Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages
-
Hi everyone!
I've noticed that many of our clients have pages addressing specific queries related to specific services on their websites, but that the Home Page is increasingly showing as the "ranking" page.
For example, a plastic surgeon we work with has a page specifically talking about his breast augmentation procedure for Miami, FL but instead of THAT page showing in the search results, Google is using his home page. Noticing this across the board. Any insights? Should we still be optimizing these specific service pages? Should I be spending time trying to make sure Google ranks the page specifically addressing that query because it SHOULD perform better?
Thanks for the help.
Confused SEO :/, Ricky Shockley
-
Hi Ricky,
This one is always a tough question to answer. It depends on a number of factors, not least of which being your vertical but it will take some creative thinking for sure.\
Unfortunately it isn't something I can even give you broad suggestions on. The questions you need to answer are "who would want to see our services pages?" and once you're comfortable you've got the answer to that, ask "where would they find it helpful to stumble across this page?". It could be an industry-relevant website where your product is a great fit, maybe a relevant forum where someone is literally asking for what your page covers etc.
This is why it's so important to make all of your landing pages genuinely helpful - if the current answer to the first question is "nobody would want to see it, it's terrible" then that should be priority #1
Build something link-worthy and reach out to those niches.
Don't forget good old fashioned competitor link analysis here either. You may find nothing directly in their link profiles but it might spark an idea - I know it's happened to me plenty of times!
-
Hey guys,
Good advice, thank you! My navigation is already pretty flat (as flat as it can be) and I certainly understand the concept of links to deeper pages...but how in the WORLD do you build quality links to a service page?
Almost every link opportunity (sponsorship, directory, curated lists of providers, PR hits etc.) seem to funnel to the home page for local biz in my experience.
Thanks again,
Ricky
-
I have to agree on the link building suggestion. Often when I've heard folks complain about this issue it ends up being due to a dramatically stronger link profile for the home page. If you don't have relevant links pointing to the landing pages, it's quite likely the on-page optimization alone won't be enough.
-
Hi Ricky,
More often than not, when we see this from a new-to-us client, it's because their previous SEO provider put some content on their homepage and drove 100% of the links there but did nothing for the other landing pages.
If you're comfortable dropping your URL in here I'd be happy to take a closer look, but if this is the case for your site, I'd suggest starting by boosting the content on each of your landing pages (to give you an idea, our internal expectation is 1500+ words of quality content per landing page, styled so it isn't a wall of text) and revise your upage titles, meta descriptions and headings as well.
Working on building some links to these pages will also help out quite a bit. Basically, the common mistake is to almost over-optimise the home page, ignore the rest and wonder why it's only the home page that ranks
Similarly, make sure your nav is as flat as possible and links directly to these landing pages rather than just from a broader "services" page or something.
-
Hi Deacyde,
I appreciate the reply but I think you misunderstood my initial question. We've already done this and have services pages properly broken out and optimized for different procedures, but we find that Google is increasingly using the HOME page as the ranking page for service terms even though the home page doesn't mention the service at all.
Thanks,
Ricky
-
Homepages in general do this because we as people put forth the meat of the site on the homepage, sometimes it works for us but often in the SEO world it works against us. Homepages should be optimized for the brand name and keywords related to the company or person, almost like a lighthearted about us page without specifics.
Then you place the meat on the service or product pages, so they have the optimized keywords to signal to crawlers that this page is best suited in case someone searches this keyword.
I'm actually redesigning a site right now because their older site was basically targeting all their keywords on the homepage via product listings and summaries of those products, even though the product category pages had great content that was more indepth and relevant, the homepage is also naturally the highest page rank of the site, so seems to get chosen over lesser ranked pages for keywords they both have.
Take another look at your site and maybe list the primary and secondary keywords you'd want each page to rank for, and make sure those keywords are correlated.
The Plastic Surgeon example for keyword targeting would be:
Homepage - **Surgeon's Name, Company, Florida Based, Plastic Surgery Professionals ( etc ) **
Surgeon Service Page - Miami, FL Plastic Surgeons, breast augmentation, plastic surgery breast augmentations, And other longtail keywords related to this niche.
So when both user's goto the page from serps they stay and convert and when crawlers go through, they find the meat of a search query on the page you want them to find it on.
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
-
Keywords are indexed on the home page
Hello everyone, For one of our websites, we have optimized for many keywords. However, it seems that every keyword is indexed on the home page, and thus not ranked properly. This occurs only on one of our many websites. I am wondering if anyone knows the cause of this issue, and how to solve it. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Ginovdw1 -
My Website's Home Page is Missing on Google SERP
Hi All, I have a WordPress website which has about 10-12 pages in total. When I search for the brand name on Google Search, the home page URL isn't appearing on the result pages while the rest of the pages are appearing. There're no issues with the canonicalization or meta titles/descriptions as such. What could possibly the reason behind this aberration? Looking forward to your advice! Cheers
Technical SEO | | ugorayan0 -
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Trailing Slashes on Home Pages
I do not think I have a problem here, but a second opinion would be welcomed... I have a site which has a the rel=canonical tag with the trailing slash displayed. ie www.example.com/ The sitemap has it without the trailing slash. www.example.com Google has it's cached copy with the trailing slash but the browser displays it without. I want to say it's perfectly fine (for the home page) as I tend to think they are treated (with/without trailing slashes) as the same canonical URL.
Technical SEO | | eventurerob0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Dynamically-generated .PDF files, instead of normal pages, indexed by and ranking in Google
Hi, I come across a tough problem. I am working on an online-store website which contains the functionlaity of viewing products details in .PDF format (by the way, the website is built on Joomla CMS), now when I search my site's name in Google, the SERP simply displays my .PDF files in the first couple positions (shown in normal .PDF files format: [PDF]...)and I cannot find the normal pages there on SERP #1 unless I search the full site domain in Google. I really don't want this! Would you please tell me how to figure the problem out and solve it. I can actually remove the corresponding component (Virtuemart) that are in charge of generating the .PDF files. Now I am trying to redirect all the .PDF pages ranking in Google to a 404 page and remove the functionality, I plan to regenerate a sitemap of my site and submit it to Google, will it be working for me? I really appreciate that if you could help solve this problem. Thanks very much. Sincerely SEOmoz Pro Member
Technical SEO | | fugu0