Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?

[Debitoor]

My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page?

Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop

[MonicaOConnor]

I haven't experienced a home page outranking a product page for anything other than a branded search. Most often a home page is not optimized for a particular key term. It is optimized as an outline for the site and to display promotions or other important things about the site.

[Debitoor]

Thanks for the reply. It was only an example with the laptop as product

My question is about if any of you have seen a trend in the search results that google rank front pages higher than landing page? I have been ranking #1 for a competitive search term with a landing page like
company.com/keyword
But now I have dropped several positions and the competitors that now outrank me have the front page as landing page. It doesn't seem that the competitors have done anything SEO-wise that should outrank me.

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Peter. One problem you're going to run into is that people searching for the term laptop have a higher percentage chance of their search being an informational search than purchasing search.  This is partly why you'll see Google displaying news, image, and related search boxes for example afterwards. They know that the term is so broad that people will most likely need to refine their search before getting to a result you want. For you this means a few things as far as how competitive it is...

1. You'll be competing with the news.  Unless your site is a repository and producer of computer news (like pcmag, pcworld, cnet...) you're going to struggle to compete with them.
2. You'll be competing with global brands. Dell, WalMart, Amazon.
3. You'll be competing with Info hubs. Wikipedia...

As such, you'll likely want to refine your goal keyword. What makes your laptop unique? How would a customer interested in your laptop describe your laptop? Things like that will help you refine your term as well as prepare your site for your future customers.  Cheers!

[MonicaOConnor]

On such a generic term you are going to need to strategically target and build your site around that topic.

Your home page generally tends to rank better because it brings a lot of traffic from people searching for your brand name and your domain name.

As far as URL structure. You want to have a structure that will really target your key term as naturally as possible. For ecomm sites you would use domain.com/category/product. That would be the best way to accomplish a strong keyword targeted URL.

So - johnnyslaptops.com/dell-laptops/dell-inspiron-5500-laptop