How to rank Product pages over its Resource counterpart?

[wiredseo]

So, I have a resource page coming up in the SERPs above the product page, obviously both pages are targeting a lot of the same terms... it's like one is how to use the product and the other IS the product.

What's your take on getting the money page to rank instead of the resource page?

The only things I can think of include making sure that (internal) anchor text hyperlinks are all powering up the product page, and possibly adding more content to the product page and it's sub-pages.  Possibly even including the how to use the product info on the product page itself.

Any other ideas?

[TomRayner]

Hi Clint

I'm in agreement with your line of thinking.  Other than building links to the product page itself, you may want to change the way the page looks in order to give it that boost.

As you will have seen - in this and other industries - Google is a fan of ranking informational content.  Subsequently, your resource page, which is more likely to have said content, will often rank higher.  The solution would be to add more of this type of content - unique versions of course - to your product page for Google to crawl.  Additionally, you may want to withold or remove that kind of content from the resource page if you really don't want it to rank.

The trade-off comes with user experience - by demoting or even removing this resource page, will it come at a serious detriment to users on your site finding what they want?  If there's a hint of this answer being "yes", then I wouldn't do it.  User experience is paramount.  Instead, you may want to add my call to action/sales imagery and/or copy to the resource page to drive conversions.

Hope this helps.