Home page ranking higher than landing pages for cities

[Dana Franks]

Hi there! First time posting about an issue I'm running into, but I'm stumped.

This workers comp lawyer got a new site a few months ago - {link removed at member's request}. The home page is optimized for Tampa and Fort Lauderdale (and one mention of Miami) and rank well in those cities. There are landing pages created for cities around those two locations.

What I'm seeing is that in some cities, like Pinellas Park and Clearwater, they are ranking (and not well) for the home page instead of their landing pages, even though there is no mention of those cities on the home page. The landing pages appear to be indexed but even if you do a search for the lawyer in those cities you get the home page instead of the landing pages.

Here are the landing pages for those two cities:
{links removed at member's request}

Any thoughts on this?

 

[James Watt]

I checked your site in screaming frog, both of those pages literally only had one internal link in your entire site, and no external links. Onpage optimization is important of course, but it can't carry the show if you've got an orphaned page. You could either think about more internal backlink opportunities (maybe a few more internal pages about those two cities, that interlink with each other? Or when you have client reviews, include the city so you can link out? Or write something locally relevant in your blog?) or I'd think about building some external backlinks to those two pages. They're not true orphans of course since you're linking to them from your service area page, but that's literally it.

 

[Dana Franks]

Thanks! That makes sense. There was actually more internal linking on their old site. One thing I want to be careful of is to not have multiple pages competing for rankings for the same city, which is something we've had an issue with before when we did linking between landing pages or on blog posts. Any ideas on that?

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Another thing to note is that the pages are almost identical (98% similar according to the tool I used)... except for the city name. You won't be able to get those moving if they don't have unique content. I would take James' suggestion and work on the linking part of the equation, but I will also suggest rewriting content to make it unique.

 

[James Watt]

Good catch Eric, I didn't even look at that. That'll definitely cause a problem too.