SEO Working GREAT! Although Keyword Rankings Only Directing to Home Page.
-
Since I've become a fellow MOZer I've seen an increase on my sites and proud to say that ALL of my clients have now accomplished 1st page rankings on at least 2 of their top 3 keywords. Yes, I am as stoked as them.
Although I am a bit worried because as I rank keywords and test them on Google and engines alike all of our rankings direct to the homepage.
I am essentially new to SEO. So as happy as I am to be doing something right I'm worried I'm losing the end user. By having them need to Search our site/menus/blog for the keywords/phrase that got them to us will turn most searchers away. They want the content now. What am I doing wrong?
My pages are pretty specific so I never cared to use rel-canonical's...I dont have duplicate content, other than your typical footer/side bar consistent info. So I'm curious where I've gone wrong.
Little history on my sites: I Use Joomla 2.5 & 3.x. I manage seo details through sh404seo. I've cleaned all duplicates I can up other than what these dynamic cms generate by just using one. I've done fairly well and all my pages rank A for moz's onpage grader for the keyword optimized around.
Any help is appreciate, THANK YOU!
-
Hi Bryan,
From a generic point of view, not having seen the other sites (the guys above have some great points about the example site given), there are a number of reasons a site's home page might rank instead of its product pages / speciality pages. The most common is that a site is not very strong, but the strongest page on the site (inevitably the home page, bar extreme circumstances like a very popular blog) is just strong enough, and its content is just relevant enough, for Google to want to rank it. This is very common for new websites - Google figures, "this site is great, better rank it for x, y and z queries", but the internal pages don't yet have the authority to rank on their own.
Link development and good linking throughout the site can help this situation change, although there are some established sites that still suffer from it. You'll see this happen for even some competitive queries - at my former agency, we once had a client who ranked well for [car insurance] in one particular country, but it was always the home page, not the car insurance page, that ranked. Changing that balance was a timely process of building authority into the site's deeper pages.
You can also have a situation where a site is accidentally targeting competitive terms with two or more pages, called keyword cannibalisation. This old post is still relevant in regards to how to deal with this.
-
Hi Bryan,
After reading this thread and visiting your site, I wanted to point out that (again, as someone who has never been to your site) there are many places that I was expecting to find more information / expecting a hyperlink to another page and I was mistaken.
For example, on the divorce page (http://www.barnumlaw.com/divorce.html) the list (property division, etc) is highlighted in a blue color and made me think I could click for more information. These lists appear throughout the site. It might be a case where if, hypothetically, these specific lower level pages were ranking and people went and did not find the information they were looking for (as happened to me when seeking more information), they bounced off the site, sending negative signals to the search engines. I see that you have google analytics the site so you should be able to breakdown landing pages and bounce rates and work to optimize those pages to be more useful.
Additionally, adding a search function to the site might give you more insight on what people are searching for when they arrive on your site so you can work to 1.) Make sure that information is on the site, if it is relevant to what services your client offers and 2.) Work to make sure that content is optimized for these popular search queries. If there is a trend where many people are searching for a certain law, etc, then perhaps adding a page to the site would be helpful. If it's a more specific query, this could be a good opportunity to add content to the blog on that topic.
Hope that helps.
-
So let's first fix that issue with your FB code:
"Given URL is not allowed by the Application configuration.: One or more of the given URLs is not allowed by the App's settings. It must match the Website URL or Canvas URL, or the domain must be a subdomain of one of the App's domains."
And after running your site on GTMetrix, there's a lot that could be done to improve site performance, and speed is a certainly ranking factor.
Now, on to key words. I imagine you have a lot of them for this site, as your site pertains to many areas of law. Are there any key words you're looking to rank for any particular page? This should have been my first question. Oh, and are you taking about the links that appear in SERPs for key words you're testing? Just want to be clear and not assume anything (like I commonly do here).
Anyway, share some of those key words and pages and I'll see if I can find anything.
-
So like I said there are several sites in question. Which Is why I believe its something 'I' have done rather than what Google may be deciphering. But lets do a more newer site of mine in which I'm still actively trying to finish optimizing and design. It was a quick launch site but soared up to first page rankings.
I'm sure all my sites will have the same issue if we can figure this out here. I'm looking through my sh404seo settings in Joomla. But I dont change any default settings other than omitting categories in link titles.
-
Bryan,
Can you share the site? I imagine you have a lot of content on your homepage(s), or perhaps the sites in question are relatively small. Consider landing pages for some of those key words. If you're selling BBQ ribs and BBQ chicken sandwiches, optimize two separate pages with specific key words for each. In that case, a search for just BBQ will likely lead a visitor to the homepage URL.
On the other hand, Google might have just analyzed traffic to your site and figured out that most people end up on your homepage soon after entering your site from another page. Hard to say, really. Share some more about the specifics so we can take a look.
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
-
Time For New Website To Rank?
We've been working on a site for the past couple months and going to be launching in a couple weeks. How long does it take for Google to establish a "stabilized" ranking for the site and various pages? The main homepage will have its targeted keywords and each product page will have its own targeted keywords. We have about 100 total pages for the site. I know rankings may fluctuate initially but trying to get an idea of when the rankings are stabilized before we start working on the ongoing SEO like earning backlinks, changing on-page optimization, etc to be able to track changes in rankings over time.
Reporting & Analytics | | vikasnwu0 -
Spam using Hostname so filter not working
Hello, on one of our sites, we have filtered via the hostname. We have done this on other sites quite happily but on this particular new website, when we add in the hostname filter, we still get loads of direct and referral traffic which is junk - and the hostname of these junk referrals are the website's domain. So it seems that this filter is not working or the spam are now using the hostname? Not sure what is going on or how to solve this?
Reporting & Analytics | | AL123al0 -
Direct Traffic has Drastically Increased
Hi, I have noticed in Google analytics that direct traffic of one of my website is increased drastically. I didn't participate in Email Marketing or any other paid campaigns however direct traffic is continuously increasing. I checked all sources, locations, browsers, filters etc but didn't get any findings. Please help.
Reporting & Analytics | | RuchiPardal0 -
Anyone heard of or used Hadoop software for SEO/website analytics?
Hey Moz Community, We received an interesting email this morning from a client's marketing manager asking if we knew about or have ever used "Hadoop software" because "[Business owner name] says it’s supposed to help us see how people use our website and more." I've never heard of this software and upon looking around on the web, it says it can do a lot, but my client is a small law firm who average 800-1,000 visitors per month, mainly from their 2 local office cities/markets. Anyone have any thoughts on this or ever use this software? Thanks in advance. Patrick
Reporting & Analytics | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Duplicate Title Errors on Product Category Pages - The best practice?
I'm getting quite a few 'Duplicate Title Error' on category pages which span over 2 - 3 pages. E.g. http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches?page=1 http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches?page=2 http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches?page=3 All 4 pages currently have the same title... <title>Steel Cutting Punches</title> I was thinking of adding Page Numbers to the title of each corresponding page, thus making them all unique and clearing the Duplicate Page Title errors. E.g. <title>Steel Cutting Punches</title> <title>Steel Cutting Punches | Page 1 of 3</title> <title>Steel Cutting Punches | Page 2 of 3</title> <title>Steel Cutting Punches | Page 3 of 3</title> Is this the best way to go around it? Or is there another way that I'm not thinking of? Would I need to use the rel=canonical tag to show that the original page is the one I want to be found? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | bricktech0 -
Google Direct Traffic Reporting for Mobile on Analytics
We noticed a significant drop in our direct traffic in Google Analytics for mobile on July 30th but all our other traffic remains the same. What is the possible cause of this?
Reporting & Analytics | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
Why do I have a lot of direct traffic from MSN and Yahoo with 100% bounce rate?
For MSN I have about 8000 hits of one page and a 100% bounce rate. In the last month I have about 400 hits from Yahoo with a 100% bounce rate. Msn is all different pages, while Yahoo is all the home page. What would cause this?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
Should I delete a page that gets search traffic, that I don't care about?
I have a page on my site that consistently gets traffic, every month. Googlers seems to love it. But I don't like it at all. Webmaster tools shows that google allows us a certain number of search impressions each day. - it flatlines, they are limiting the impressions we get. We also getthe same number of clickthroughs each day. So my question is for anyone who has this same experience, who may have experimented by deleting a page you don't care about. Did you just lose that number of clicks each day or did other pages on your site get displayed and clicked through instead?
Reporting & Analytics | | loopyal0