Has anyone experience with deoptimising a homepage to alter landing page?

[Harry_TheClickHub]

Our home page is ranking for a group of search terms even though we have dedicated landings pages for them that have higher on-page scores. The home page is optimised for a base search term, i.e. "Product", and the landing pages for variations, so "Product Variation A", "Product Variation B" and so on. The home page has a slight higher PA than the intended landing pages. We are tempted to de-optimise the home page, however, the fear is that we simply lose our positions entirely.

Anyone tried this before?

THANKS

[Ria_]

Good Answer received!

Thank you very much, and good luck with the landing pages!

[Harry_TheClickHub]

...and Moz won't let me mark as a Good Answer - I will try again later!

[Harry_TheClickHub]

Thank you Ria,

We've done exactly as you have outlined here, exact the PA for the landing pages is still lower than the homepage. Based on what you've said, I think we will try and achieve a higher PA for the landing pages first, before deoptimising the homepage.

Many thanks again

[Ria_]

This is fine too. But when landing pages have a much higher conversion rate than the homepage for its target keywords, than naturally you will want the landing page to rank instead of the homepage. And in some cases I've found, as soon as the homepage is out of the picture the landing page is able to rank higher for the query than the homepage ever did.

So how much effort, if any, you'd put into doing this should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis really.

[EGOL]

This happens with my sites for many keywords.  When I see it, I spend a few moments go give thanks and then I get right back to work.

[Ria_]

I've had this with a couple of clients' websites recently. What worked for me was to (in this order):

1. Ensure that the landing pages are well optimised for the target keyword.
2. Anchor text from other pages, including homepage, of the site make use of keyword.
3. Build a couple of good links to each landing page.
4. Watch and wait for landing pages to start climbing position a little in SERPs, even if not overtaking the homepage.
5. De-optimise the homepage for the product variant keywords, keeping it broad only.

It seems too simple and straight forward, but this has worked twice for me now. Hopefully it works for you too. But I would be careful not to de-optimise the homepage if the landing pages are nowhere near within sight yet in the SERPs.