Homepage Ranking For Service Keyword (KW Cannibalisation)

[meowth24]

Hi All!

I will try and keep my question brief, any advice is greatly appreciated.

I have a client that is a well establish coach hire company, naturally their main priority is to be ranking for 'coach hire' in their surrounding area.

The homepage and /coach-hire/ page - both appear to compete against each other in the search results.

The homepage is positioned higher up the rankings, it also has historical backlinks with anchor text relating to coach hire, whereas the /coach-hire/ page doesn't have all that many backlinks.

The company has a few services  that it offers through it's website - Coach Hire, Coach Day Trips & School Bus Services.

The Day Trips and Bus Services pages rank well for their respective keyword.

My question therefore, is - should I focus on making the homepage the best page for the 'coach hire' term and forget about trying to get the /coach-hire/ page to outrank the homepage? If so, what's the best way of doing this in terms of what happens to the /coach-hire/ page?

Any advice is greatly appreciate and if you need any other info, just let me know.

Many thanks,

Gareth

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Gareth,

This is a pretty common issue.
Generally your homepage is always going to be your 'strongest' page for links etc so in most cases it makes sense to use it to target your highest level and most important keyword/phrases.

If you are ranking well with your homepage for this important phrase then you don't really want to be messing with it unless there is a good reason.

For the service page you could consider:

1. Leaving it as is since it serves its purpose for users and site navigation and conceivably supports the ranking of the homepage.

2. Consider slightly reworking to try target a relevant secondary phrase (ie bus rental instead of coach hire for example or private coach hire etc, etc) - assuming your homepage is not ranking as well for these type of searches and they are indeed relevant to your business.

The above assumes you ARE actually ranking well for "coach hire" with your homepage. If you are not ranking as well as you like then that might change your approach. Of course, if you did get the hire page to rank well then.... what phrase would you target with your homepage?

Hope it helps