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Why and how to define a subpage for your keywords
Why and how to define a subpage for your keywords

Discover why rankingCoach is asking you to define a subpage for your keywords and learn how to do it.

John avatar
Written by John
Updated over 4 months ago

1. What is a subpage?

Simply put, a subpage is any page of your website which is not your homepage. While your homepage’s address is your website’s main URL (www.mydomain.com for example), each of your subpages has a specific address derived from that main URL (www.mydomain.com/subpage1 for example).

If you want to improve your website’s rankings in search engines, you need to optimize all the pages of your website for specific keywords, including your subpages.

2. Why assign keywords to subpages?

When answering a search query, Google compares the content of the various web pages it has indexed to try and find the ones most relevant for the keyword entered by the user.

To get the best chances of ranking and to avoid internal competition within its own pages, a perfectly optimized website :

  • needs all of its pages to target very specific keywords;

  • never has multiple web pages targeting the same keyword.

The best way to make sure you follow these guidelines is to carefully plan your content strategy :

  1. Choose the most relevant keywords for your business.

  2. Assign your keywords to your subpages in order to have a clear overview of the content you want to offer your customers.

  3. Start optimizing your pages’ content.

rankingCoach is there to guide you through the optimization of your website’s content, but before getting to the actual optimization, you need to let the application know which are the keywords you want to optimize the various pages of your website for. This is why rankingCoach is asking you to define subpages for your keywords.

Based on the associations you will make, rankingCoach will create easy-to-follow customized tasks with video tutorials.

Please note that most SMBs make the mistake of relying too heavily on generic keywords, but these are not the best pick for the optimization of your website’s subpages. You need to make sure you have keywords that are more specific and target certain products or services that you are offering. If you are running an Italian restaurant for example, do not just go for keywords like “restaurant” or “italian restaurant’, but pick more specific keywords like, “homemade pizza and pasta'', “traditional italian food” or “pizza near the cathedral”.

Check out this article if you need help choosing or editing your SEO keywords in rankingCoach.

3. How to choose which page to define for each keyword?

When defining a subpage for a keyword, you have to take into account the topic of the page and make sure that the keyword will naturally fit into its content.

Let’s say you are the owner of a small Italian restaurant. You could for example assign the keywords “homemade pizza and pasta” to your menu page, the keyword “traditional italian food” to your about us page, and the keyword “pizza near the cathedral” to the page where you give customers directions to easily locate your restaurant.

If you realize that one of your keywords does not match any of your existing pages even though it accurately describes what you are offering, you should consider creating a brand new page about this topic.

4. How many keywords should you assign per subpage?

You should not assign more than 1 or 2 keywords to each subpage. Remember that your keywords have to be specific enough to exactly fit the content of your page and that you will have to integrate them at various key locations of your page, including the meta-title and meta-description, which have a limited length.

5. How to define a subpage through the rankingCoach tasks?

rankingCoach has created specific tasks to help you define subpages for your keywords. You can either choose a subpage amongst the ones suggested by the app or directly insert the URL of the subpage you want this keyword to be assigned to.

Please note that you only need to paste the part of the url starting with the first “/” (If the URL of your subpage is www.mydomain.com/subpage1, you only need to paste “/subpage1”). Also, make sure that you only insert the URL of existing subpages.

6. How to define a subpage through the rankingCoach dashboard?

You can also assign keywords to subpages (or delete any keyword/subpage association) directly through your rankingCoach dashboard.

Click on “Search Engines” in the left menu and then on “Subpages” (or click directly here). Use the “Define a subpage” button to add a subpage and then just drag and drop the keywords you want to associate with that specific page to the right section.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our support, we are happy to help you!

Any further questions? We have additional articles on more topics here:

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