Which page to rank for a Keyword? Home Page or Deep Page?

[MauriceKintek]

So, we have a situation where there is one particular keyword we want to rank for.

We have been up and down over the years, at our best probably position 4-5, and now at 20ish. Thats for our home page of course, which the majority of our linking is probably pointing at.

We also have a sub page which is optimised for that particular service.

The term is "web design brisbane".
So as you can imagine, Web Design is in itself a service and we offer others.

Should we optimise our home page for it and remove the sub page?
Keep the sub page because its one our services and optimise both?
Do some kind of canonical thing?
Change our interlinking?

All our competitors home pages seem to be the ones that rank, and it feels and looks better in results if its the home page, but if switching up to our sub page is better im all ears.

Also if our sub page is somehow hurting or leaking SEO from the home page, id like to know as well.

Would prefer to not have to provide a link, due to competition but if someone wants to know we can always PM.

[MoosaHemani]

In my opinion what you should really consider is that what page (either home or internal page is working well for you in terms of conversions...

If home page is offering you more conversions then probably you should go for it! And direct your SEO strategy to get results from home page but if the inner page is offering your better conversions then you should prefer redirecting the angle of your SEO strategy towards inner pages...

I think there is no need to delete any internal page for this! But all you need to do is to build some great links so that your rankings can get stable positions against your key phrases.

[MauriceKintek]

No, the content of the pages is very different, its just that our home page is what we want, but our services page actually has better content for that keyword, so it was a question of what to do.

I think ill optimise the home page as per moz.orgs tools and leave our sub page optimised and as is.

Thanks for the advice.

[MauriceKintek]

Cheers chris well get on this!

[Chris.Menke]

I'm not aware of much/any research showing that changing anchor text on external links is harmful.  Keep in mind, too that you'd be eliminating most of them anyway.  Again, I say, emphasize your brand, more so than the keywords. Diluting is good.  Thematic is good, too.

I'd lean towards being aggressive in your changes time frame, as there's  still a long way down to the bottom of the slope you're on and you don't want to wake up one morning and find yourself there.

[BlueprintMarketing]

There's no way that your example.com/services/web-design/ is actually harming your home page ranking. However if it was just example.com/web-design/  might be a better fit

Are you getting any duplicate content issues when you run it through the campaign mode here on Moz?

What is your current domain trust, rank could you case the numbers below and could you do that for your web design page as well?

Are you running a content management system?

Sincerely,

Thomas

[MauriceKintek]

Hi Thomas,

So we have:

Main Page

/

Web Design page

/services/web-design/

We already have these pages, I am just worried that our:

/services/web-design/
is harming our home page ranking for that keyword, or at least that theres some room for improvement.

[BlueprintMarketing]

If you need anyone to confirm what Chris has said here I agree 100% with what you stated. Google has become extremely tough on web design companies that put their URL with the exact same anchor text in the footer. It then ends up showing up on every single page that is made on the website and does not look good at all to Google as relevancy of the website pointing to matters quite a bit to them still rather not you have made it which I believe in someway makes you very relevant to that site however Google does not agree.

Thumbs up Chris good point to bring up and very important.

Definitely get rid of the extra URL made by example.com that is only going to hurt you.

You can use the methods Chris has stated as an example to also help with that.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[MauriceKintek]

Hi Chris,

Yes unfortunately most of those are from a long time ago.

We are worried that changing them will raise a red flag because links on pages shouldnt really change if the rest of the content doesnt. In this case we would be making them "better" in googles eyes in that we would add our company and dilute the keyword phrases out a bit, but at the same time do you think theres any risk or danger in doing this.

Or should we change parts of the page as well? Or even do them a few at a time?

[BlueprintMarketing]

When you say so page are you talking about creating link that looks similar to this below and architecture

http://www.example.com/subpage/example/ ?

or

http://www.example.com/example/

or

http://subpage.example.com/

Ideally the best way to build in my opinion is a flat system. Depending on how many pages you have

that would make

http://www.example.com/ this would be your homepage

http://www.example.com/web-design/ this would be your web design page

If you want to Interlake keywords I still recommend using scribecontent.com it is excellent for this type of thing.

Yours links on site architecture

http://moz.com/blog/site-architecture-for-seo

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/17/starting-out-organized-website-content-planning-the-right-way/

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2258433/Next-Generation-Site-Architecture

If you were willing to private message me your URL I would be happy to have a look at it as well.

Thanks,

Thomas

[Chris.Menke]

I'd stick with your home page as the result for that search.  Remember, "Web design" is a service, "web design Brisbane" is keyword, not a  service.

Looking at (what I figure is) your website and your back links, I see you doing what has gotten a lot of designers in trouble--putting tag lines with exact match anchor text in the footers of all the pages on their clients site . If I were you, I'd make a list of 20 different possible anchor texts that also include your actual brand name and go to every client site you're able to and either remove or nofollow all but one or two footer links on each site.The live links that remain should employ your list of varied anchor text. Moving forward from there, keep your new links thematic but diverse and emphasize your brand.

[BlueprintMarketing]

What Todd stated is true about trying to get a page to rank higher than your homepage. Well it is possible it is not really something very desirable by an end-user standpoint and it is very hard to do.

If I make a recommendation of a cool that you should use if you're targeting a secular keyword this can be used with WordPress is a plug-in, or any type of webpage at all. Via its own web-based system.

http://scribecontent.com/

more

http://www.copyblogger.com/scribe-4/

If I can make another two suggestions. I highly recommend HubSpots information about how to target keywords

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6223/Keyword-Targeting-The-Essential-Guide-for-Website-Owners.aspx

A very useful download is available here

http://offers.hubspot.com/blueprint?__hstc

Another excellent tool for finding ways you can make the improvements to your website is marketing grader I helps but it is 100% free and if you quite a bit of feedback about your websites current position.

http://marketing.grader.com/

I hope this is of help to you.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[MauriceKintek]

Hi Todd, thanks for the great answer.

What should we do about the sub page? Its still one of our services. Are we jeopardizing our root url rankings for that keyword buy having another optimised sub page which we also link to from our navigation, and of which there will be some back links from the web to?

[toddmumford]

In general, high authority websites are able to rank inner pages better. If you have a smaller budget for content development, then you should consider focusing on the home page to rank for this phrase and other clustered (related) phrases.

Also, if the company itself is purely about web design primarily, then this is advisable. The only time I advise an inner page ranking is when the company offers this as a service, and has high authority / ability to build high authority relatively quickly, driving that inner page up to top 5 positions.

Otherwise, it is always more difficult, by nature, to rank an internal page over a homepage (root domain) for competitive terms such as yours.

Hope this helps!
~Todd