Need advise on best statagy to increase rank for specific search term

[rozier]

I have a real estate web site smartopenhouse.com that serves the greater Fresno CA area.  I currently rank 16 on google for the term "fresno homes".  Would it be better to create a page smartopenhouse.com/fresno/homes and have unique title and descriptions with content about homes in Fresno.  Is this going to dilute my my current rank?  Would it be better to focus my home page to "fresno homes"?  Thanks for the help

[Matt-Williamson]

It depends on what other terms you are currently targeting and whether this is your main term as to whether you decide to concentrate your homepage on the keyword mentioned - obviously using your homepage will help straight away as this is usually the strongest page on a site in terms of links pointing at it and page authority.

When I have targeted local terms in the past I have always had success doing the following –

create a separate page with the url structure – (location)-(service).html – so for you fresno-homes.html

Then I have made sure that my navigation contains this link with the keyword I am targeting as the anchor text.

Then I have made sure I optimise all the on-page factors for this term without making it look spammy and purely written for the search engines.

I have then made sure that I gain links pointing at this page. Good tactics for local have involved identifying local influencers and getting them to share, like and tweet about my services and this page. Don’t forget to find your happy customers and get them to do testimonials and also interact with them on a social level for this.

As far as diluting your current rank I have taken this tactic on before and had both pages ranking on the first page in the top two results, so in my personal experience I haven't found it dilutes my ranking at all. As long as the extra page created actually appears to give value and serve visitors rather than being purely for search engines I don't think you will have an issue.

Hope this helps.

[rozier]

Thanks your insight really hepls