Should I be optimising this landing page...

Hi guys,

So I am currently trying to rank for a relatively competitive keyword in our niche, lets say its for the word "basketballs", so we made a basketballs landing page with all of the information surrounding the basketballs we sell and just generally being a lot better for conversions.

However, because our site is themed around basketball in general, our home page is ranking at number 10 for this keyword. All of our competitors have their own specific "basketball" landing page just like ours and rank accordingly but, despite trying to optimise this page as much as possible, it still won't even rank on Google (I have checked that it is indexed and even put rel=canonical in).

Would it be more worth it at this point to optimise the home page and add some level of conversions strategy to it or do you think I could get this page above my home page?

Again, pretty rookie with this stuff so go easy haha