Our Blog

Your Guide to Optimising Your Homepage

Homepages are often the first thing people see when they visit a website, so it’s important to get them right.

They’re most likely the first point of contact for most users, but we find that sometimes they aren’t performing well in searches. Poor SEO is often due to bad optimisation or a poor user experience (UX). 

This article will look at how to design and optimise your homepage for search engines to improve its performance.

Summarise what you do.

Your homepage is the first thing a visitor sees and it needs to give them a clear understanding of what you do and what makes you different from your competitors. 

If a visitor can’t tell within 3 seconds on your homepage what your business does and why they’d prefer purchasing from or working with you, there’s a problem.

Instead of promoting a product or service right away, attempt to see things from a first-time visitor’s point-of-view. They’re still gathering information about your business, so convincing them to read on and learn more is your first hurdle.

You can begin doing this by highlighting your unique selling point on your homepage. Your Unique Selling Point (USP) is a marketing term used to describe one or more aspects of a product or service as being different from competitors.The ultimate goal with a USP is that consumers can associate the positive product benefit with the brand.

Select the right keyword for your page title.

One of the most important elements of your homepage is your page title. It is a clickable link when displayed in search engine results pages and is centered in the browser window at the top of your screen once the web page loads.

It serves two main functions:

• determine whether people decide to click on your site or not.
• lets potential customers and viewers know what your website is all about.

As a result, your homepage’s page title should be something that reflects the business you are running while also containing a keyword that people are searching for.

When you choose keywords that are relevant and specific to your homepage, you increase the likelihood of converting your audience into regular visitors. 

On the other hand, if you choose keywords that don’t relate to your business, your audience will immediately be turned off by the unrelated content on your homepage.

Let’s say you own a vegan bakery in Sydney. Instead of targeting specific products like vegan cakes, vegan croissants, or sourdough, you decide to target the keyword “vegan bakery sydney”. All your products can be categorised under that keyword phrase and it captures what your business does as a whole.

Utilise headings.

Using headings is one of the easiest ways to make your homepage more readable. They are traditionally larger and less dense than regular text and make your content easier to scan.

From an SEO perspective, headings are like the table of contents of any webpage. They show search engines how the content on a webpage is organised along with their relationships to one another.

There can only be one H1 heading on every webpage. You can then have several H2 headings with numerous H3 headings under it and so forth. The H2 headings can be the different services you offer or your different product categories.

So, the H1 heading on your homepage can be Camping Store in Perth. The H2 headings can be product categories like Tents, Lighting, and Sleeping Bags. Under Tents, you can have H3 headings like Family Tents and Hiking Tents.

If you don’t sell products and offer services instead, your H1 heading can be a keyword that encompasses what your business does. Your H2 headings can be the different services you offer.

Remove clutter.

It’s no secret that we live in the age of information overload. There are so many distractions out there battling for our attention it’s hard to hold focus on anything for long.

That’s why it’s important, on your website at least, to remove all that clutter and offer the reader easily digestible information.

When we talk about clutter, we’re talking about all the elements on your homepage that distract readers from taking action on your page. 

Beyond the obvious distraction that clutter can cause, it also contributes to slower page load times. This can affect both the user experience and your keyword rankings since website speed is now a Google search ranking factor.

This so-called clutter could include adverts, social media links, or other stories above or below the fold. The best thing to do is remove this clutter and make it easy for readers to reach the call-to-action or CTA of your page.

Conclusion

Optimising your homepage for search engines is an essential part of your SEO campaign since it’s the first thing that search engines will be seeing.

If you would like more information about optimising your homepage – give us a call on 02 82110668, email us on info@cornerstone-digital.com.au or complete our online enquiry form.

• Comments (0)
• Trackbacks (0)
• Permalink

Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.