Your homepage is the most visited page on your website, your customers’ jumping-off point, and your only chance at a first impression. It’s also the fork in the road for new visitors to decide if they want to know more about what you have to offer.
If you’re thinking about optimising your website for SEO, you’ll know that the task is trickier than it sounds. The most public-facing page on your website has to do a bit of a balancing act already. It needs to define your values, present your USP, and call visitors to action; all without using too much text or bogging viewers down with info. Needless to say, this isn’t the best place to pack in the non-branded industry keywords.
Does that mean SEO doesn’t matter for your homepage? Should you admit defeat and focus all your energy on user experience? In short, no.
Your homepage helps the Google crawlers read your website, and optimising for them has a lot in common with optimising for real live humans. Here are our five tips for doing both.
Reworking your Homepage: A Short Guide
1. Let Your Purpose and USP Shine
When a curious visitor lands on your website from a link or a query, they should immediately know what you are about. Your homepage needs to communicate two things first and foremost:
- What you offer (your product or service)
- What differentiates you (your Unique Selling Point)
This is the core of how you’ll be perceived, so don’t make your visitors scroll to find this information, don’t bury the most important part in blocks of text. This information can be communicated efficiently and artfully using a careful combination of headers (H1/H2), taglines, and visuals before expanding on the details.
Now you probably want to include a bit of rich content to help your users and Google’s crawlers get to know your company and your product or service. If the opportunity comes up organically, include a few relevant keywords related to your company or what you offer to boost your SEO. If there are other important aspects of your brand that belong on your homepage (such as mission or values), incorporate them here, but don’t let anything overshadow the main points of your business value proposition.
2. Intuitive Navigation
Your visitor found you and got the big picture from your homepage, but where do they go from here?
Structure the top navigation bar simply – long drop-down menus are likely to confuse crawlers and annoy visitors if they are overloaded with pages that aren’t essential to what they are trying to achieve. The two things to keep in mind are the pages that most clearly address your audience’s reason to visit and your most strategic pages for SEO, so make those the foundation of your homepage navigation.
Once they’ve left your homepage, you can help your users easily explore your website by using different local navigation tools. For example, clickable visuals can add ease and context to the user experience and don’t clog up the top navigation bar.
If you cater to multiple audiences with distinct needs, optimal navigation will allow them to choose a track that signposts each of them to their targeted route directly from the homepage. Consider how new visitors and returning visitors may explore your website differently and make it easy for both.
3. Optimise for Mobile
If your homepage looks bad or unwieldy on mobile, you’re going to alienate a huge percentage of online users and increase your bounce rate. Make your visuals and formatting just as eye-catching and communicative when viewed on a handheld device as it is on the computer screen. If you’re using a hamburger menu, remember to include link-based navigation for mobile users who have Javascript disabled.
Also, the fact that most online sessions occur on smartphones and tablets means that Google is likely to crawl through your mobile version first. Your rankings will take a hit if your navigation isn’t perfected for mobile straight from the homepage because the crawlers can’t make sense of your site.
4. Explore Calls-To-Action (CTAs)
Including relevant CTAs that draw the eye invites your page viewers to interact and potentially become leads. You could suggest they:
- ‘Shop now’
- ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’
- ‘New offers’
- ‘Join our community’
- ‘Contact us’
- ‘Apply today’
You’ll notice that many homepage CTAs invoke a time limit or capped numbers to create a sense of urgency. Low-risk wording such as ‘browse’ or ‘learn more’ can also be employed as a subtler way to invite visitors into pages that are more detail-rich than your homepage.
Be sure to run a few different CTAs through A/B testing (build different versions of your homepage with different CTA ideas and compare how they perform with your target audience) as placement and phrasing can make all the difference.
5. Use Organisation Schema Markup to Stand Out
Schema markup, or structured data, helps users narrow down the results page by creating more info-dense listings. You can create structured data to add to your homepage source code through Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper. Google will have more information to include as snippets in your homepage result when online users see your brand. Common things to add include:
- Logos
- Reviews
- Maps location
- Navigation to top pages
- Social media links
Having detailed information in your Google knowledge graph drives it up on the SERP, but it also helps you out with users. At the same time, a detailed, eye-catching result can make your site more memorable to users than plainer results that rank above it.
We hope our tips have uncovered some of the mysteries of homepage optimisation. Give them a try and you’ll find building the perfect homepage for people and Google’s crawlers is not as hard as it seems.
