How can I drive organic traffic to a specific landing page?

[Rajaindiain]

HI,

I have a site which is attracting traffic for my target keywords but to the wrong pages.

I usually create a series of articles on the topic (10-15) an start getting organic traffic, but I have not been able to drive the traffic to the main page for that topic.

How can I get the main page rank over sub pages?

Thanks in advance!

[BruceA]

Analyse why traffice is not going to the main page. A few things to look at:

Do a page rank check on Moz on each page using the keyword, and follow the guidelines and make adjustments.

See if the actual pages are getting the same keyword as a trigger, you might find it is actually another word that is ranking higher.

Hope that helps

Bruce

[Andy-Halliday]

I am assuming you have done the basic checks like:

• page is in your sitemap

• Google has crawled the page

• meta title and description optimised

If this has been done, does the sub pages have better content than the main page.

Like Bruce said, use Moz and see what keywords the page is ranking for or you could use something like searchmetrics to see what keywords are driving the traffic. Without knowing the url or keywords its a bit difficult to give you a bit more detail

[gazzerman1]

I actually just asked Google's John Mueller the very same thing and additionally a question about finding pages that do the same thing that may have been missed.

Check out the video clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GlxLlpm3Ew&feature=player_detailpage#t=2343

watch?v=-GlxLlpm3Ew&feature=player_detailpage#t=2343

[EricaMcGillivray]

All great technical replies, but don't forget to look at the content and consider which would actually be good for the user to end up on. You might be getting a lot of longtail traffic that's a deeper search, example your landing page is about "cats" but people are going to your article about "best food to feed a cat." Sometimes main topic pages can have very light content and aren't very attractive to users looking for information.

[gazzerman1]

and that is precisely the reason for me asking John in that video about how to recognise things like this.

Its really bad that Google has removed keywords for referrers that use https (logged in to Google) as this basically makes it very hard for you to see what your customer was looking for when they landed on that page. Back in the day you could use that info to alert a user to a product page or some other clever tactic.

John also said in another hangout that they removed it because it was being abused and people were making millions of dynamic pages to scrape up traffic.

However I see no reason not to have it in WMT or Analytics, but it turns out that they don't want users to be able to do powerful keyword research. I personally feel that this is a backwards move on Google part.

Watch his advice in teh video above, its about 8 minutes long and he goes into detail about recognising if the page that you want to have ranking is the best option and how to make that happen.

[Rajaindiain]

Ok Guys,

Thank you all for your inputs, I found three issues -

1. Content on the main page is weaker. It is an introduction and list of the articles.
2. Internal linking need to be better structured - would love to get some tips on this so will be searching for best practices.
3. The sub pages are getting more traffic, social share etc and ranking better for long-tail and perhaps this is boosting them for the main keyword also.

I have seen on numerous sites that they have the exact page show up for the main keywords, I guess it is also because of lots of links to these pages. I don't have many links.

Any suggestions to correct this are welcome!

[EricaMcGillivray]

Good, relevant links are definitely a strong signal for getting your page ranked higher. If you're seeing competitors who are ranking for "the exact page," I'd take a look and see what they are doing that's working so well for them.

For more info about better internal linking, I'd watch our webinar from August all about internal linking.