Pages Fighting Over Keywords

[nezona]

Hi Guys,

Just after some general advice. Since manipulation of keywords through links is no longer a feasible way of ranking these days, I was wondering how people got round the issue of pages bouncing for the same keyword or Google deciding that a blog post is a better signal rather than your service page.

For instance if you are doing local and national search, how do you stop the local keywords ranking for national pages, without diluting the local signals. I have some ideas:-

• stronger internal linking to the page
• review content

But obviously redirects or canonical won't be a good solution as I still want these pages to exist in their own right.

Regards

Neil

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Neil,

Thanks for your reply. So, the thing is, it's typically much, much harder to rank national pages (you're competing against the nation) than to rank local ones - if the searcher is local and the search is perceived to have a local intent, because these pages are only competing locally. So, another question from me:

Are the local pages ranking well for local searchers? As in, your office in Atlanta is telling you they see the Atlanta landing page come up instead of the national page? And your office in Dallas is telling you they see the Dallas page come up instead of the national page?

Or, are you saying, you have a searcher in San Francisco (where you have no office) seeing the Dallas page instead of the national page?

[nezona]

Hi Miriam,

Something link this scenario yes. Okay the client has a lot of local landing pages which are performing extremely well. However theire is also the searcher who will perform a search without a local modifier but the issue is the national pages aren’t ranking, Google seems to be picking local pages instead. It definitely is a content issue but I don’t want the local pages to lose momentum.

I am thinking:-

• more internal linking from local pages to the national page.

• review national content and see if it can be improved/extended.

Regards

Neil

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Neil,

I want to be sure I've envisioned your scenario clearly. Are you saying something along the lines of:

1. You have a national medical services brand, with 10 clinics on the west coast.

2. You have a permanent page on your website that deals with the topic of supporting family members with Alzheimer's.

3. You write a blog post on an Alzheimer's walk in San Mateo that your clinic in San Mateo is co-sponsoring and which gets a lot of shares and links, and suddenly, this local-focused blog post is outranking the permanent, non-local page on this disease when someone searches for "Alzheimer's support.". And you don't want this ... you want the permanent article to appear first when people look for this keyword phrase.

Is this what you are describing, or would you modify my hypothetical scenario in any way?