To get homepage to rank highly for a given term, do you only add the term(and variations) to the homepage?
-
If adding the term on all pages then won't the pages start competing with each other in the SERP?
I'm building a site for a client who wants to rank highly for 'Southern California general contractors' and its not clear to me whether to fit these keywords (and variations) only into the homepage or if I should try to fit them into all pages.
-
That's right Kenny - create unique content for each landing page (whether it's based on location, type of service offered etc).
Unless your brand name is 'California Personal Injury Attorney' (99.99% sure it wouldn't be) - then don't add the term to each and every one of your title tags. Add terms/keywords related to that page.
E.g. homepage might be 'California Personal Injury Attorney | ABC Lawyers'
A landing page based on injuries related to traffic accidents might be 'California Auto Accident Attorney | ABC Lawyers' or something similar.
-
I'm with you and I think Brad would agree that duplicate (or even largely duplicate) content would not be the end result behind landing pages dedicated to specific cities. If I were going to use this technique I would include city-specific content for each page.
Also, when you say 'duplicate title tags' do you mean MOSTLY duplicate title tags (ie Home | California Personal Injury Attorney, and About Us | California Personal Injury Attorney)? If so, are these really harmful to rankings?
-
You don't want to create duplicate title tags. It sends a bad signal to search engines, and you ultimately then create multiple pages that compete with each other for the same keywords.
When you're targeting various cities, you also need to exercise some caution. Brad mentioned 'breaking up landing pages depending on locations'. I'm not going to say that's wrong because I'm not sure exactly what he's getting at, but you don't want to create multiple pages with the the same, or largely the same content, where the only difference is the name of the city because this presents a duplicate content issue. And this isn't a 'technical' (honest mistake) duplicate content issue. This is a 'I think I can outsmart the search engines' kind of duplicate content issue.
-
That makes sense Brad, thanks!
So say one of my other clients wants to rank highly for 'California Personal Injury Attorney'. Should I not add 'California Personal Injury Attorney' to the title tag of every page (eg 'Contact Us | California Personal Injury Attorney', 'Home | California Personal Injury Attorney')?
If I did add this keyword to every title tag, would it damage my client's ranking in the SERP?
-
Hi Kenny,
You need to decide which terms you want to rank for which specific pages. E.g. if they are targeting 'Southern California general contractors' on the homepage, then you'll want to use that keyword a few times in the text on the page, title etc. The focus should be on that keyword, without making it look spammy.
However, you wouldn't want to try and target that term on every page on the site, it just doesn't make sense. E.g. you might have other landing pages that target 'welding', 'structural steel', 'maintenance and repairs' etc (I'm not exactly sure what you mean by 'general contractor' or what they do). On these pages, the focus should be on different keywords to 'Southern California general contractors'.
You could even break up the landing pages depending on locations. So have 1 for Los Angeles General Contractors, San Diego General Contractors and so on.
This might be a good start point - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization. Just don't try and over optimise in light of Google's recent algorithm changes. Create content that is useful to the consumer and you'll be fine.
Thanks,
Brad
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
-
Canonical homepage link uses trailing slash while default homepage uses no trailing slash, will this be an issue?
Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues. I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com. I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers. Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this. What says you?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Domain vs Sub Domain and Rankings
Hi All Wanting some advice. I have a client which has a number of individual centres that are part of an umbrella organisation. Each individual centre has its own web site and some of these sites have similar (not duplicate content) products and services. Currently the individual centres are sub domains of the umbrella organisation. i.e. Umbrella organisation www.organisation.org.au Individual centres are sub domains i.e. www.centre1.organisation.org.au, www.centre2.organisation.org.au etc. I'm feeling that perhaps this setup might be affecting the rankings of the individual sites because they are sub domains. Would love to hear some thoughts or experience on this and whether its worth going through the process of migrating the individual centre domains. Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
IP address changed and some rankings drop
I changed my hosting company coz better server hardware and results (google). My website was perfectly for every queries on google but after changing company and ip address some results dropped to second page. What can i do now? These drops caused by changing ip address?
Technical SEO | | umutege0 -
What Would i do to get my site ranking high?
Hello Friends, I need your help please tell me what would I do to get my site ranking high in Google search engine. When I start my work on my site my work blog commenting , social bookmarking, keyword targeting etc.… But now the scene is completely changing. Now I am working on just guest blogging. I don’t understand that what would I do next after the guest blogging. Because I think there is now just one way to promote your site VIA guest blogging. Now please tell me is there any other option to work and get high ranking?
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Rank tracker and Rankings report differs
Hi all Is this normal? I have set up a campaign for a site. Tracking a variety of keywords. For one of them, which is a quite important keyword I've been working on I've moved down one step in my rankings report. This is first of all weird because my on page optimization went from grade c to a, and even weirder beacuse if I run Rank Tracker tool on the keyword and the URL I see that I've moved up 6 steps, to 15 in Google. Kinda makes it hard to grasp if I'm on the right path or not! (I've checked and they are both results on google.dk, same URL and same keyword - exact)
Technical SEO | | Budskab0 -
Getting Posts Indexed
On a Wordpress site I'm working on you can get to any product from home in 2 clicks but I'm a llittle concerned about the URL which looks like this: domain/categoryname/subcategoryname/productpage Will I have trouble getting my products indexed?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Optimising multiple pages for the same search term
We were having a discussion on title tags and optimising multiple pages for the same term. We rank well for the phrase 'chanel glasses' which points to our Chanel brand page. The Chanel brand page is optimised for this term, and has the phrase 'Chanel glasses' at the front of its title tag. Previously, the title tag on our home page had the words 'Chanel glasses' at the start in an attempt to rank twice for the term (as one of our competitors has managed). This never worked (though at the time, our DA/PA was lower than it is now). For this reason I switched the title tag on the homepage to try and rank for 'designer glasses'. My belief is, given we already rank highly for the term on a more relevant landing page, trying to rank for it again on the home page is not the best use of a title tag on our highest PA page. We may as well use it for something more generic like 'designer glasses' (though this term does not convert nearly as well, nor does it currently rank as well for us as we've not been attempting to get 'designer glasses' as anchor text. Plus it's more competitive. Another generic term maybe be preferable). My colleague's view is we should attempt to do what our competitor has done and try and rank twice on page one for this term. I like the idea of dominating the top results, but I feel that since attempting to get double-listed hasn't worked for us so far, we should use the homepage for optimising for a different term ( ideally something that we don't already rank for elsewhere on the site). I see his point of view - if we were ranking nowhere for the search term then, yes we should concentrate on getting one page to rank, not two. But since we already rank well for the term, perhaps his strategy is preferable? Just for clarity, the title tags are not duplicate, but the idea was to share many of the same keywords between the two title tags. What are your thoughts SEOmoz?
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Getting a bunch of pages re-crawled?
I added noindex tags to a bunch (1,000+) of paginated category pages on my site. I want Google to recrawl the pages so they will de-index them. Any ideas to speed up the process?
Technical SEO | | AdamThompson0