Properly changing title, URL and content for new keywords without harming other rankings.

[BabyBeauBelle]

Hello - We are looking to try to bring up some keywords in the SERPs that we are currently ranking fairly low for. We sell Christening clothing for children and people will use both Christening and Baptism to search for the same thing. We currently rank very high for Christening (#1 on Google for certain combinations) but we are fairly low on Baptism.
I am trying to figure out the best way to start getting Baptism up by changing some title, URL and content pages to include more Baptism keywords. My concern is messing with the existing because we rank so well for Christening. Since we are ecommerce we can vary this quite a bit on our products, but again I'm nervous to do so fearing changing the wrong things, too many products etc and in the process of trying to raise one set of keywords (baptism) we harm the other set (christening).
Any advice would be appreciated!

[BabyBeauBelle]

Thanks all for the answers, we will create new content and start from there, probably create an internal blog for more content creation...

[irvingw]

I would leave the existing ones alone and create new page(s) targeting baptism and link to them prominently from the homepage and globally on the site, submit the URLs in WMT and add them to your sitemap.xml file for quicker indexing.

[nsauser]

"So it's not a good idea to start adding some baptism keywords to product descriptions and such (but not remove any existing christening keywords)?"

No, you'll run the risk of cannibalizing your christening rankings and moreover may confuse your customers. Remember, develop for your customers NOT for the search engines.

For example, I work for a law firm and our homepage ranks for all sorts of criminal crimes (DUI, Drugs, etc.) So if I see an area where I want to improve my rank, say for "criminal defense attorney" - I'll write new content for a blog post or page around that set of KWs instead of trying to get the homepage to rank for that KW among all the others.

[BabyBeauBelle]

Thanks nsauser for the response. So it sounds like the best strategy is to add to the homepage but not mess with any existing content and add the baptism keywords to any new content and or products.

The problem is we have a fairly static inventory and add new products pretty infrequently, so our best bet immediately would be content creation using the baptism keywords and any new products that are added to start hitting them with the baptism keywords?

So it's not a good idea to start adding some baptism keywords to product descriptions and such (but not remove any existing christening keywords)?

[nsauser]

Generally I shoot for 1 - 3 keywords per page and definitely only one theme per page. I know that homepages tend to rank for a lot of different KWs but maybe it's possible that you could add a Baptism related kw to your title (and in the content) without removing anything then that might be worth a try.

Otherwise I would create new pages and content to target the baptism related KWs. If you can link your new content from the homepage it will give it a boost to start out with. Internal linking is a great way to get content boosted in the SERPs especially if you have a good Domain Authority. Also, track these changes, the easiest way is to note them in Google Analytics. You want to be able to look back in 2 weeks or a month and see if your changes have helped or hurt.