Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages

[RickyShockley]

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

[ChrisAshton]

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!

[RickyShockley]

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

[MattRoney]

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.

[ChrisAshton]

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.

[RickyShockley]

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

[Deacyde]

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.