Trying to rank homepage nationally and internal pages locally?

[AgLend]

We are a finance brokerage in Australia and we operate in a specialist niche and in regional areas with low competition but we have identified KW's that are very profitable to us but seem to need different approach re strategy. We specialise in Agribusiness lending. We have been pretty scrappy in the past with our SEO as it has always been done by me, and as a startup, as everyone knows, the jack of all trades can help and hinder!

To date, we have done a lot of Adwords (and KW research) so I have a fair idea of what keywords I am after. Some KW are low competition and extremely profitable to us. But there is a difference between them on who our competitor is and how difficult it would be to rank and which strategy to use. For example Agribusiness, used by all major banks, now they provide agribusiness, but only via their own products, as we are brokers we tend to receive a lot of new leads as we are brokers and we can compare all products and as agribusiness can be quite complex this is a major point of difference for us. So my strategy to rank for this KW  would include a national approach as we provide advice in this space on a national scale, which has worked well via AdWords leads. But would like to move away from my sole reliance on AdWords.

Then we move onto KW that we have also had some success on a national scale via Adwords but the metrics suggest is better from a local perspective (local regional town), i.e hobby farm loan, rural finance, even home loans (when there is no other local competitor in small town). As we have brokers in other regional towns this also opens up an opportunity to have either internal pages with lots of local signals (i.e NAP, Authority outbound links, local KW, social signals from local FB groups etc). But can a internal page compete against a competitors HP, for example I was going to set up mysite/Toowoomba.com.au internal page with info re that broker and lots of local points, or am I best to create another site, i.e brandname-Toowoomba.com.au (still linking from my contact us page for Toowoomba) and focus solely on local for this site (including internal pages to rank locally, i.e Toowoomba Home loans)? the extra benefit is I then create another asset if I was to sell the region as a franchise (another discussion)

So, my question is, can I mix my strategies without any issues, or should I create separate sites?

[RobCairns]

Hi Tim,

To answer your question - you can combine both methods. I've done work for several clients (including business lending and financial advising) with locations based all around a given country (Canada, US, UK, etc.) who also provide service inquiries on a national level. For this type of campaign, you want to create a geo-specific silo on your page and then focus on ensuring that your content is creating relevancy for the keywords you are targeting.

Additionally, your link profile will play a huge role in this campaign since you want to ensure you are generating local links for your local pages while simultaneously targeting national links for your national services. It's very important that you structure this type of campaign well before you dive in, because it can be a mess if it isn't rolled out properly.

I think this is a better strategy than creating multiple websites, since you aren't forced to track all of your campaigns spread across different regions, which can be a disaster in terms of organization. I would also add that you can certainly outrank a home page with an internal landing page based on content, links etc. Wikipedia does it all the time.

Sound like you'll have your hands full with this rollout, so feel free to touch base with me any time and I'll be happy to impart any knowledge and experience I have to help you out.

Cheers and best of luck!

Rob

[AgLend]

Thank you, Rob. I appreciate the feedback. I will definitely stay in touch.

Regards

Tim

[julie-getonthemap]

An internal page can absolutely compete against a home page. Just tonight I was doing some research, and 4 of the sites on Google's front page were internal pages.