The Wrong Page Ranking for Your Main Service

The page that shows up instead

Search for your main service and your town, and your business appears, but with a blog post from two years ago, an old news item or the home page.

The service page, with the prices, the booking button and the photos of your work, is nowhere in the results.

A visitor who lands on the post reads about the topic in general and has to find their own way to booking. Some do; others go back and choose the next business.

This is not a penalty, and nothing is broken. Google has simply decided another page on your site is the better answer.

Why Google picks the other page

• More words: the post explains the service; the page lists it.
• A clearer title: the post names the service; the page says Services.
• Outside links: other sites linked to the post, not the page.
• Your own links: menus and sidebars point to the post from everywhere.
• Age: the post has been around for years; the page is new.
• Crowding: twelve services share one page and one title.

The fourth is the one owners control and rarely check. A popular-posts box repeated in every sidebar tells Google the post is one of the site's most important pages.

Find out which page Google prefers

Start with a plain search for the service and the town, in a private window so your own history does not colour the results.

Then search site:yourbusiness.ca threading, with your own domain and service, to see which of your pages Google associates with the word.

In Search Console, Search Analytics can filter by a search phrase and show which pages appeared for it. If the post collects the impressions and the service page has none, that is your answer.

Make the service page the best answer

The fix is not to hide the other page. It is to make the service page clearly better at answering the search.

Give it a title and main heading that name the service and the area, not just Services. Titles show about sixty characters, so the important words go first.

Then write what a customer needs: what the service involves, the time it takes, the price or a realistic range, who does it, what to do before and after, and photographs of real work.

That usually means several hundred words where there were twenty. The point is not length but answering the questions people have before booking.

Point your own links at it

Links within your own site are the clearest signal you control about which page matters.

Link to the service page from the home page, from the menu by its own name, and from every post that mentions it, using plain words such as eyebrow threading.

Trim sidebar boxes that push old posts onto every page, or at least make sure the service page sits in the menu above them.

A worked example

A brow bar with three threading chairs on a busy street in a suburb offers threading, tinting and waxing. Threading is most of its business.

Searches for eyebrow threading in its town showed the brow bar on the first page, but with a two-year-old blog post comparing threading and waxing for sensitive skin.

The services page was a price list of twenty items titled Services. The post had eight hundred words about threading, Facebook shares and a link from a local beauty blog, and a popular-posts box put it in every sidebar.

Google was doing its job. On the evidence, the post was the site's best page about threading.

A new threading page now covers how it works, how long it takes, the price, how to prepare and what to expect afterwards, with photographs of the room. The home page and menu link to it by name.

The post stayed, trimmed to its real question, with a link to the new page near the top. Over the following weeks Google began showing the threading page for threading searches.

When to merge two pages

Sometimes two pages say nearly the same thing, such as a service page and a blog post that is really a second service page.

Then combine them: move the useful content into the service page and point the old post's address at it with a permanent (301) redirect, so its links pass to the page that remains.

Do not simply delete it. A deleted page that other sites link to throws away the reason Google trusted it.

An old news post announcing the service is simpler still: edit it to say the service now has its own page, and link there.

The home page problem

Small sites often see the home page ranking for the main service, which is fine if the business does one thing.

When it does several, the home page should summarise and link, with a short section for each service pointing to its own page.

A home page title naming only the main service competes with the service page. A title covering the business as a whole leaves each service page room to own its service.

Give Google time to notice

Changes like these take weeks to show, since Google has to recrawl both pages and reassess them. Fetch as Google in Search Console can ask for a quicker recrawl of the service page.

Then check the same searches every couple of weeks, and resist rewriting the page again in the meantime, which makes it harder to tell what worked.

The counter-case

Not every case needs fixing. If the post that ranks leads clearly to the service page and people book from it, the result is doing its job.

General questions, such as whether threading beats waxing, belong to the blog post. Only searches from people ready to book belong to the service page.

And a one-service business with a small site may be well served by the home page ranking.

For the main service, though, the service page should be complete, specific and the one your own links point to.

Search first, then rewrite

1. Search your main service and your town.
2. Note which page Google shows.
3. Check Search Analytics for that phrase.
4. Rewrite the service page around real questions.
5. Link to it from the home page and menu.
6. Add a link from the competing post.
7. Recheck the results in a few weeks.

Step four matters most. Links and titles help Google find the right page, but it chose the post because the post was the better answer, and only a better page changes that.

A rename produces the same gap between what Google shows and what you want shown, as covered in the site that ranks for the old business name.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.