Changing keyword target on home page? Will it work?

[JohnPeters]

I have a site that is in the financial services niche and has around 20 pages talking about different services.

I want to change the goal of the site and now just target Insurance.

The current home page is a simple introduction to the website, I was going to change this to target the insurance keyword and put around 500 words content on the front page. I was also going to change the Page Title, Description and H1 tags too.

My question is will the front page then rank for that keyword once google recrawls the site? Could I damage the PR of the site or any other factors from changing the front page.

Here are some stats about the site

• 11 years old
• PR 3
• Page Mozrank 5.58
• Page Moztrust 5.61
• Domain Mozrank 2.29
• Domain Moztrust 3.17

Thanks for your help guys

[CyrilWilson]

Your page rank will  not be affected at least by the changes you have mentioned. According to me you can safely go ahead and do this.

1.  But if your home page ranks on any keyword currently, changing the title, description and content may have impact on it.

2. By making changes in the home page, you are working towards optimization of site for sure but that doesn't mean you will immediately get rewarded.

3. To outrank the top ranked sites on SERP on keyword "insurance" you have to match their  back-linking portfolio too, which takes its own time

4. Analyze competition and plan for a good link building campaign along with the on page optimization effort you are putting in.

[JohnPeters]

Thanks for the reply. Just to make things clearer, its not actually insurance I am targeting, it is a financial product, I chose that to keep it simple.

The front page doesnt actually rank high for much anyway, I wanted to change the front page to target the most profitable product/service that we sell.

Am I correct in thinking that the front page should do ok due to the age of the domain and the mozrank and moztrust? The reason I am asking that is I see a massive serp change since penguin and noticed that the ones now ranking are all aged domains. The top one is 4 years old with 20 backlinks, thats it!

[CyrilWilson]

What matters is the overall quality of the pages of your website and the number or quality of backlinks. The order that pages appear in the results of a search at a search engine are influenced by the number of pages that link to that page, and by rankings of the pages that link to that page.

When a site is linked to by a popular and trusted domain, that link might provide more value than a link from a site that is less popular and trusted.

Domain age may be a factor  but just a minor one. Think about the condition wherein someone would bought a domain and have just parked for last 10 years. Will putting a content on it will give any boost to its rank??