Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Our current home page is texty, talking about why choose us and general information on what the service involves. We are currently developing a new web design and content architecture involving moving all the content out of the home page, and making the homepage a beautiful guide to the site, as is the best practice. I think the home page will generally result in a better user experience.

SEO: we currently rank second for "service city" (going to our homepage). Our domain is service-city.co.uk. While the change is going to involve us adding lots of new good-quality pages with new keyword targets, our most important keyword by far is "service city" and the home page would probably still be the most appropriate page for that keyword.

And I'm gravely worried the change will negatively impact this keyword.

I would appreciate your thoughts

Is bounce rate itself an important factor? For example if my page which shows pricing for a service ranks high, people usually come to that page, then go to the contact page to see where I am. Most of them then realise I'm not close enough and exit. Now, I could give these people that info on the pricing page but that would drive my bounce rate up. Does it make a difference from Google POV?

Note: not real names, services, locations used:

So we are a single health clinic in Vancouver. Our natural name is GSF Health Clinic. As the most important search term is Health Vancouver by far, we decided to kind of change our brand name to 'GSF Health Vancouver' years ago. Our main competitors name is Health in Vancouver and had had a hard time getting above them in local SERP. But actually, since the change in name, we haven't really improved. As there are also searches for Health Clinic Vancouver, some of our citations are actually GSF Health Clinic Vancouver just to get that keyword in. This variation even happens on our site.

Now, looking back, we should have just kept our natural sounding brand name and more importantly, kept the same exact one everywhere. However I'd like advice going forward. So the decision is whether we need city in the brand name - does it make much difference?

The options are:

• GSF Health Clinic Vancouver ("Health Vancouver" is not together, but we still have city name. Current citation on G+ and a few other places. A bit of a mouthful)
• GSF Health Clinic (Sounds nice, but poor SEO and also no exact citation matches currently so this is a major name change)
• GSF Health Vancouver (very targeted SEO, sounds okay but not amazing when in a sentence)

BTW our domain name is health-vancouver.ca