Picking a Keyword to optimize for home page

[inhouseninja]

Hi there,

I have chosen a keyword for a bunch of my top pages based on relevance, traffic, competition etc, and am tracking in the Tool - so far so good.

The issue I am having is with picking a keyword or phrase for the home page - all the suitable keywords I seem to have been allocated to 1 particular sub pages - basically product pages...

Anyone come across this issue?  Basically any keyword or phrase that I think might be suitable for the home page, I find a more precise page beneath the home page....

Help gratefully accepted!

[Thos003]

I had this issue with my main site. Pest control was our big target phrase. Yet we had optimized an internal page for pest control as well, /pest-control.php They were somewhat competing for the same term. So how do I proceed? Well the search engine made that decision easy.

Our main page was ranking for "pest control" so I let that one carry the load for our pest control efforts. This meant internal links were directed back to the home page for that keyword and external links also took this into consideration.

The solution I used for the internal, /pest-control.php, page was to alter this page to "pest control service". So I didn't loose out on any previous efforts for that page. Just modified it a bit. Hope that helps.

In my opinion, your homepage will almost always be your strongest page, so put your core term there.

[CPU]

If you have pages optimised for each of your products that you are happy with then I would consider whether there is a term that might be used to describe the group of products that people might use when searching less specifically. Is there a term that a competitor site uses?

Many searchers start quite generic and get more specific when there initial search doesn't throw up any suitable results.

As you have done for the product pages see which collective phrase has the best search volume/lowest competition.