What more can be done to get Google to change the landing pages it uses for certain search terms?

[ClickHub-Harry]

For one of my SEO campaigns, Google is using the website's home page as the landing page for the majority of search terms being tracked. The website splits its products by region and so we want specific region pages to rank for search terms related to that region, rather than the home page. We have optimised each regional page to a reasonably high standard and we have ensured that there is a good amount of internal linking and sign-posting to those region pages, however, Google is still using the home page. The only complication is that for the first few months there were canonical tags on these pages to the home page. These were removed around 3 months ago and we've checked that the region pages are indexed properly.

Is there anything we are missing?

Has anyone had any success in getting Google to change its landing pages?

[LoganRay]

Hi Harry,

I've done this a number of times when taking over campaigns for other 'agencies'. It's a pretty common task for most SEOs. It usually involves some de-optimization of the ranking page in order to shift that emphasis over to your preferred page. Check out Moz's on-page grader, that might give you some insight into why the homepage is overpowering the interior pages.

Rand did a really good Whiteboard Friday on this topic about a month ago. It's definitely worth watching if you haven't already, you might find the key to what you're looking for: https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday

[ClickHub-Harry]

Thanks Logan, I'll check out!

[JaredCarrizales]

Hi Harry,

Logan is right, this happens a lot when new projects get started, especially when a site is newer.

The easiest way that I've found to combat this (in addition to what you've already done) is to build some almost "over optimized" links to each of the pages in question. When our team does this, we make sure 1) to include exact match anchor text of links that are built, 2) the links and linking domain itself are extremely relevant to the destination page, and obviously, 3) they are pointed at the very specific pages in question that you're trying get ranked properly.

I certainly wouldn't be this blatant all the time, but when trying to "separate" these pages in the search results I would definitely make sure this is on your checklist.

The search engines are incredibly "intelligent" but they're still machines and can't necessarily infer what page needs to be ranked without the proper signals. So making sure the on and off page signals are there to provide as much context as possible is really important.

Hope that helps Harry!

[ClickHub-Harry]

Hi Jared,

That's very helpful and your response is greatly appreciated! From your experience, what sort of time frame would you expect from implementing these signals and the pages being reindex to seeing an effect in the ranking?

Many thanks

[JaredCarrizales]

That's partially a question of how soon the linking pages get indexed/recrawled, but in general it's very fast. On our last project where we had an issue like this it only took ~4 days before our pages were showing up correctly in the search results. We were targeting two pages specifically, and built around 8 links per page.

Keep in mind though that the homepage is almost certainly going to be stronger than any of your other pages, so rankings might slip a bit at first when the engines start to attribute the pages correctly.