Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages
-
Hi everyone!
I've noticed that many of our clients have pages addressing specific queries related to specific services on their websites, but that the Home Page is increasingly showing as the "ranking" page.
For example, a plastic surgeon we work with has a page specifically talking about his breast augmentation procedure for Miami, FL but instead of THAT page showing in the search results, Google is using his home page. Noticing this across the board. Any insights? Should we still be optimizing these specific service pages? Should I be spending time trying to make sure Google ranks the page specifically addressing that query because it SHOULD perform better?
Thanks for the help.
Confused SEO :/, Ricky Shockley
-
Hi Ricky,
This one is always a tough question to answer. It depends on a number of factors, not least of which being your vertical but it will take some creative thinking for sure.\
Unfortunately it isn't something I can even give you broad suggestions on. The questions you need to answer are "who would want to see our services pages?" and once you're comfortable you've got the answer to that, ask "where would they find it helpful to stumble across this page?". It could be an industry-relevant website where your product is a great fit, maybe a relevant forum where someone is literally asking for what your page covers etc.
This is why it's so important to make all of your landing pages genuinely helpful - if the current answer to the first question is "nobody would want to see it, it's terrible" then that should be priority #1 Build something link-worthy and reach out to those niches.
Don't forget good old fashioned competitor link analysis here either. You may find nothing directly in their link profiles but it might spark an idea - I know it's happened to me plenty of times!
-
Hey guys,
Good advice, thank you! My navigation is already pretty flat (as flat as it can be) and I certainly understand the concept of links to deeper pages...but how in the WORLD do you build quality links to a service page?
Almost every link opportunity (sponsorship, directory, curated lists of providers, PR hits etc.) seem to funnel to the home page for local biz in my experience.
Thanks again,
Ricky
-
I have to agree on the link building suggestion. Often when I've heard folks complain about this issue it ends up being due to a dramatically stronger link profile for the home page. If you don't have relevant links pointing to the landing pages, it's quite likely the on-page optimization alone won't be enough.
-
Hi Ricky,
More often than not, when we see this from a new-to-us client, it's because their previous SEO provider put some content on their homepage and drove 100% of the links there but did nothing for the other landing pages.
If you're comfortable dropping your URL in here I'd be happy to take a closer look, but if this is the case for your site, I'd suggest starting by boosting the content on each of your landing pages (to give you an idea, our internal expectation is 1500+ words of quality content per landing page, styled so it isn't a wall of text) and revise your upage titles, meta descriptions and headings as well.
Working on building some links to these pages will also help out quite a bit. Basically, the common mistake is to almost over-optimise the home page, ignore the rest and wonder why it's only the home page that ranks
Similarly, make sure your nav is as flat as possible and links directly to these landing pages rather than just from a broader "services" page or something.
-
Hi Deacyde,
I appreciate the reply but I think you misunderstood my initial question. We've already done this and have services pages properly broken out and optimized for different procedures, but we find that Google is increasingly using the HOME page as the ranking page for service terms even though the home page doesn't mention the service at all.
Thanks,
Ricky
-
Homepages in general do this because we as people put forth the meat of the site on the homepage, sometimes it works for us but often in the SEO world it works against us. Homepages should be optimized for the brand name and keywords related to the company or person, almost like a lighthearted about us page without specifics.
Then you place the meat on the service or product pages, so they have the optimized keywords to signal to crawlers that this page is best suited in case someone searches this keyword.
I'm actually redesigning a site right now because their older site was basically targeting all their keywords on the homepage via product listings and summaries of those products, even though the product category pages had great content that was more indepth and relevant, the homepage is also naturally the highest page rank of the site, so seems to get chosen over lesser ranked pages for keywords they both have.
Take another look at your site and maybe list the primary and secondary keywords you'd want each page to rank for, and make sure those keywords are correlated.
The Plastic Surgeon example for keyword targeting would be:
Homepage - **Surgeon's Name, Company, Florida Based, Plastic Surgery Professionals ( etc ) **
Surgeon Service Page - Miami, FL Plastic Surgeons, breast augmentation, plastic surgery breast augmentations, And other longtail keywords related to this niche.
So when both user's goto the page from serps they stay and convert and when crawlers go through, they find the meat of a search query on the page you want them to find it on.
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
-
Subpages have Page Authority of 1 behind Home with DA 50
How come that our subpages all have a PA 1 if the home got DA 50? technical specialities: Megamenue opens on click only Category pages dont exist (home/i-do-not-exist-as-page-category/PA-1-subpage) All subpages have a high amount of links to ressources (over 200) what would be the most obvious cause for the low PA? would the external link profile be the main reason? thanks in advance. I would be happy to answer your questions Kind regards
Technical SEO | | brainfruit0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content Crawl Diagnostics
I have Pages with Duplicate Page Content in my Crawl Diagnostics Tell Me How Can I solve it Or Suggest Me Some Helpful Tools. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nomyhot0 -
Page Rank gone - technical difficulty?
Hi all, after coming back from the holidays, I noticed that our PR (6 on the homepage) has vanished into "Unranked". All other sites are also "unranked". I tested other domains - PR still there, so the problem does not lie in the PR checker. There are no drops in traffic, rankings, no messages in the GWMT, the same numer of indexed pages, inbound links okay (all natural)... As you see, I checked everything I thought could be a hint to a solution, but found nothing... This goes on for the 3rd day now (after my holidays, maybe even longer). Could there be a technical problem causing this "drop"? Our website: http://www.access.de/ I am thankful for all hints/suggestions... Thanx...
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Photo Attachment Page
Hi! I am using Wordpress, and when I click on my photos, they go to an attachment page that only shows the photo. However, in my SeoMoz crawl results, these are showing up as duplicate content page. Is it worth going back and changing all of my photos so they aren't clickable and therefore do not create a duplicate page? Thanks in advance! Jodi familytravelmagazine.com
Technical SEO | | JodiFTM0 -
Has Google stopped rendering author snippets on SERP pages if the author's G+ page is not actively updated?
Working with a site that has multiple authors and author microformat enabled. The image is rendering for some authors on SERP page and not for others. Difference seems to be having an updated G+ page and not having a constantly updating G+ page. any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | irvingw0 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10 -
Redirect and ranking
Wehave 2 websites for the same keyword Website 1 is indexed on place 2 but we do not like that name any longer it does not fit our long term marketing Website 2 is indexed on place 5 and this domain fits better What will happen if we redirect website 1 to website 2? Fall down to postion 5 Fall down to position 5 and after a certain period we get back at position 2 or 3 thanx in advance for your reply
Technical SEO | | turnon0