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
-
Is it better to optimise for several keywords/keyword variations on one page, or create sub categories for those specific terms?
I've done a fair of research to try to find the answer to this, but different people seem to give very different opinions, and none of the info I could find is recent! I'm working with a company that produces a range of industrial products that fit into 6 main categories, within this categories, there are types of products and the products themselves. Prior to my involvement most of the content was added to the product pages and very little was added to the overall category page. The structure works like this: Electronic devices > type of device > products The 'type of device' category could be something like a switch, but within that category are 3/4 different switch types...leaving me with 11 or 12 primary keyword/phrases to aim for as each switch is searched for in more than one way. Should I try to rank for all of those terms using that one category page? Or should I change the structure to something like: Electronic devices > type of device > sub-category/specific variation of device > product This would mean creating a page for each variation to have a more accute focus for a small number of phrases..but it also means I've added another step between the home page and the products. Any advice is welcome! I'm worried I'm overthinking it!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adam_SEO_Learning0 -
Redirecting Domain / Maintaining Keyword Ranking
Right now we have two sites: "our-company.com" and "cool-widgets.com." We rank high for "cool widgets" searches due to our keyword-friendly URL, but we're merging everything into our newly-redesigned company site. Should we redirect the old "cool-widgets.com" homepage to "our-company.com" (to directly transfer the old PR and links), or would it be more prudent to redirect the old homepage to "our-company.com/cool-widgets" to keep the "cool widgets" keyword in the URL? This option seems like it would be good for maintaining organic search results, but it wouldn't pass the strong link backbone to the new site's homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | versare0 -
Ranking go down why ?
Hello, Thank you , if you help us our web url www.prismpharmamachinery.com before some time very top ranking but now going down 5-7 pages in google any SEO expert can help for that Regards pooja
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Poojath0 -
3 Pages Ranking Beside Each Other | How do I consolidate so one ranks better?
An ecommerce website I own called backyardGamez.com sells outdoor games, for example cornhole boards, bags, etc. One such product is a cornhole board carrying case. If you search the above phrase, my site has three pages that rank on the first page. The term isn't high volume, so I'm assuming that is part of the reason. Is this a good, normal thing or does this mean I have inadvertently broken up my ranking power from one powerful page to 3 OK pages? Does anyone know how I can take two of these pages and use them to make the 3rd page more powerful? For example, I would prefer 1 page ranks higher on page 1 in the serps and the other two fall a bit from supporting the other. Thanks, Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Soft-Lite0 -
Page URL keywords
Hello everybody, I've read that it's important to put your keywords at the front of your page title, meta tag etc, but my question is about the page url. Say my target keywords are exotic, soap, natural, and organic. Will placing the keywords further behind the URL address affect the SEO ranking? If that's the case what's the first n number of words Google considers? For example, www.splendidshop.com/gift-set-organic-soap vs www.splendidshop.com/organic-soap-gift-set Will the first be any less effective than the second one simply because the keywords are placed behind?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReferralCandy0 -
SEOMoz Keyword Ranking Accuracy
Getting some mixed message on this. Is the keyword ranking informational available in SEOMoz based on the data in Mozscape or based on live Google data? Reason I ask is that my ranking for "crown moulding" for www.worldofmoulding differs: Based on the today's scan my www.worldofmoulding.com ranks in position 40 in Google. Based on a manual check with cleared out cache no local setting ... the site is 4th spot Running a third party check using "Advanced Web Ranking" tool it comes up in 9th spot, but they count the local business SERPs in which case it matches my manual search. It seems that SEOMoz is not in line with actual ranking. Any suggestion for what can be used to accurately asses SERP placement for terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanadiumInteractive0 -
Keyword Significance
I am seeing some very interesting changes in our non-branded keywords, and am curious to know how keyword significance in Google Webmaster Tools plays into ranking of a site. Say for example we are a photography website selling photography supplies. At one point our most significant word was Canon, but now it is photography. Would that mean that we would start seeing a lot of non-branded keywords generating from Google like "camera strap", "camera lens hood", etc. This is really good for us, but curious to know if the only reason we are seeing this is the shift in our keyword significance. Any insight? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaHoku0 -
Shall I fix "most Common Errors" for a website that ranked top 3 on Google (difficult KW)?
How can SEOmoz "most Common Errors*" under "Crawl Diagnostics" advice can be right for a good site organic? Site is well ranked top 3 on Google (difficult KW). If I go ahead and fix these errors, I might hurt my SEO , no? like: Too Many On-Page Links 302 (Temporary Redirect) Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters) Missing Meta Description Tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Elchanan0
