How to set primary landing page for Keyword in Google's Eyes?

[silversamurai]

Dear Fellow Marketers,

I am trying to rank a website for its primary keyword.

Now, I can see that the website ranks for this keyword with one of its subpages. As most of the competition websites rank with the frontpages, the subpage of my website does not have enough authority to compete with them.

Now, I would like to know, how I can achieve to rank with my frontpage, too.

So far, I guess the content on the subpage does better than the content on the frontpage. However, I dont want to add all the content on the frontpage.

Is there another (more technical way?) to show Google which page to rank for a given keyword?

Can the canonical tag be of any help here? Should I change the internal linking?

Thanks a lot for your valuable feedback!

[adder]

Hi,

The first and the most important question is whether you've determined that the homepage is the best-converting page for your primary keyword. Do you have the Analytics Goals set up and does this data suggest that homepage is converting better? In most cases homepage is not converting as well as targeted landing pages. Maybe Google has got it right this time? :)

It's a myth that you need a homepage to outrank the competitors. Once you've reached a certain level of domain authority, you can boost your rankings by simply pointing a few internal links to the pages that you've optimised for conversions.

Secondly, if you're sure you really want the homepage to rank for the primary keyword, you have to determine why this subpage is outranking the homepage. Is it because of link-related metrics or is it mainly on the merit of content quality.

I'd look at both internal and external links. Maybe too many internal contextual links are pointing to this subpage? If that's the case, simply change those links so that they point to the homepage. Depending on how you acquired the external links to the subpage, you can email the webmasters and suggest that they are linking to an old page and that you now have a more relevant page with more up-to-date content.

If, however, you find that Google has chosen this subpage because of its content, then the only way you can fix this is move all the content (and I can see you don't want to do that) from the subpage to the homepage and do a 301 from the subpage to the homepage. BUT... if your homepage has got on-site optimisation flaws (scattered targeting, hundreds of internal links etc etc) be prepared to lose rankings. It's not guaranteed that the homepage will resurface at the same position as the subpage.

Can the canonical tag be of any help here?

Unless the homepage and the subpage has identical (or nearly-identical) content, canonical tag won't help you.

[Wilburforce]

The primary function of my business/site is widget-service, and Google has for some years alternated between returning mysite.com and mysite.com/widget-service.html for widget-service searches. The two pages are obviously of similar relevance, and the difference may hinge on off-page factors (Google often switches without any prior changes to either page). Note that organic links are likely to use anchor-text and target-pages that are most relevant in their own context.

I agree with adder that conversions are more important than any other preference, so if your current landing page is converting well I wouldn't be too concerned. If it isn't, I would focus on raising its conversion-rate, rather than trying to steer Google somewhere else, which could backfire spectacularly if it looks to Google like the manuipulation it is.

Broadly, also, if your client is looking for widget-service, why would you want them to go to your homepage rather than straight to widget-service? Users generally want the shortest path to what they are looking for, so if your widget-service page isn't the most relevant result for that term, what is it there for? If its content is so similar to the homepage that the canonical tag would have any relevance I would be inclined to ditch it altogether.

[silversamurai]

Dear adder and Wilbirforce,

thank you so much for your quick and outstanding clarifications on this matter. I have really been impressed by the quality of answers in this forum.

You both have certainly a point and I have not included conversion and bounce rate metrics into my consideration so far. I definitely should do that and get back to analyzing these figures.

I have the impression that the subpage is ranking due to the content quality rather than due to receiving strong incoming links. It is the main keyword for a service that is promoted on the homepage. The subpage is providing more detailed information about this service and containing further explanation. So for a website visitor looking for the service, the homepage would be more relevant. On the other hand, for website visitors trying to find out more about this kind of service (without buying intent), the subpage would be more helpful.

I guess you are right with your argument that I should not try to manipulate Google here and rather rely on their algorithm to bring up the most relevant page for the users.

Thanks again and keep it up :-)

[FranticFish]

I had this problem before. This is quite an old thread but I think the advice from Tedster is still good - look for anchor text in the body of the pages as well as the in the links pointing to each page - [webmasterworld.com...]

[silversamurai]

Thanks, FranticFish.

The Thread that you linked to turned out to be very helpful.