One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
-
Hi everyone
I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too.
eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres"Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should.
eg
HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres".
ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text.So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it.
I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages.
Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term?
We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too.
Thanks!
-
Thanks Thomas!
-
I will use deepcrawl on your site make sure your link structure is not holding back Will post soon
-
Thank you so much for your help. I have started reading some of the articles posted above and I think that you are all spot on.
This particular link is http://www.fortusgroup.com.au/browse-products/rubber-tracks.html which tends to rate well for every other "rubber Track" search term.
-
Pretty impossible to answer without seeing the site but things that I could think about:
Links, as discussed below, mainly pointing to the homepage. The "link juice" (I hate that term but it fits) flows down through the homepage to the main categories (such as Tyres) which then filters (again) down to "Honda Tyres" - but the Tyres page (or homepage) could also have a TON of outbound links, internal links to filter to, etc.
You could also have duplicate/non-existent content on the internal pages and Google may just not value them as much. Your URL structure could affect this. The backlink anchor text pointing to one or two of your category pages could affect this.
Again, without a URL we're just shooting mosquitos with a shotgun.
-
Ellie
Very difficult without the url. The site structure is very important. Assuming it is a new site, so no pages have been penalized, i will make an educated guess and go with page authority. The site structure and paradigm you set up is integral to success. There is a great article by Bruce Clay and though aged it is still current today so in any redesign i Would have an eye to bruce's suggestions. http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/silo.htm
I would try and identify the key issues before a re-build, rather than hope the rebuild will just fix the problem. See https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 for more info.
Hope that assists.
-
It sounds like a case of all the URLs pointing to your homepage. Do you have data on your back links? Use Moz Open site explorer and make sure that you have some URLs pointing to these pages. Otherwise with the new site for a week site you will not rank well for any page regardless. There are so many factors take a look at the learning section here on Moz the beginners guide to SEO is a great read for anybody even a seasoned professional.
It sounds like you need page authority.
Hope this helps,
Tom
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate page content on numerical blog pages?
Hello everyone, I'm still relatively new at SEO and am still trying my best to learn. However, I have this persistent issue. My site is on WordPress and all of my blog pages e.g page one, page two etc are all coming up as duplicate content. Here are some URL examples of what I mean: http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/3/ http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/4/ Does anyone have any ideas? I have already no indexed categories and tags so it is not them. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3mil0 -
Ranking for homepage & category page?
We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February. The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content. We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage. The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase. For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other. The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time. We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com". Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0 -
Optimized Page Not Ranking for Head Term
We have a primary donation page that we've tried to position well for the term 'Donate' and some of its longer-tailed derivatives. The page has plenty of high-quality backlinks and internal links, and hasn't had any manual actions taken against it. The backlink profile is fairly good from what I can tell, definitely not mainly spam. The issue is that it doesn't rank for 'Donate', at all really. For 'Donate Online' and 'Donate Canada', it ranks roughly #3-4 across major Canadian cities, but we're not even in the top 100 for 'Donate'. There are pages and domains that are way less optimized, with much weaker backlink profiles, that are ranking well ahead of us. It's not a noindex or robots problem, as the page ranks fine for many other terms. We also have a strong domain with around 660k backlinks according to MajesticSEO. Here's the URL in question: http://www.redcross.ca/donate I'm hoping someone can help us diagnose what could be going wrong with this term specifically and how we can get this page into the SERPs where it belongs. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc0 -
How to associate content on one page to another page
Hi all, I would like associate content on "Page A" with "Page B". The content is not the same, but we want to tell Google it should be associated. Is there an easy way to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Viewpoints1 -
Yellow pages, how to improve rankings?
We have a huge database of companies in the baltic region (www.business-baltics.com) the page is completely yellow pages with no unique texts or anything. How would you improve the Search Engine Rankings for a website like this? And how do you do a link building for a page like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkasKR0 -
How long for new pages to rank
Hi Guys, Our website has some really good serps for our established keyword phrases some of which are quite competitive. We recently acquired and have begun selling some new brands through our online shop and launched new pages for these brands around 2 months ago. They are quite competitive ("merrell shoes" and "timberland boots" for example in google.co.uk) terms. Do you think we should get some keyword rich links built into these new pages from external sites such as blogs - or is there chances of ranking well driven more off our overall site authority/link profile? In other peoples experience, what is a typical realistic timeframe to start getting meaningful serps on new pages/keyword phrases (I know that is hard to answer - but ball parks figures appreciated). Thank you everyone in advance. Kind Regards (and happy thanksgiving to our US friends)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0 -
Should I 301 Redirect Old Pages to Newer Ones?
I know there is value having lots of unique content on our websites, but I'm wondering how long it should be kept for, and if there is any value in 301 redirecting it? So, for example we have a number of pages on our website that are dedicated to single products (blue widget x, blue widget y, red widget x, red widget y). Nice unique content, with some (but not many) links. These products are no longer available though and have been replaced. So I'm faced with three choices: 1. Leave it as it is, and hope it adds to the overall site authority (by value of being another page), and also perhaps mop up a few longer tail keywords. Add a link to the replacement product on these pages; 2. 301 redirect these pages to the replacement products to give these a bit of a boost, and lose the content; 3. 301 redirect these pages to the replacement products and move all the old content to a new 'blue widgets archive' and 'red widgets archive' page? Would appreciate everyones thoughts!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0