Attacking New Keywords – Updating Your Homepage Versus Creating A New Page – 014

How To Decide If You Should Refocus Your Homepage Or Make A New Page To Attack Keywords

In this weeks episode, we dive into a question that was submitted by Patrick, who listens to the Local SEO Tactics podcast. Patrick was wondering if he should modify his homepage to attack a new keyword target, or if he should create a new page to go after that keyword instead. We’ll break down the options and talk about the various situations in which you may choose path over the other.

YOU’LL LEARN

• Which page carries the most weight on your website
• How Google serves up web pages, not websites, in search results
• Deciding if you should change your home page or create a new page when going after a new keyword target for your website
• When you should avoid refocusing your keyword targets on your homepage
• When it’s okay to refocus your keyword targeting on your homepage
• When you should create a new page to attack a new keyword focus
• When you should refocus your keyword targeting on an existing page versus creating a new page
• The danger of deleting pages off your website with out properly informing search engines

Thanks for Listening!

Here is the transcription from Episode 14 Attacking New Keywords – Updating Your Homepage Versus Creating A New Page;

Jesse: This is Local SEO Tactics and this week we have a new type of episode for you. We’re
gonna take a question from one of our listeners. Patrick emailed in with a technical
question about how to apply some of the tactic’s we’ve been talking about. That kinda
gave us and idea. We’ve handled questions from a few of you that have emailed into us
and have kinda communicated privately via email. Patrick’s gonna be the first one that
we kinda put on the air and we wanted to take that a step further. We want to do a
regular Facebook live event where you can join us. If you have a website or particular
web page that you’re having problems with or you have some questions on. We want to
handle that on Facebook live, so if you’re interested, if you want to be a part of that. If
you want us to take a look at your website for whatever the reason is just drop us a line.
We’re gonna ask you to go to intrics.com/live and just let us know if you’re interested
right there and we’ll get in touch.

So, without further adieu we’ll get into this week’s episode here talking about Patrick’s
problem and we hope you all can kinda pull some nuggets out of this. It think it’s gonna
apply to a lot of you out there on some of the decision making you’re gonna make for
what pages to attack and how to apply some stuff here, so here we go.

Hey everyone, welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, Jesse Dolan here with Bob Brennan.

Bob: Howdy.

Jesse: As always. Are we ever gonna have a third person or …

Bob: We’ll get a guest on here one of these days.

Jesse: One of these days we’ll have a guest. If anybody wants to be a guest let us know.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: Happy to have you. Just gotta make it up here to the frozen tundra.

Bob: That’s right.

Jesse: What is the date here, coordinates, April 10th?

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: Is it?

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: I forget what the date is. Still snowing …

Bob: The bold north.

Jesse: The bold north. This is highly unusual. We don’t want to scare anybody away but …

Bob: Sure.

Jesse: … and they’re forecasting through this weekend so we’re gonna be what, past tax day
somewhere, April 15th-ish this weekend of more snow.

Bob: Sure.

Jesse: Especially northern Minnesota. They’re talking over the next week like two more feet so
that’s enough weather talk. If you guys are from the upper Midwest you know we
always talk about weather anyways so …

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: … sorry to bore the rest of you with the details but it’s darn cold up here. We’re sick of
it.

So, back to the show though. So, we’re gonna be talking here today. We got a question
from a listener that emailed in. I think it’s a really good question.

Bob: Yup.

Jesse: We’ve gone through, you know, a dozen or so episodes here talking about a lot of good
strategies, a lot of good things that you should do, you know check lists, tips, guides,
how do you do this, that and the other thing. This guy has a question like where do I do
this at? Where should I start? I got all these different options.

So, I’m gonna read his question. There’s not one straightforward answer, kinda depends
on the context. We’re gonna get into that a little bit here, but we’ll start with this
question, so this is from Patrick. We’ve already communicated with Patrick offline here
so he’s not just getting his first communication here. He emailed us in a couple weeks
ago. By the time this airs, but Patrick says, I’ve been listening to your Local SEO podcasts
and very much enjoying them. Thank you Patrick. Thank you very much for all of the
helpful information and the resources. I am an entrepreneur, so on and so forth.
Basically he’s got a website. It’s already been out there for awhile, but now he’s really
getting it re-energized after listening to this show. Realizing he kinda needs to dig into it
and improve some things, so his question’s pertaining to his homepage. He says, ” I have
a simple question, should I start playing with my homepage and optimizing it for my first
keyword target. Or, should I be creating a new landing page? I assume the answer is
new landing page and I have started that way, but I don’t know if I have ever heard you
expressly mention that on your show. If I missed, sorry about that. Let me know what
you think.”

Didn’t miss it. We really haven’t got into [crosstalk 00:03:57] those kind of minutia yet
and it’s actually a great question, which is why we saved it and want to put it on the
show. There’s not a straightforward answer. It kinda really depends on what’s already
happening. So, the example Patrick, I already emailed this to you but for everybody else
I’m gonna use as if you’re a plumber because this is a real life situation we helped one of
our customers with already so it’s kinda fresh and easy to speak about.

So, let’s say if you already have your … in this case we should set it up too. You have a
website. You have your homepage, right, which of course is the default page on your
website. And then you already have some top menu or main menu pages, whatever you
want to refer to them. These would be the products and services that you represent
that are gonna be found in your navigation menu of your website, whether it’s under a
services tab or if you list them individually. If you’re a plumber, you know, water heater,
leaks, and things like that. If your homepage is already optimized for this number one
keyword then you’re not gonna wanna mess with it, right?

So, if you’re a plumber and what would you have like 24/7 emergency plumbing is kind
of a common thing. If that’s what you do and if that’s your main thing then definitely
make sure your homepage is optimized for that …

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: … regardless of what you’re, Patrick doesn’t say exactly what he’s getting into here but
he says his first keyword. So, my first train of thought here would be well is this first
keyword you’re gonna attack different than the overall primary thing that you’re gonna
be focusing on? Or is this the first new thing, right? That you’re gonna be going after? If
you’re a plumber and if your main business that you want to be known for is 24/7
emergency plumbing repair, plumbing service, make sure your homepage speaks to that
to the nth degree. You want to let everybody know that’s what it is and keep that, that
way.

Now, if you want to add, in Patrick’s case, if he wants to be hot water heater repair. If
you want to change your business and have that be the number one thing you’re known
for then I would definitely attack my homepage for that.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: With that in mind, if you were already getting some kind of ranking and some kind of
exposure for the 24/7 and the other stuff for the plumbing in that case you might
jeopardize that a little bit, you know?

Your homepage is the most powerful page on your website. I think we’ve covered it
before, but just to make sure everybody’s aware when you’re going up to Google, or
Bing or anything else and you do a search, they’re not giving you a website in the
results. They’re giving you pages.

Bob: Pages, yup.

Jesse: Individual pages on that website and we’ve talked before about how to do proper title
tags and naming conventions to make those pages standout, but that’s a very important
thing to understand. Sometimes depending on what people are searching for, even if
you have a page that’s about a certain topic, in this case 24/7 repair, you’re probably
gonna have a couple pages on your website that’ll talk about the various emergency
services you provide. Your homepage is gonna be the one, probably more often than
not that Google’s gonna serve up if that’s really what your business is all about.

So, before you change that you really gotta understand what you’re doing because you
may lose some traction you weren’t prepared for. You thought, well I just want to get
more focus on water heater repairs, let’s throw all that on the homepage and cut out
some of that other stuff. That other stuff may be what was getting you some leads and
some rankings that you weren’t quite aware of. So, before you do that on your
homepage a good thing is run it through our instant SEO audit or some other tool, just
to kinda get a baseline of where things are at right now.

In this case, if you want to go ahead and change that for the water heater repair go for
it. Use the tool, you know, get a similar grade or try and shoot for that 90% if you’re
using our tool Intrycks.com, click on the free SEO audit up on the top right corner,
yellow button, and pick the keyword and the phrases that are gonna be all about, in this
case, water heater repair. And then I would go, make sure you still have the page for
24/7 plumbing if that’s the case. You don’t want to completely abandon that idea …

Bob: Right.

Jesse: … if it was giving you some traction before.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: So, the other scenario is no, we are 24/7. That’s still what we want to be known for but I
really want to go after hot water heaters. Then you are gonna create a new page, as
Patrick was saying, “Maybe I should just create a landing page.” If this is something
you’re adding on. If this is something you’re not getting exposure for that you want to,
but it’s not something you’re gonna completely abandon the other stuff in your business
and go after, then definitely add it as a new landing page.

With that, don’t be afraid of adding multiple landing pages, right? If it’s something that’s
super straightforward, you can’t think of multiple variations of that keyword or maybe
there’s a page two and page three with more information then forget it. One page is
fine. It’s better than nothing, but absolutely if this is an area that as Patrick says, is
number one keyword. I take that as very important.

Bob: Quick question, hopefully this pertains to it, but is there a right or wrong answer for the
number of pages? Like we dealt with one client that had a lot of pages, like over 300
pages.

Jesse: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bob: And another client that had a lesser number …

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: … what are your thoughts on that? Is there two different strategies there or?

Jesse: Yeah, that’s a good question. We talked in that earlier episode on sort of an answer for
that, as far as how many pages should I have? You should have a page for every
prodding service that you offer, right? So that’s kind of the minimum, but as far as
maybe the other end of that spectrum, having too many pages. There is a concern out
there in the search engine optimization world for Google seeing that there’s too much
crappy content on your website, for lack of a better way to phrase it here quick.
So, if you’ve got 300 pages out there. If you’re only getting traffic and exposure on
maybe 30 of those, 10% of them then yeah, those other 270 pages in this example are
just diluting everything else, right? So if you can imagine it more like a file cabinet,
because Google has its Google Index is what it’s referred to and what it’s called …

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: … can visualize that as kind of a file cabinet. It’s got multiple drawers and each drawer
has got, you know, files with stacks of paper in them. If your website has 300 files, 300
pages that are in there. For Google to understand exactly what you’re all about versus if
it had 30, that’s just that much more information to go through and draw conclusions on
and things like that. If you’re having 300 pages you’re gonna be pretty broad and pretty
wide in what you’re doing, completely fine. You can have thousands of pages on your
website and still rank good.

In this case, long answer to your short question it’s kinda more about are those sticking
though? Are you getting any traction with them and are they relevant? So, I would try to
always pair that down to only relevant ranking information is really where you’re gonna
wanna be on that. Looping that back into Patrick’s question, kind of in a sideways, he
didn’t exactly ask it like this, but just set it up for anybody else who’s maybe on the
same train of thought, if you already have a landing page in this case.

So, just to reset, Patrick, hey should I got after this top keyword or not on my homepage
or a new landing page go after a landing page if you’re adding it on. If you already have a
page that’s kinda talking about that I would circle back to that first. Kind of as a third
option here on my homepage, new landing page, I’d say what about an existing page?
That you already have that, maybe, maybe kinda talking about that topic or that you
kinda want to reframe and spin around. Maybe you were talking about water heaters,
nobody ever really contacts you for them so I’m gonna maybe tweak this page and
change it up to be more about, you know, emergency water heater repair in this silly
example that we’re using.

So, not a right or wrong for number of pages. Pages need to be relevant otherwise
they’re never gonna get out of that file cabinet drawer …

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: … you know, for Google so be aware of that and just like our files at home or at work. If
you ain’t touched that thing in 12 years you know, decide if you really need that page
anymore and if not go ahead and get rid of it. It’s not gonna be any sweat off your back
or any pain to Google or anybody else out there. Put a little asterisk there’s a right and
wrong way to get that content off your website. If you just delete that, if that page was
in Google’s index even if it wasn’t showing up. If it was in Google’s index that’s now
gonna be a 404 error, page not found. So there’s a proper way to do that to tell Google
that I have removed this page instead of just straight removing it. Just kinda warn
everybody and …

Bob: I was gonna say, so if you’re gonna slim down your site so to speak, and all the traffic’s
on those, let’s say, 30 pages …

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: … and you’ve got 300 and there’s 270 that gotta go. Like you said, you just can’t delete
them because there’s a process there.

Jesse: There is a process there and maybe that’s something, again if we get some good
feedback we can dive into that later and talk about some examples on that, but yeah
there absolutely is a process and you just gotta let Google know what’s going on so they
don’t think that something is wrong with your website because if they were expecting
these, in this case 270 pages to still be there an they’re not, hey what’s wrong? Is this
website compromised? There’s something wrong here. Maybe we shouldn’t send
customers there anymore. And you’re gonna lose your exposure.

So, just to kinda recap Patrick’s question, if your homepage isn’t about the main thing
that you do and that you want to be known for, optimize it for that. Don’t be bashful,
you know, your homepage is your most important … it’s kinda like your storefront or the
first impression, however you want to reframe it and give an example. Your homepage
should be about what you do first and foremost.

If you want to go after a new product or new service you can still feature it on your
homepage. Put a little blurb in there, put a link to the page, whatever. You don’t have to
not include it on your homepage …

Bob: Right.

Jesse: … just maybe isn’t the primary thing and then have a new page about that. If you
already have a page that’s similar to this topic you can definitely explore repurposing
that page and kind of tweaking it instead of creating a brand new one from scratch so
that’s about it. Again, pretty long answer for Patrick’s question as well, but really
wanted to kinda try to take his question and expand out to many different scenarios for
everybody else.

I think something else I wanted to mention here with Patrick with his question, I think it
can apply to a lot of people. A lot of our audience is gonna be business owners or maybe
managers that may or may not be doing the actual SEO and website work yourselves. A
lot of feedback, which is kind of unexpected, a lot of feedback that we’re getting from
people is hey I don’t directly do this stuff but your podcasts are helping me understand
what’s going on.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: That’s kinda Patrick’s deal. He didn’t make his website somebody else helped him.
Sounds like he’s taking it over a little bit more or at least getting more involved but at
least you can see what’s happening and hold other people accountable. I was talking to
another customer who he doesn’t do anything with his website, but is still digesting our
episodes saying now I know how to talk to my web guy …

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: … I know what to do when I’m on my website and I’m scratching my heads saying “I
don’t know if this is quite right.” There’s some information to fall back on now.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: You know? Doesn’t mean everybody’s always doing something wrong. Just because you
don’t know what’s happening doesn’t mean they’re doing a bad job, but now you can
have some kind of accurate way to understand that and get you thinking. In Patrick’s
case here, hey I got something I want to promote for my business …

Bob: You bet.

Jesse: … now I kinda now how to get after it instead of just tell my web dude “Hey, throw this
up on my website.” You have a little bit of strategy, so …

Bob: Yeah, you’ve got a little bit of gray hair on your head and you’ve built a few things in
your life in terms of craftsmanship, you know? In terms of plumbing or electrical and
you kinda know your way around a house. You go to build a new house, your
contractor’s gonna look at you differently and deal with you differently as you go in to
building that house …

Jesse: Right.

Bob: Right? Because you have some idea how electrical works. You have some idea of maybe
this is the way the code should be or how drainage works and things like.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: So the contractor, I’m not saying contractors are bad, but there are bad ones out there
that will try to pull the wool over your eyes. Just like everything else. If you understand
how that’s put together, you know, you’ll keep him on task a lot better.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: So that’s the goal of this podcast.

Jesse: It’s your website. It’s your company. It’s an extension of you. You own it so absolutely
nothing wrong with understanding how things work even if you’re not gonna be an
expert on it. So, hopefully we’re helping you guys do that. Again, really appreciate the
feedback, the questions …

Bob: Like the reviews. The reviews have been great on iTunes. We really appreciate that.

Jesse: Absolutely, absolutely. We love it. It helps us know that we’re doing something. Not just
blowing hot air. We’re actually making a difference in helping some people out there so
very exciting and motivating for us. So, keep the questions coming in. Keep the reviews
coming in. We’re happy to talk about anything you want. Extrapolate on anything we’ve
been talking about and answer any questions.

So, one last time Intrycks.com/show or if you want to leave us a review go out to iTunes,
Intrycks.com/iTunes and we’d love to see it. Until then, see you next week.

Bob: Have a good night!

Jesse: Alright everyone hope you enjoyed that episode. As always wanted to share with you a
review this week that we got. This one here is coming from Hannah Place and gives us a
great five star review saying ” great info! Thanks for bringing conversation and hacks to
this intimidating topic.” I think we’ve kinda mentioned the same thing before. That’s
what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to help local business owners, sales managers,
entrepreneurs. Trying to make waves in their own local markets not having to be an SEO
expert to pull some of this off. Some shows are gonna be more advanced, some are
gonna be more basic, but at the end of the day we’re hoping that everybody out there
can just take some of these tips and tricks, apply them to your website and start to gain
exposure in your local market.

So, thanks for the great review and you guys out there if you want to leave us a review
we appreciate that. Helps us know if we’re on the right track, if you like what we’re
doing and just if it matters to you. So, go on out to Intrycks.com/iTunes that’s

I-N-T-R-YC-K-S.com/iTunes and we’ve added something new this week. We’ve had some people
ask us how do I leave review? iTunes isn’t the easiest so you’re gonna find some
instructions on how to do that. Hopefully make it a little bit easier for you so
Intrycks.com/iTunes and we’d love to hear from you!

I wanted to throw in one more plug for our product review leads. Talked about it in
previous episodes if you haven’t checked it out yet go to reviews.intrycks.com. It’s a
great piece of software. It’s totally web based. It’s gonna allow you to get more reviews
from your customers. This will be the easiest process your customers have ever gone
through to leave reviews and that’s how you’re gonna get more customers to leave
reviews. It’s just gonna make it so much easier for them. On your end of the table you’re
gonna get instant reports when people leave reviews whether they’re good or bad.
You’re gonna be able to instantly share and I should say automatically share any good
review four or five star rating, whatever you want to social media, to Facebook, to
Twitter, things like that help spread the word.

So, takes a lot of burden off your shoulders. Makes it easier for the customers. Makes it
easier for you and getting more reviews obviously helps your SEO for your Google My
Business page. So, it’s just a win win across the board. Check it out, reviews.Intrycks.com
and you can check out all the show notes on Intrycks.com/epsiode14 that’s episode
one-four. You’ll find the link to ReviewLead, a link to the Facebook live event. You can
watch this episode on YouTube and download the full transcript of this. So, check it out.
Shownotes.Intrycks.com/episode14.

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