Your company website may be three pages or it may be 300; regardless, your homepage is inevitably the centerpiece, and likely the most important online asset you’ve got. It’s your company’s virtual storefront, and it sets the first impression that many customers will have of your company. As such, it’s important to do anything and everything in your power to maximize your home page’s impact—and that includes optimizing it for search engine visibility.
The homepage represents a number of opportunities for SEO impact, though these opportunities are far too often overlooked. What follows are a just a few straightforward ways that you can up the SEO game on your most important piece of online real estate.
SEO Tips for Your Company Homepage
Don’t compete with yourself. Your home page is likely the most expansive page on your site, encompassing everything your company does; other pages may be more product- or service-specific, but your home page is meant to stand in for everything. As such, it can be easy to overextend yourself with keywords—targeting dozens of different words and phrases, some of which you may be trying to rank for on other pages. Narrow your focus and hit your target with greater precision.
Don’t keyword stuff. On a related note, one of the worst things you can do on your homepage is to make it a litany of keywords. Always make sure the page reads naturally; if you have so many keywords that the content feels stiff and robotic, then you have too many.
Turn your homepage into a gateway to the rest of the site. Your homepage should lead clients through the sales funnel, and make it easy for them to find the specific section of your site that they need. If your navigation is unclear, it may be time to rethink it.
Trim your loading time. Many business owners get flashy with their homepage—literally so, in some cases, using Flash-driven or image-heavy sites to create an awe-inspiring effect. The problem with this is that it can cause the page loading time to take a hit—and slow-to-load pages tend not to do well SEO-wise. Keep things simple enough that users can get to your content quickly and easily.
Fill in your SEO title and meta description. These two meta fields offer you some invaluable space to include keywords, calls to action, and a basic site description—and they are essential to good SEO. Don’t neglect them!
Include your contact information. You should have a phone number and other contact info on every page of your site—and yes, that certainly includes the homepage. This helps with your local search presence.
Include a strong call to action, too. CTAs help you lead the user to the next stage of their buying experience—and the home page needs a good one to keep them engaged with your page. Make sure your home page ends with a strong invitation to take further action.
Your homepage includes a number of avenues for you to appeal to search engines—and to human readers, in the process. Each one marks a distinct competitive advantage, so you want to engage them carefully. To learn more about this, we encourage you to give us a call at enCOMPASS today.
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