on those pages, which is not unnatural, pleased Google for many years. it still pleases Bing. But Google now seems very picky. Based upon your experience, what is the ideal % keyword density for 2 and 3 word phrases, and should they be left out of alt tags even when proper to put them there? While Google dominates, we do not wish to alienate BIng/Yahoo. It is a huge mystery, and experimentation with more non-keyword-related text has so far not born any fruit. Thank you, GH
Competitive Research | | gheh20130 -
Effort for "moderate competition" keywords
I'm rather new to this, and while I'm getting some sense of everything I'm trying to figure out what kind of scope of work lays ahead of me. The keywords I'm looking to rank for are "moderate difficulty" -- somewhere between the 45%-55% "difficulty scale" on seomoz's keyword difficulty report. Assuming I have a number of "A-grade" (according to SEOmoz's reports) optimized pages for these keywords, how many links of a given quality level should I be looking at building up? I mean, of course, the more the better, but if I'm gunning for high DA/PA pages, am I looking at dozens here or hundreds of such links? I can imagine that any answer isn't going to come with much specificity, but if there was just an "idea" of the scale of backlinking involved here, that'd be great!
Competitive Research | | yoni450 -
What is a reasonable time frame to get to the 1st page
If my site is not in the first 50 results and the keywords are medium to highly competitive? I have just started adding to directories, planning out a blog, fixing seo mistakes, updating sitemaps etc. The 1st ranking competitor has external links in the tens of thousands whereas I have maybe a few hundred. I see a light at the end of the tunnel as competing sites in between me and the 1st place ranking competitor have external links only in the 1000-2000 level. We are an ecommerce site and want to be ready for our high season which is Nov-Jan.
Competitive Research | | ribandhull0 -
Keyword Research Tool Problem
Hi, I had been in SEO for around 2 to 3 years, I am looking for your suggestion if there is any best keyword research tool. I tried almost most of the keyword research tool (both paid or free) but I found the following problem: -Worktracker: I think it is too difficult to use and understand as a non technical person. I always wonder the data accuracy because when the same keyword appear in Google for few thousand traffic, it only appear in Wordtracker for few dozen or hundred of search. Also I don't think they suggest any long trail keywords in my view. The long trail keyword you can also find in free keyword search tool. -Google Keywords Tool- Good, but it can only show 100 results. I cannot get a better pictures of related or niches keywords. I always find some competitive keywords can rank easily but some non competitive keywords usually very difficult to rank in some case. It will depend on how you interpret the data results. -Keyword Discovery and Wordstream-Although I really want to subscribe, but they are a way too expensive (you have to subscribe for 12 months). I check with their free keywords tool but only shown very limited results. Although there are some other like spyfu.com or keywords spy...... Is there any one can suggest me which is the best tool to start with keyword search for the long trail and niche keywords ? or is there any way or trick to find the best keywords ? Thank you. Tom
Competitive Research | | Stevejobs20110 -
Keyword difficulty/research question
Wondering if I could get some opinions from the fellow moz users' I have a website which I which to rank for the term 'evening dress'.As you can imagine it is a pretty difficult term with a score of 62% (the term gets 301,000 broad matches and 27,000 exact matches a month). As much as I would like to target this term I feel that my domain is not strong enough (DA 39) to match the competition. Therefore, would a better strategy be to target long tail keywords which also contain the primary keyword, ie black evening dress evening dress hire cheap evening dress buy evening dress online please note that these were just examples, I haven't researched a comprehensive long tail list. Would targeting these long tail keywords mean that a) I should be able to rank for them faster and thus receive more traffic, sooner, and b) build up links to the page which I ultimately want to rank for evening dresses with numerous backlinks containing the keyword evening dress. The trade off with doing this is that I would need to seo one page for all the long tail keywords to gain the maximum benefit for the 'money' keyword. Does this sound like a sensible approach to both ranking for big money term and also getting traffic sooner rather than later? Thanks Carl
Competitive Research | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
What precisely is "partial match" anchor text?
This page says "...'partial match' means that at least one word from the query matches the anchor text.". Does this mean that at least one word from the query matches at least one word from the anchor text, or that at least one word from the query matches the entire anchor text?
Competitive Research | | TheEspresseo0 -
Link to landing page or home page
Ok, so I've been doing a bit of link research and found that most of our competitors use anchor text to link to their homepage on their site and not a specific landing page. Our current strategy is to link to the correct landing page depending on the anchor to get these to rank, as opposed to getting our homepage to rank for different keywords. If that makes sense. The main reason I can think of to send all links to the homepage is that it would increase the domain authority of the site as a whole. Instead of spreading the links to certain pages depending on the anchor text. It would also give your one page a greater chance to rank for all keywords? Quick example I am a site that sells sports clothes. I have 2 main pages from my homepage: Homepage Football Rugby _Should I link to the football page for all links anchored with "football", and all linked anchored with "rugby" to the rugby page OR should I anchor all links including "rugby" and "football" to the homepage? _ What do you think is the best strategy? Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | esendex0 -
Competitor Ranking High has 2 Domains, But Duplicate Website ?
I was using OSE and noticed all the backlinks to one of our competitors is there other domain name, which is the EXACT SAME website. You can enter both url's and they display the same content. They are not useing any canonical tags either. Why are they not penalized for duplicate content? And for using there own website for backlinks ? We try to do everything right, but still cannot beat them. Any thoughts on this?
Competitive Research | | hfranz0