A common question we get with clients is why specific content pages might show up in the search engine results pages (SERP), but not the home page. The answer to the question actually first needs to nip the whole idea that having your content pages showing up on the first page of any search engine is bad. There’s no reason to prevent the search engines from indexing your site’s content pages, so you shouldn’t try and stop them; valuable traffic frequently enters websites on content pages in the search engine results.

As much as it would be ideal to have your polished branding be the only entry point into your site, the reality of it is that there’s no way to make your home page specific to all the phrases you want to show up for. That’s what the SEO content pages are for, to increase your chances of being ranked on all those specific key phrases. That’s not to say you can’t target 1-3 specific phrases for your homepage, in fact we encourage it through use of the title, META, h1 tags, bold emphasis, URL optimization, content, etc. But you can’t expect your home page to ever be the most relevant result for the dozens of phrases you’re targeting with your SEO campaign. If you don’t want the specific content pages to show up in the results anymore, they can be removed from the site and eventually the search engines will phase it out of the natural rankings. But you will lose any ranking associated with it, because that’s a page that the search engines value highly enough to rank for a reason.

Pay-per-click is the only way to force the search engines to connect a phrase to your home page. Optimizing your home page for the 1-3 phrases that are most critical to your business is the best way to go about promoting yourself to the search engines for natural ranking.