Page relevance vs SERP ranking.

[Anatoliy]

I was researching my home page ranking problem and found that I’m in a very interesting situation.
I hope someone with more SEO wisdom would help me decide what to do next.

My site 5 Star Appliance Repair Tucson | Same-Day Professional Service is a local Tucson, AZ appliance repair service area business.

I’m looking at the most productive keyword, “appliance repair tucson”, which brings most local traffic.
For over a year I’ve been trying to get closer to the top SERP, and all the time I would be in average position of 8 (the screenshots are from GSC):

Now, this time I zoomed in on which page on my site gets which position, and here’s what I found:

As you can see, my homepage gets 90% of the impressions and its average position is 8.5.
However, my secondary landing page /tucson-nw is getting 10% of the impressions, but it is shown at position 4.
Naturally, it gets 3 times more clicks per impression (CTR 0.7 vs 2.1).

I was surprised by this finding. I guess I assumed that for the same query, if google ranks one page of a site higher than all other pages, it will show this page in results for this query much more often than other, less ranking pages.

Obviously, there’s a difference in google logic in "which page to show" in response to a particular query and Google's ranking logic ("where on the SERP to show it")?
I looked around for an answer. For the most part I found that for the same keyword query with the same user intent, for a similar relevance and technical SEO, for a similar content quality and freshness, and for the same user experience (mobile load speed, bounce rate, etc.) the main difference in Google's ranking algorithm is the backlinks profile.

Two pages differs in UR link profile (Ahrefs):
homepage:

tucson-nw:

Further examination shows:
homepage:

tucson-nw:

Home page has far more referring domains and links, and the link profiles are very similar:
dofollow/nofollow ratio is about 70/30 and the DR in both cases are approximately 80% in 70-79 DR range and 20% are in 30-39 DR.

The only visible difference I see is that the secondary landing page jumped from 8 to 13 UR with a sharp increase of referring domains from 11 to 25, while the homepage was growing steadily and increased from 6 to 10 UR with referring domain increase from 50 to 60. However, with the further increase from 60 to 80 domains the UR stayed the same (10).

So, the bottom line: on one hand I have a secondary landing page that is hardly selected by Google to be shown, but when it is shown it is ranking near the top. On the other hand I have a homepage that is shown 10 times more often, but positioned near the end of SERP.

What should I do?

Something tells me I need to work on my homepage link profile to get it to rank higher, at least as high as my secondary landing page.

Apart from acquiring more quality backlinks to /, would any of these help:

1. Re-pointing existing /tucson-nw links to /?
2. Redirecting /tucson-nw to / with permanent redirect (301)?
3. Anything else?

Maybe I'm missing some other important factor that brings my secondary page on top and leave my main page at the bottom...

Any advice is highly appreciated.

Best regards,
Anatoliy

 

[cfazio]

Are you using a UTM parameter on your GBP listing?

If not the "homepage" is most likely your GBP website link.

If the search query returns a map pack - your GBP listing is more likely to get the click than your location page.

 

[Anatoliy]

cfazio - thanks for looking at this!

GBP is a good guess, but the statistics show otherwise:

I have two GBP profiles, one for East location, with link to homepage 5 Star Appliance Repair Tucson | 20yrs, Family Owned & Operated., the other for NW location, with link to Arizona Appliance Repair.

Here's their performance comparison:
For the East location (homepage):

For the NW location (landing page):

They both have very similar profiles.

One may argue that NW is shown for "appliance repair tucson" search term 968 times in 5 months, while the home page is shown only 612 times. But that is probably related to location proximity: in Local Pack we rank much higher in NW, than in the East.

If we look at Website Clicks here, we have very similar stats: 358 clicks for East, and 477 for NW.

So this doesn't explain why homepage is ranking lower in search results and, therefore, is clicked much less than NW page.

However, this brings me an idea: Do you think changing the link in the NW GBP to point to homepage, instead of NW page, would bring the homepage up in SERPs?

Any input is much appreciated!
Anatoliy

 

[silverlinestudio.eu]

They are not ranking for the same queries, your subpage is ranking for different queries
Secondly, GSC average position is far from accurate, I've been nr.1 in both Map Pack and Local for months and it still shows average position 4 for my main keyword.

And yes, I've let friends check the other part of the city, or outside of the city, it's better to check yourself.
Google Searches with KW + city, will always give equal rankings to anyone performing these on the same browser + language.

Theres also alot of on-page SEO you're doing wrong to rank on a side note.