How to make site pages appear higher than homepage

[danieldunn10]

Hi, our site sells a mixture of clothes, for example jackets, hats, scarfs and gloves.

when somebody searches for 'hats in Chicago' our main website would appear.

How can we make it so that our webpage with our hats appears?

Thanks

[Alex-Harford]

If [hats in chicago] clicks are converting into sales you should be careful about playing with this in case you lose the ranking altogether. Saying that, individual product pages usually convert better than anything else so it may be best to concentrate on those instead of category pages. To rank a category page that lists the hats you have available there are a number of things you can do if you haven't already:

• If you don't want the homepage to rank, make sure you're not committing keyword cannibilisation
• Ensure your onpage SEO is spot-on for the hat page e.g. title tag with your keyword (and maybe a price/offer/incentive to encourage clicks, meta description to encourage clicks, descriptive image filenames and alt attributes, useful URL structure
• Onpage too - add some unique introductory text
• Show review data (such as AggregateRating) by each product and consider adding a small number of reviews to category pages - user generated content is good for getting unique content. I say a small number of reviews to avoid duplicate content issues
• Link to your most important category pages from every page on your website via a main menu
• Add breadcrumbs
• Make sure you have an HTML sitemap, and an XML sitemap submitted to the search engines - both listen all your pages

[GregB123]

Hi Daniel. I struggle with the same issue on one of my ecommerce websites, while my other site doesn't have that problem (the subpages always appear ahead of the home). I don't know why.  Hopefully one of the smart Moz Members will have some ideas...

I only have general clues on how to get the product pages to rank above the home page, like: 1) get some links pointing to the product pages. 2) get more descriptive text content on the product pages. 3) Have great meta titles and descriptions on the product pages. 4) Include social media functions (such as Like, Tweet, and G+) available on the product pages.

I have set Priorities in my XML sitemap to declare the main product pages as being higher that average priority, and the homepage as being lower than average. From what I read it doesn't appear that Google uses these Priority declarations very much or at all, but it's easy to do and does not appear to hurt anything. You can read a little more about Priority at the bottom of this page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en

Good luck!