No matter what the keyword, only the homepage shows in the SERP

[popcreativeltd]

Hi, wondered if someone could help. My clients website shows up well for terms but its always the homepage rather than the targeted landing page. For example, if you search for "teeth whitening anglesey" they appear http://goo.gl/ohJdua however, its the homepage rather than the tooth whitening page http://goo.gl/uVI8gK

Thanks

Ade

[popcreativeltd]

Thanks Kathy, yeah is an odd one. Ive seen it happen before with some other sites we have done and its always confused me why it happens.

Regards

Ade

[katandmouse]

Perhaps this page is cannibalizing off of the one you want: http://www.marquess-dental.co.uk/tooth-whitening-marquess-dental/ They share essential the same title tag.

also in looking at your competition, they have a very strong architecture. Search on site:www.thecosmeticdentistry.co.uk "teeth whitening" and you can see all the pages in that "directory."

This is a tough one  because you don't even have the word whitening on your home page! It's as if Google is saying, I know you're relevant but I don't know what page to show so I'll just show the home page instead. Makes no sense, but most of these home page cannibalizations make no sense either. Sure hope someone can crack this nut.

[popcreativeltd]

Thanks for the answers. great idea as well Inbound Boulder

[authority-networks]

In addition to all of these suggestions, try adding some more internal links with that keyword phrase pointing to the page you wish to rank for that phrase.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Adrian

I would take a look at your backlink profile / rankings via the following tools:
Google Webmaster Tools
Majestic
SEMRush

I would assess your anchor texts, the topical relevance of your backlinks, age of your links, and also your backlinks individual metrics. Not only for your own backlinks, but your competitors as well based on keywords/queries you want to rank for.

Also, take a look at Moz's On-Page Grader and see if there are any opportunities you may be missing out on.

From there, I would also look into Schema.org - they offer keyword markup opportunities that can help you better assist crawlers in understanding the topics/meanings of a particular page. Also - take a look at their medical markup opportunities as well.

Lastly, for the time being, if you have a lot of traffic coming to the homepage for these keywords and queries, take a look at A/B testing your homepage to get users to those internal pages more quickly. You have quite a bit of navigation going on and your rotating banner is quite large and confusing, especially when you click the arrows. I see images, but then I click on one that I think is taking me to whitening, but then I am taken to dental warning signs.

Consider this area your opportunity to grab users attentions, get them to where they were searching for, and utilize internal linking in a more effect manner.

You can use the following tools if you want to test:
Visual Website Optimizer (GREAT resource section)
Google Experiments
Optimizely

Also, check your robots.txt/meta robots and sitemap (and check that it's submitted to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools) to make sure everything is being properly indexed and crawled.

Just some things to think about - hope this helps! Good luck!

[DirkC]

I guess it's related to the keyword + location. If you do a tooth whitening site:yoursite - the tooth whitening pages appear first - if you repeat the query with the location - the homepage gets the first result. You could try to add the location on the title / metadescription / H1 / url of the detailed pages - to make it more obvious that the page is not only about tooth whitening but about tooth whitening in your city.

Also check what is more popular - you mention teeth whitening as example - the article however talk about tooth whitening - Google knows it's similar - but I would go for the more popular term.

rgds,

Dirk

[GPainter]

Google picks the page it thinks is most relevant for the search, so you can look at why you think your homepage is more relevant than the other page, is this from meta tags, content (including keywords), robots, links etc.

It may be a matter of making the teeth whitening page more appealing to Google this can be via some content really drilling down that niche etc.

If you're having problems you can always try to direct users from the homepage to the correct page which will in tern help Google understand the right page etc.

Hope that gives you some insight that helps you a bit.