Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?

Question

Our ecommerce site www.example.com ranks very high for the search term: "turtle food". The homepage shows up on the 1st page of Google's search results. I found this out by using Google Webmaster Tools.

But the link that Google displays is to our home page and not to www.example.com/turtle-food, which would be much better for user engagement and reducing bounce rate.

Google's other first page results link to other pet food sites, but those results go right to their turtle food pages.

Is there any way to fix this easily? Can I redirect users based on the search terms they used to find our site? Can I suggest that Google use www.example.com/turtle-food instead of just www.example.com? Or is the only way to "fix" this just to try to get our turtle food page to rank higher organically?

Answer 1

Here's a couple of things to consider:

• Did you submit a sitemap that included www.example.com/turtle-food? If not, you should. If you did, then check for "crawl errors" in Google Webmaster Tools and use the "Fetch as Google" option for that page.
  
  
• Do you have the same keywords and similar content relating to "turtle food" on both www.example.com and www.example.com/turtle-food? If so, they could be competing with each other. Focus your keyword use to the page you want to be returned in your SERP, and make sure there's relevant content there too.
  
  
• Obtaining more backlinks from authoritative sites might increase your rank for that page, but make sure www.example.com/turtle-food is indexed (see above).
  
  
• In the meantime, you can use the high rank of the home page to redirect visitors to www.example.com/turtle-food using some server-side scripting: Get incoming Search Keywords to your Website/Blog

Answer 2

Google ranks webpages (and not websites) for a range of keywords. If your home page ranks better than your concerned webpage for turtle food, that is you're more optimized your home page for these keywords.

To optimize www.example.com/turtle-food/ for these keywords, you can apply a good link from your home page to this internal webpage with turtle food as anchor link. Then, you can optimize this internal webpage (on-page and off-page optimization) for these keywords by getting some good backlinks etc.