Homepage Ranking For Service Keyword (KW Cannibalisation)
-
Hi All!
I will try and keep my question brief, any advice is greatly appreciated.
I have a client that is a well establish coach hire company, naturally their main priority is to be ranking for 'coach hire' in their surrounding area.
The homepage and /coach-hire/ page - both appear to compete against each other in the search results.
The homepage is positioned higher up the rankings, it also has historical backlinks with anchor text relating to coach hire, whereas the /coach-hire/ page doesn't have all that many backlinks.
The company has a few services that it offers through it's website - Coach Hire, Coach Day Trips & School Bus Services.
The Day Trips and Bus Services pages rank well for their respective keyword.
My question therefore, is - should I focus on making the homepage the best page for the 'coach hire' term and forget about trying to get the /coach-hire/ page to outrank the homepage? If so, what's the best way of doing this in terms of what happens to the /coach-hire/ page?
Any advice is greatly appreciate and if you need any other info, just let me know.
Many thanks,
Gareth
-
Hi Gareth,
This is a pretty common issue.
Generally your homepage is always going to be your 'strongest' page for links etc so in most cases it makes sense to use it to target your highest level and most important keyword/phrases.If you are ranking well with your homepage for this important phrase then you don't really want to be messing with it unless there is a good reason.
For the service page you could consider:
1. Leaving it as is since it serves its purpose for users and site navigation and conceivably supports the ranking of the homepage.
2. Consider slightly reworking to try target a relevant secondary phrase (ie bus rental instead of coach hire for example or private coach hire etc, etc) - assuming your homepage is not ranking as well for these type of searches and they are indeed relevant to your business.
The above assumes you ARE actually ranking well for "coach hire" with your homepage. If you are not ranking as well as you like then that might change your approach. Of course, if you did get the hire page to rank well then.... what phrase would you target with your homepage?
Hope it helps
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
-
Google Rankings Are Dancing What To Do?
I was been ranking on page no.3 for many of my keywords. Suddenly they all dropped to Page No.9& Page no.10. Now 10 days back one of my keyword got back to page no.4 & now suddenly today it went back to page no.9 again. I haven't done any changes to the site. My page speed is less than 4secs. Checked everything & all seems fine. No errors or manual actions notification in Webmaster too. Should i wait for the rankings dance to get over or should i start doing something. Currently i am planning to get fresh pages with good content added to the website for the whole month of July. Suggest me what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Page Rank Worse After Optimization
For a long time, we had terrible on page SEO. No keyword targeting, no meta titles or descriptions. Just a brief 2-4 sentence product description and shipping information. Strangely, we weren't ranking too bad. For one product, we were ranking on page 1 of Google for a certain keyword. My goal to reach the top of page 1 would be easy (or so I thought). I have now optimized this page to rank better for the same keyword. I have a 276 word description with detailed specifications and shipping information. I have a strong title and meta description with keywords and modifers. I have also included a video demonstration, additional photos and an PDF of the owners manual. In my eyes, the page is 100% better than it ever was. In the eyes of MOZ, it's better also. I've got an A with the On-Page Grader. Why is this page now ranking on page 8 of Google? What have I done wrong? What can I do to correct it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dkeipper0 -
Site Not Ranking- No Reason Why
I have a client with a HUGE website who should be ranking for it's competitive keywords. No penalties, or bad links. Old domain. Not ranking for anything. Client has a huge AdWords spend and my theory is that it's not ranking organically because of the AdWords spend. I can't think of anything other reason. Anyone? Thanks. The keywords I'm trying to rank this client for aren't even competitive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
Advice on Link Removal Services
Hello everyone, Due to the Penguin update my site unfortunately took a bit of a hit. A little while ago I submitted all of our questionable/bad links to the disavow tool, however I still wante to go back and delete any and all problematic links that are still out there. Ive looked into many services, however I haven't been too impressed. Removeem - The email addresses they provided weren't always valid, and their email tool didn't always deploy correctly - a lot of cross referencing and was not saving me any time. Link Detox - Free trial was a bust. They show you 10 links on the free trial, however for me, 9 of the 10 were all the same. Couldn't get a good feel of their system. Rmoov - Their tool is one where you upload your own links, and they help manage everything, however they DONT allow you to email through their system, so Im not sure how this helps my process if I have to do everthing manaully anyway. A lot of sites I see are also a full service approach that charge you based on how many links they remove, and this can get quite costly. I have also contacted:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lukin
Link Delete - No reponse from multiple email requests
Linkquidator - No response
Infatex - No response My questions to all of you are: Is there any company out there that you recommend that provide a self service tool [online or desktop driven]? Is this even an avenue I should explore, or should I compile my own list [as 3rd party algorithms are not always accurate] and reach out to sites manually? Is disavowing good enough and Im just spinning my wheeles trying to now get them all removed? Thanks!0 -
Homepage bombed from rankings
I'm working on a site that has historically had issues ranking the homepage. We cleaned up some on page issues and then it went into a high and low pattern - page 4 then page 12 etc (was static around page 9 before), settling at page 6. The link profile was not good and there were a high level of links that should have been no-follow as they were clearly looking paid for - we addressed this along with some other poor links. This effectively dropped ranking down to page 23, but not unexpected considering the very big drop in followed links. Meanwhile we have embarked on a fresh steady link building strategy with nice clean links, varied anchor text coming from varying DA domains, smattered with a few no-follow links - strongly focussing on being as natural as possible. At the Penguin update the homepage has totally disappeared. Frustratingly just after the update (same day) we removed a 301ed old domain from the profile. This was the old company URL which we discovered had a lot of spam linking associated with it. An oversight - there were other 301 domains that were removed some time ago which were totally unrelated to the main site and we were told all other domains were simply bought and redirected to stop hijacking - all but this were. Considering the work we have done would it be good assumption this domain 301 could be the underlying factor? So far organic traffic is steady, in fact a tad up. What would you guys do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Why Is This Page Not Ranking?
Hi Mozzers, I can't rank (the page is nowhere on the Google grid that I can find) and I've not been able to move the needle at all on it. The page is http://www.lumber2.com/Western-Saddle-Pads-s/98.htm for keyword "western saddle pads." I'm inclined to think I'm cannabalizing the category with the products so I removed the word saddle from the majority of the product names on page. However, saddle pad or saddle pads is in the meta title for most if not all of the products. Do you think I'm cannabalizing with the product titles or is there something else going on? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Why? Keyword ranking on Google go under and down regularly
I have a group of keyword that constantly move within the Google SERP. One week they are in the top 3 spots the next they fall down to position 7+ (in some cases they even fall 20 places) then after this they eventually go back to their most regular position within the top 3 spots. Can anyone please explain why this keep happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdvanceSystems0 -
2 Year Old Keyword Focused Site Will Not Rank for Keyword
Hi All, I need your help. This site is confounding me. The site is turnstilefactory.com It's a few years old. Strong domain name and seo focused on the term 'turnstile'. In bound links are not abundant, but certainly not absent either. Considering the subject matter, content and competition in the space, I would expect this site by now to at least be in the top 10 pages for the search 'turnstile', but it's not. I've tried everything I can think of with this, but it just won't rank for anything other than it's domain name. Can anyone please take a look and let me know if they see something I'm missing? It would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomozpaul0