The home page is often overlooked in terms of improving SEO. We tend to want to focus on improving product pages and add the maximum amount of keywords, even though the home page is one of a website’s most powerful pages in terms of product listing. For example, it is the page that is most often the target of backlinks. It also connects the store’s various product categories. It is therefore vital to maintain it.
Compact content on a home page will enable search engine robots to gain a better understanding of your store. Google needs content to analyze to understand the website’s context. Textual content with a minimum 400 to 500 words, which is well drafted and free of spelling mistakes, will help it to find the information it is searching for and catalog your website easily.
Keywords and topics
Your store’s home page must be used to target important keywords relating to the topic of your products:
- The first keyword to target here is the name of your brand. Highlighting it in the textual content of your home page is essential.
- The idea is then to search for a long-tail keyword around the topic of your products and to work through your textual content around this keyword.
For example: Do you sell car products? You can then focus your content on “online car store”. Do you sell organic cosmetics of French origin? Write your content on the topic of “French organic cosmetics". The simpler the topic and the closer it is to the terms that users search for on Google, the better it is!
Tailor and fine tune the structure
Once you have found your keyword and topic, you will need to structure your content to fine tune it. Think of your home page as a blog:
- The title tag and the meta-description should be simple and clear (👉 Where do I check these elements?)
- The H1 and Hn tags must be in place and follow the structure of your page (👉 Where do I check my tags?)
- The semantics, the keywords used and your Alt attributes (the name of your images) must be logical.
A well-structured top of page will have, for example, a H1 title just above or just beneath your slide show/image block, to introduce your page.
What should the content consist of and how can I optimize it?
Finding the content for your home page is simple! It needs to refer to topics that you have an understanding of and can speak of with ease!
- Talk about your store’s history
- Talk about the type of products that you sell
- Talk about your values and your business’ values
- Highlight your testimonies and customer reviews
- Write an FAQ section that covers the most frequently asked questions.
You need to differentiate between dynamic content (promotions, articles, products, slide shows) and static content (textual content).
Static content is content that will enable Google robots to find the information it looks for when it lists your website. The content should be sufficiently succinct to allow Google to understand your store’s context. A 400-500 word paragraph is a good start. You should use the bottom of the page for this type of content, so that your visitors may browse without interruption. The dynamic content should ideally be positioned at the top of the page.
A good way of optimizing the textual content of your home page (and of your store in general) is to use semantic optimization tools.
Here are a few free examples:
- Cocolyze: to give you an idea of the keywords to use in reference to your topic
- Outiref: to help you analyse the structure of your competitors’ websites and draw inspiration from them
Once these analyses have been carried out, you can use TextOptimizer to confirm whether or not your content needs improvement.
💬 Please do not hesitate to contact your Business Coaches should you have any questions!