Question on term and what to target next? Nice dilemma to have!

[redfishking]

Guys, I have an interesting dilemma that the team here is discussing and wanted your input here is the situation:

1. We had our home page rank for a key word 4-5 on google for the past 2 years.

2. About 5 weeks ago, the home page and a sub page began ranking on top 10 for the same term.

3. Today, the sub-page a "What is page" ranks 3-5 on google and the home page is dropped somewhere like 22 or so now

** I believe I should begin redirecting that anchor text to the sub page, and maybe even some or all of our internal anchor texts to this page...

Any recommendations?  The home page is optimized to help get conversions, so we hate to 'give up' on that term, but any one run into this? What did you do?

Thanks Community SEOMOZ! for any input...

[Unity]

Hi Debbie,

Ideally each webpage would rank for 1-2 keyword targets. So if your homepage and sub page is ranking for the same term it could mean that the on-page optimization is geared towards the same terms (there is also the chance that Google will see both pages as similar and choose to rank only one - however from your description I don't think that's happening at the moment, so more of an fyi for now).

If you want to widen your reach in SERP's I'd first recommend targeting 1-2 specific keywords per page (so title tags, <h>headers, body copy, alt tags etc). Once you achieve rankings for these terms to further widen your reach, and without diluting the ranking you have gained I'd recommend adding more content rich pages to your website that target additional keywords.</h>

I'm unsure where or how your anchor text links sit and how they have been contributing to your rankings but if your homepage has dropped to number 22 wouldn't you want to try improve that ranking over the sub page?

Also, have you thought about doing link building (from external sites linking back to you)? It can help build your rank for target keywords.

Good luck,

Davinia