Optimized Page Not Ranking for Head Term

[digitalcrc]

We have a primary donation page that we've tried to position well for the term 'Donate' and some of its longer-tailed derivatives.

The page has plenty of high-quality backlinks and internal links, and hasn't had any manual actions taken against it. The backlink profile is fairly good from what I can tell, definitely not mainly spam.

The issue is that it doesn't rank for 'Donate', at all really. For 'Donate Online' and 'Donate Canada', it ranks roughly #3-4 across major Canadian cities, but we're not even in the top 100 for 'Donate'. There are pages and domains that are way less optimized, with much weaker backlink profiles, that are ranking well ahead of us. It's not a noindex or robots problem, as the page ranks fine for many other terms. We also have a strong domain with around 660k backlinks according to MajesticSEO.

Here's the URL in question: http://www.redcross.ca/donate

I'm hoping someone can help us diagnose what could be going wrong with this term specifically and how we can get this page into the SERPs where it belongs. Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in advance!

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Personalization?

I have you at 5-6

[KeriMorgret]

I'm going to answer your question with another question. What kind of value does a referral for 'donate' give you? Is such a broad keyword one that is going to bring you in the right type of person, or are you better off building content regarding the terms that convert better or target more qualified searchers?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Josh,

Keri has asked the same question I was thinking about when reading this.

One thing to consider around this is that SEO isn't just about getting people to your site - it's about getting the right people. I personally would be looking for phrases like "charitable donations", "charity donations", "donate to charity", etc. Those people that are searching for those phrases have one clear action in mind, whereas "donate" could be anything, including people just looking for general information.

-Andy

[digitalcrc]

Hi Andy,

I fully agree with both of you. I should've prefaced the question by saying that this isn't a big issue on my end, just something I found very strange. Still hoping to diagnose it, just so I know how to deal with the problem if it comes up down the road with a more relevant intent-heavy keyword. Sounds like the consensus might be 'it's just too broad.'

[digitalcrc]

Hi Keri,

See my response to Andy below. I agree that the keyword isn't essential, and not even that great, I'm just more curious as to why; actually ranking it for the term isn't as critical as my initial question made it sound

[spencerhjustice]

You're probably not using google.ca. It ranks slightly lower on google.com.