Changing My Home Page Focus Keyword

[Instabill]

Hello,

We recently launched a new home page design on our company website, but we still have the same focus keyword in the title, H1, and in parts of the page copy. However, this focus keyword no longer represents our entire brand. We want to change the focus keyword and have done some research on the keyword difficulty and local searches in Google, but are still uncertain on the potential effects.

Let me explain our situation more in depth.

Instabill provides business owners with merchant accounts and other services. Our current focus keyword is offshore merchant accounts. However, over the past three months, we have been helping businesses establish US merchant accounts (retail, mobile, and online--but retail and mobile to US only while online to merchants everywhere) and intend to continue to increase our US merchant base. We are also still able to provide offshore merchant accounts.

Our fear is that when a US merchant comes to our website (http://www.instabill.com), they will see Offshore Merchant Accounts in big H1 letters and leave our site since they want a local US merchant account. However, we still want to make sure our international merchants know we can still work with them.

Thus said, we would like to change our focus keyword to something more broad, but still descriptive of our brand: merchant services. To elaborate, we want our H1 heading to read Merchant Services for Retail and Online Businesses. Merchant services is more descriptive since we provide more than just merchant accounts. We also provide the payment gateway, free shopping cart modules, help registering businesses, help obtaining an SSL certificate, and a discounted PCI Certification Service through McAfee.

We have more than one page on our website that ranks for the term online merchant accounts, but none that rank for merchant services. However, we are willing to put in the work to ensure we optimize our website properly and put in the effort to make the change successful. Merchant services is also a keyword we would like to optimize on our website, so making the change on the home page will only help the steps in the process.

Statistics:
Offshore Merchant Accounts has a 35% difficulty level and we consistently rank for SERPs #1 and #2. This term, according to the Google Keyword Tool, only receives 70 monthly searches in the US, 50 in the UK, 10 in Canada, and 10 in Australia. These are the four countries of most importance to our website.

Merchant Services has a 57% difficulty level and we do not rank for it in Google at all since we have never tried to optimize for this term in the past. Also according to the Google Keyword Tool, this term receives 14,800 monthly searches in the US, 1,600 in the UK, 590 in Canada, and 260 in Australia.

Clearly, merchant services could potentially get us much more traffic than offshore merchant accounts if transitioned correctly.

I suppose my bottom line question is this: Would it be a bad idea to change my primary focus keyword on my home page? What type of results should I expect to see if searching Google for my company name?

Thank you for all of your help.

Meghan
Senior Copywriter of Instabill

[Instabill]

Vadim,

We already have an offshore page and it ranks quite well for the term in Google. We typically hold two SERPs for the term offshore merchant accounts--one for our home page and one for our offshore page.

Thanks for your suggestion!

Regards,
Meghan

[Instabill]

Thanks, Moosa! Your advice does help very much!

Regards,
Meghan

[Instabill]

Hi Chris,
Your advice makes perfect sense. I appreciate your help and input!

Regards,
Meghan

[MoosaHemani]

I completely read every word of your description and i would say it actually is a good idea but its a long term game and you have to decide how much dip in traffic you can afford because once you are going to change the keywords the traffic that was coming from previous keywords will fall down and new keyword (as its new) might not send you any traffic at all.

If you can afford to loos traffic then this is a perfect idea to change the keywords and start optimizing fir links! But if you can’t in that case you should content marketing plan first and then slowly move towards the change!

If I would be at your place I would have created another page that should target the new keywords and start getting quality links to that page until it start ranking for the particular keyword. Once it will be on the desired position, I will then slowly change the content of the home page and redirect that page to the home page so that all link juice can be transferred to home page... This will also hit traffic negatively but the dip will not be as serious as it can go if you do it without doing this!

Hope this helps!

[vmialik]

Hi Instabill,

You can also create another landing page, with home being your initial landing page, create the second one at hompage.com/offshore-merchants-accounts and see how it fares

[Chris.Menke]

I'd say that your idea is a good one strategically but it's not going to be quick and easy.

If it were me, I'd start not by revising anything on-page, but by working on building links back to your home page from content relating closely to "merchant services" and with anchor text that's somewhat thematically relevant to that. Once you've build up your domain and page authority to be somewhat equal to other sites that are ranking for your term, then you might revise your home page meta tags and content to take advantage of the new strength.  The reason I say I would go in that direction is because your home page likely isn't currently strong enough to rank for the new keyword (just by virtue of on-page changes) and it may not be strong enough to pass the strength that the internal "offshore merchant accounts" landing page would need to take up the slack created by the home page not ranking for that term any more.

The better the quality and relevance of the links to your homepage, the quicker the transition will take place in the search results once you make your on-page changes. Right now, your link profile is not terribly strong.

And when you're ready to make your on-page changes:

1. Go through your site and make sure all links with anchor text of "offshore merchant accounts" are revised to point to the internal page that deals with your offshore merchant account service.
2. Make sure that links pointing to your home page carry the anchor  text "merchant services" or variations of that.
3. Anchor text from your external links going to your homepage looks generally OK but where possible, you should work on making them variations and synonyms of "merchant services", rather than "offshore merchant accounts"