If you are thinking whether homepage SEO exists? Is SEO for homepage is necessary? Is it relevant to my business? Answer to all your questions is “YES!” Homepage SEO exists, it is a necessity for every website and for every business. Why? You will learn in this article further.
Before that you must understand that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a necessity for every website because it is a tool that delivers your message to the search engines about the existence of your website, its offerings and why your customers must choose you over the competitors. Now, businesses might want to particularly focus on product pages to reach out to their customers and scale their business, so why is homepage SEO important? Let’s get into the details.
Why Perform Homepage SEO?
There are several reasons why you must optimize your homepage for search. They are:
1. Homepage creates your first impression on web in the eyes of your prospects or customers. They may judge your business’s performance through your homepage. This is because, the homepage is your online store front. The visitors will definitely check out how your store front is even if they are impressed with one of your product’s pages
2. If you have a corporate website, your visitors would like to learn about you through your homepage content. So, it will be the first page they visit once they get into your website
3. Search engines like Google will send its crawlers to your homepage to first understand your website’s offerings through its title, description, homepage content SEO, etc. and based on that, it will rank your website’s pages
4. For some websites, competition is too high and homepage plays a key role in ranking the website on search engines because it has the ability to absorb all the power and page rank from the other pages of the website
5. For small business websites, homepage is the selling point for their products because of the brand name they have developed in the industry. Hence, homepage SEO must be optimally performed by small businesses as well.
How to Optimize a Homepage for Search Engines?
Now that you know why homepage SEO is such an important aspect of activities you perform to build your brand on the online front, let’s delve into how you can optimize your homepage to reap all the benefits of homepage SEO for your website.
1. Choose the Target Keyword
Your target keyword / keywords should clearly define about your business to the readers and the search engine. This target keywords must be added in the relevant homepage content to enhance its understanding to the visitors. A relevant keyword insertion aids in generating ranking along with the other homepage SEO optimizations.
How to do that? – Prepare a list of the keywords that will optimally define your business, research whether they are searched by people or not on keyword research tools like keywords planner on Google ads, then derive a relevant content around that keyword and place it on homepage.
2. Optimize the Homepage Title
A homepage title is designed as per the structure of content and the goal or the purpose of the website. Simply adding the name of the business will not prove to be useful on the title. You must understand the search engine requirement from your business and what it currently showcases. Then, you must first be clear on the purpose of your website, content structure on the page, targeted keywords and what you want the visitor to do when they are visiting your homepage.
How to do that? – Define: 1. the purpose of your homepage, 2. the targeted keywords, 3. the kind of content you want to publish, 4. Competitive website who deliver similar products and content. As per the parameters above, decide on a relevant title that suits the most on the page. The title should be eye-catching, must have the targeted keyword, can have brand name, and it must fit with 60-70 characters including spaces.
Also Read: How to Search for Keywords on a Website?
3. Create Content for Your Homepage
As discussed earlier, you must decide the content on your homepage but how will you do that? What should be the content? Focus on the brand and the business offerings while creating the content. Same kind of products too are built differently in terms of brand by organizations. For example: ITC owns two brands in biscuits Dark Fantasy and Mom’s Magic, though the products are in the same category, their branding is done differently.
Similarly, as per the type of brand you want to build in the eyes of your target audience and as per what the competition is currently doing and is successful, you can finalize the content for your homepage.
4. Add Schema Markup
Schema markup is a backend code that aids search engines in understanding the business, its offerings, and the value you deliver to your customers. Adding schema markup on your homepage increases your website’s visibility on the search engines. You can add organizational schema, product schema and more on the homepage as per your business’s deliverables.
Also Read: Ultimate Guide to Schema Markups
5. Optimize Homepage Loading Speed
Most visitors (more than 40%) will leave the page of the website if it doesn’t open within 3 seconds of click on the SERP. So, even if your homepage is created brilliantly in terms of content, keywords insertion, schema markup and everything but it doesn’t load fast, the user will quickly move out, it will increase your page’s bounce rate and eventually there will be a major drop in the ranking of your page.
How to reduce the homepage load speed? – purchase a reliable host server that aids the website to load faster, optimize the image file on the page, check out the page’s performance on Google Pagespeed Insights and make changes on the backend as recommended there, if there are any video files on the page then optimize the size of the file, and keep your backend software up-to-date for no delay from that end as well.
6. Build High-Quality External Backlinks
To rank any page on search engines, it is essential to have external links pointing towards the page. For building authority of the homepage, it is necessary for it to have a variety of backlinks pointing towards the page for a better homepage SEO. This increases the website’s chance to rank high on search engines for branded as well as non-branded keywords.
What kind of backlinks can be created? – The answer to this question highly depend on the industry your business is into, as per what kind of backlinks are your competitors focusing on and where will your potential clients might look out for you. The types of backlinks typically created are social bookmarking, directory links, web 2.0s, guest posting, and more.
Also Read: Effective Off-Page SEO Strategies for Your Website
7. Build High-Quality Internal Links
Internal links mean that you link your website’s one page to another relevant page that makes the visitor’s website journey smooth and informative. Adding internal links on homepage helps the search engine discover the other pages of your website faster, it passes the page’s authority to another page for it to rank faster and helps search engine understand the content of that page. So, adding links from homepage to relevant and important pages like product offering page, cart page and such is important for better visitor and search engine experiences.
Conclusion
Performing homepage SEO is a mandate, given the benefits you gain from it. When you perform all the pointers mentioned above, it becomes easier for search engines to find you and rank your website. All the homepage SEO tips are necessary to perform to get the best results in terms of ranking, branding and traffic on the website.
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