Which Page Has the Best Chance at Ranking for Your Target Keyword
March 5, 2012
The first step of any successful SEO campaign is to start off with keyword and competition research. Deciding which keywords to target is vital for ALL SEO campaigns. Once you have decided which keywords to target, you have to determine which pages of your website should target these terms.
For instance, if you are a pet supplier and your target keywords are “pet food”, “cat food” and “dog food”, you would most likely assign “pet food” to your top level pet food page, “cat food” to your cat food page and “dog food” to your dog food page. Once you have your list of 3, 10, 25, or 100 keywords, you start out assigning keywords to the pages that are most naturally relevant to them. If you have several “pet supply” keywords it’s easy to assign them to the homepage. If you have specific dog food keywords, it’s easy to identify your dog food page and to assign that keyword to that particular page.
Why Keyword Assignment?
The reason you assign keywords to pages is to help Google identify the structure of your website and to ensure the best odds of ranking for a particular keyword. Let’s face it, your cat food page will have a very slim chance at ranking for “dog food”. Simply because the page is not about dog food and you can’t naturally say dog food in all the high value locations on a cat food page.
When you assign a keyword to a page, that page must be about that particular keyword. You should be able to find that keyword in the title tag (title of that page), the meta description (page description), the headings (H1, H2, H3, etc) and most of all within the content. Ideally that page should be all about the keyword assigned to it. If the cat food page is really about cat food, it shouldn’t be hard to not only assign cat food to that page, but to put it in all the locations your shoppers/users would look.
Assigning Keywords to the Right Pages
In some cases your whole website is relevant to a keyword, or you can’t think which page is MOST relevant to a particular keyword. Therefore, you may have a hard time deciding if your “dry dog food” page or your “wet dog food” page should be the page that targets “dog food”. Here are some pages to consider.
- Your top level dog food page just above your wet dog food and dry dog food page
- The page already saying dog food naturally the most
- The page you want to show up in the results for “dog food”
Keep in mind, you can have multiple pages all targeting the same keywords. You just have to pick a page that targets it the most, or have the keyword more prominent & dense on the target page.
How to Determine Which Page Will Rank the Fastest for Your Target Term
Consider your website is SuperPetSuppliesOnline.com and you are trying to decide which one of your pages already has the highest chance of ranking for “dog toys”. You may have 100’s of dog toys, but you are unsure which page you should be back linking or internally linking to. Based on the above information, your top level dog toys category page should be your target page. However, for this example, you are looking for the page that is already indexing high in Google, and with a little push it could be on the first page. Here are the steps to determine which page already has the best chance at ranking for “dog toys”
- Go to Google.com
- search site:superpetsuplliesonline.com “dog toys”
- and/or search site:superpetsuppliesonline.com dog toys
Google will display only pages from superpetsuppliesonline.com. But will rank the most relevant page(s) to “dog toys” first. This is how you can tell which pages, according to Google is already relevant to your target terms.
If the top results are way off (not relevant to your target terms at all), then you have a problem. You must start from the beginning of this article and decide which page to assign that target keyword to, add that keyword in all the high value locations of the page, then start (off page & internally) linking to that page using that target keyword.
If you are still having trouble assigning keywords to their appropriate pages, contact us today. We can help!