Google Is Ranking the Wrong Page
-
Howdy Folks-
I have a case where Google is ranking the wrong page for a couple of different keywords.
The home page is: http://healthtn.com
Most notably, we're trying to optimize the home page for "Tennessee Health Insurance" but the below page is what continually ranks for it, and does so very poorly. We used to be page two with the home page, now we are page four and it ranks the following page.
http://healthtn.com/tennessee/health-insurance/student
I have started directing our Internal Linking to reflect the correct anchor text but succeeded in losing ranking for the term, but am still ranking the wrong page.
Any thoughts or help would be much appreciated!
-
Thanks for the help sir, I just dropped a link into the misranked page back to the home page. I haven't been able to do any of the other suggestions yet, but it's a start. Thank you!
-
Thanks for the actionable advice, really helpful!
I went back in and made some of the changes you suggested. It was helpful to revisit some of those points. We've also been attempting too (and succeeded in) ranking for "Health Insurance Alternatives in Tennessee" so some of the meta real estate had been dedicated to that. But I tweaked some things to try to do both.
I've struggled with the amount of content on the home page. The student page that is ranking for "Tennessee Health Insurance", only has it in the keyword in the content twice, but it does have over 1800 words and lots of Heath Insurance and Tennessee references. The home page is designed to have little content on it, as many of them are... If I drop Tennessee Health Insurance a few more times in the 200 ish words on the home page, it may start to get stuffy?
Know anyway around low word counts on the home page?
As for the title, The page is called home for menu purposes, I don't have full control over the design and that is the way the site designer designed it. Not sure if I can do much there...but I agree it is a vital piece of on page ranking options.
-
Looking through your home page's source code, I see that the keyword has been incorporate into the copy once or twice, the meta description and an image alt tag. That's a good start.
I would also incorporate "Tennessee health insurance" into the home page's meta title and h1 header. These are two fairly important hotspots with onsite optimization.
I would also try to naturally incorporate the keyword 1 or 2 more times within the home page's content. Lastly, I recommend brushing up on Chapter 4 of Moz's SEO Guide: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development
-
My advice is to redevelop the content of the ideal page and make it more keyword specific. Give internal link from the page which is ranking to the page which you ideally want it to rank.
Give another link to your site structure and see if you need any improvement on that level.
Also build some good links with anchor text that target your keyword and instead of the home page link should go back to that particular page.
Hope this helps!
-
Hey, thanks for the help!
After spidering the site again I noticed the primary anchor text being directed to http://healthtn.com is "Home" as it's the home page menu Bar. Is there any way to getting around having 100+ links with "home" in the anchor text? I am fairly certain I want to have a link back to the homepage from every internal page for a Quality User Experience?
-
Hi there,
Here are some of the most common reasons for search engines to rank a less relevant page above a more relevant one.
Internal Anchor Text .
External Link Bias
Link Authority & Importance Metrics
On-Page Optimization
Improper Redirects
Topic Modeling / Content Relevance IssuesYou can find out more details right here moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
Hope it helps you.
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
-
On Brand Queries Google does not shows my home page first instead of it shows internal pages.
Also on my brand query it doesn't shows sitelinks. What may be the reason?
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
If Two Internal Pages Rank for a Given Keyword, Are They Competing?
Let's say I'm a house painter working out of offices in Boston and Springfield. When I search for "Boston house painter" or "Massachusetts house painter," both my homepage and my Boston office page come up #8 and #9. That's good, sorta (2 results on first page), but I'd trade that scenario for a single result in the top 3. How likely is it that these two page are competing? If I removed the Boston page, would the homepage rank better? Or should I be happy I have two pages turning up the the first SERP? Any thoughts here appreciated. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | wparsons0 -
Will Google Custom Search results on my home page kill it's ranking?
This is probably a dumb question, but here goes anyway. 🙂 On a site I have it would be very useful to the reader to offer a search box that uses a Google Custom Search that I have optimized to search websites that are closely on-topic with my site. I know it sounds bad that I would send people to other sites, but just assume that the reasons are valid for this discussion. My question is, if the search results are set to display on the same page (the home page) as the search box, will the links in the search results to external sites just bleed my page rank to death? I assume it would, but thought I'd check just in case I'm missing something. I have to option to place the results on separate page of my site, and noindex it, but it won't be as powerful as it would be on the home page.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0 -
How google handle with Title when is invisible on the page?
I would like to display H1 Title tag invisible on the homepage. I set up Title colour same colour as background colour. How google handle with this cloaking? What should I to set up in the style.css?
On-Page Optimization | | joeko0 -
Will Google re-index the page if content is changed/improved?
Hello,
On-Page Optimization | | wickedsunny1
i have a little question, it seems most of my posts which are 3 years old or even more, all have almost same type of 2-3 lines of text at post starting and then images roundups etc.
which recently stopped getting any traffic from google. Probably becuase of lack in text etc.
So if i now edit those old pages, will they be reindexed in google with this new content/data?
thanks in advance.
cheers0 -
Why a page with an On Page A grade has a less good rank than a page with a F grade?
Why a page with an On Page A grade is ranked 17 in Google when the home page with a F grade is ranked 9 ? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Amadeus_eBC0 -
Would I be safe canonicalizing comments pages on the first page?
We are building comment pages for an article site that live on a separate URL from the article (I know this is not ideal, but it is necessary). Each comments page will have a summary of the article at the top. Would I be safe using the first page of comments as the canonical URL for all subsequent comment pages? Or could I get away with using the actual article page as the canonical URL for all comment pages?
On-Page Optimization | | BostonWright0 -
Why does my on-page report card say my page title is 403 forbidden when its not?
I'm trying to get on top of my on page stuff and I'm going through the SEO Moz on-page report cards and it says I'm scoring a fail on certain elements within the 'critical' and 'high importance' factors as my page title is '403 forbidden' but when I go on to my site, my sites CMS it's not '403 forbidden' it's the text I entered?
On-Page Optimization | | jamesj35mm0