Homepage ranks worse than subpages

[CQMarketing]

My homepage (www.mach7t.com) is optimized for "enterprise imaging solutions", but only ranks #55 in Google. The rest of my subpages rank much better than that for their respective keywords, many on page 1. Any ideas why this might be?

[MonicaOConnor]

The only thing I would recommend here is to add a little more content to the home page. The design is superb and the keyword use is natural. I think with how competitive the word is you might need to use it a little more. Maybe 12 times instead of 8. It appears to be pretty competitive.

Did you run the page through the on page grader? And did you check your links in open site explorer? Run an advanced SERP in the Keyword Analysis tool to compare your metrics with the SERPs on page 1.

[MichaelC-15022]

I'd agree with Monica.  Panda's above-the-fold algo is absolutely going to slay your home page.  You've got only 1 sentence of content above the fold.  Your images in the slider are all clickable (except the Lego image), and besides, they don't seem to be foreground images (except the Lego image)...Panda is likely going to see them as decoration.

Your video is probably not seen as video.  I see no schema.org/VideoObject markup, and it doesn't seem to be one of the standard embeds (YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia) that Panda can likely recognize in the HTML.

Everything else on the page is clickable, which (this is my theory only) is likely to cause Panda to see it as navigation....not content.

So....I'd recommend:

• chucking your current slider; choose a different plugin (or write it from scratch, it's only a couple dozen lines of Javascript and a few links of plain old boring HTML), so that the images are seen as content AND they're not clickable, except the next/prev slide buttons
• redesign your layout to pull some of the text below up above the fold, including moving the Archive & Communicate section and its siblings above the giant buttons
• use Wistia to embed the video, and follow their instructions re: creation of a video sitemap

I'd also recommend going into Google Webmaster Tools, and doing a Fetch & Render on your home page, to make sure that Google is able to see your page laid out the way you expect.

[MonicaOConnor]

I would use YouTube instead. Just because it is another search engine itself and can help increase traffic to your site.

[MichaelC-15022]

I would agree IF the video is something that people would search for, e.g. big branding content, humor, viral content, music or celebrity related.

Otherwise you're just generating traffic for YouTube.  Conversions from visitors to your YouTube page for your company to clicks back to your website will run around 1%.

And the YouTube page for your video is likely to outrank your own page that embeds that video.

Phil Nottingham from Distilled is the master of the universe when it comes to video SEO...see his writeup here where he talks about the pros and cons.

[RangeMarketing]

Hi!

Try messing around with your home page title tag. It's displaying as "Mach7 Technologies: Enterprise Imaging Solutions" for me in the SERPs. Google loves pushing brand names towards the beginning of the title tag and valuable keywords further away. Switch it up and see what Google likes. Even something like "Mach7 Enterprise Imaging Solutions" might bump you up a tad.

Also, Google isn't preferring the meta description you added to the page. It's using "Explore our award-winning enterprise imaging solutions and find out how an image management strategy can consolidate data access and sharing across the ..." from your home page. Try some variations of that so that the meta description doesn't get cut off in the search results.

Worth a shot! Good luck

[CQMarketing]

Thank you everyone for your input. We will try some of these ideas and let you know what works!