The Complete Guide to Homepage SEO

Did you lovingly craft what you thought was the perfect homepage for your website, but it isn’t getting the traffic you hoped for? Did you put up a basic site because everyone said you had to, even though nobody ever visits?

If this sounds like you, your homepage SEO (search engine optimization) could be to blame. About 70% of all website traffic starts in a search engine. If your page isn’t ranking in the top results, you aren’t getting the traffic you need. Here, we will tell you how to boost your rankings.

What Is Homepage SEO?

Search engine optimization involves tweaking your online content to give it the best chance of reaching the top of the search results. SEO for your homepage specifically focuses on your website’s main landing page.

How Important Is the Homepage for SEO?

Your homepage does two important things for SEO. First, it ranks for relevant keywords, helping potential customers find your site. Second, it helps the other pages rank better by establishing your site as an authority on relevant topics that potential customers are searching for.

How Do You Optimize Your Homepage for SEO?

Imagine if you could load your homepage into your favorite content creation tool, press the “optimize for SEO” button, and forget about it. Homepage SEO isn’t quite that easy; however, you can improve your results.

Perform a Website Audit

You can’t get to where you want to go if you don’t know where you are. A website audit helps you figure out where you are in your SEO journey by thoroughly examining how well your site is currently optimized for search engines. There are several ways to perform an audit.

You can manually check all the various aspects of your website, but this method is time-consuming, particularly if you have a lot of content. You can also use one of a variety of free or paid SEO tools.

Even with a good tool, it takes time to acquire the expertise necessary to evaluate the results of your audit and formulate an action plan. Save yourself the trouble by talking to the experts at BKA Content. We provide a free site content audit as part of our SEO consultation service.

Identify Your Target Keyword

Your homepage must tell visitors and search engines exactly what your business is about. One way to do this is to focus your homepage SEO on a target keyword or phrase.

Create a list of all the keywords that best describe your products, services, and value proposition. For example, if you sell organic apples, your keyword list might include words like:

• Apple
• Fresh 
• Organic 
• Healthy 
• Delicious

Once you have your list, look at what your competitors are doing. Read their websites and add the words they use to describe their products to your list.

Analyze the words on your list to determine how many people are searching for them and what kind of content they find. You should probably use a free or paid tool to help with this step or consult with an SEO expert.

Use the results of this analysis to select the keyword or phrase that strikes the best balance between accurately describing your products and services and matching the words potential customers are searching for when looking for those products and services. Build your homepage content around this target keyword.

Create Your Homepage Content

The bulk of the content on your homepage is the words, images, and videos you use to describe your products, services, and business to potential customers. Build your content around what customers need to know about your business and what makes you unique.

Your content should match the user’s search intent. If your content doesn’t naturally match what someone would expect when searching for your target keyword, rethink your keyword.

Search for your target keyword and examine the types of content the top-ranking pages include. Be sure you don’t copy this exactly, but use it to inspire your content.

Remember to mention your brand in your content. This will help people searching for information about your company find their way to your page.

Incorporate relevant keywords into your content, but do it naturally. If you have to force the keywords in, consider choosing different keywords for your homepage SEO.

Include a mix of text, images, and video content. Build trust and authority by incorporating customer testimonials, case studies, and other social proof.

Give customers everything they need to know on your homepage. Don’t assume they will dig deeper into your website to find out more.

Optimize Your Meta Description and Title Tag

Title tags and meta descriptions help visitors and search engines understand what your page is about. Both elements should grab your reader’s interest and accurately describe your page content.

Include your target keyword and brand name in the title tag, but keep it to 60 characters or fewer. Google may rewrite your title if it exceeds this limit.

The meta description is a short snippet that describes your page. A good meta description won’t improve your rankings, but it increases the chance customers will click on your listing in the search results.

Your meta description should be enticing and accurately represent what your page is about in 160 characters or fewer. You can think of it as expanding on the promise in your page title.

Improve Your Homepage Load Speed

A few seconds can seem like an eternity to potential customers waiting for your homepage to load. Most won’t stick around if your page is too slow.

To add insult to injury, slow-loading sites are penalized by search engine algorithms. Improve your homepage SEO by regularly checking your page speed.

If your page takes too long to load, speed it up by:

• Choosing a more reliable host or switching from a shared plan to a virtual private server
• Optimizing image sizes and formats
• Running Google PageSpeed Insights and following the recommendations
• Updating your software regularly
• Hosting video content on a video streaming service instead of your server

Test your load speed regularly to ensure you aren’t losing valuable traffic and search engine rankings.

Incorporate Quality External Links

It may seem counterintuitive to send customers to someone else’s site, but links from your site to other authoritative sites build credibility with readers and search engines. When linking out, choose sites that are relevant, authoritative, and genuinely helpful to readers.

Build Backlinks

Links from other authoritative sites to your site bring in traffic and improve your rankings. Try to get backlinks from reputable sites relevant to your products and services.

One way to acquire backlinks is to include a lot of high-quality content on your site. This will make other sites want to link to you as a resource.

Some other ways to build backlinks include:

• Writing guest posts on other relevant sites that allow you to link to your page
• Getting review sites and influencers to review your products and services and link to your page
• Pitching stories and press releases to media sites
• Adding links to community sites
• Using a white-hat link-building service

Strategically using external links can also get you a few backlinks because when you link to other sites, they may choose to link back to you.

Include Internal Links

Internal links make navigating your site easier for customers and search engines. Internal links also pass some authority from higher-ranking pages on your site to lower-ranking pages, which is good for your homepage SEO.

Make it a regular practice to link from your homepage to other pages on your site and from other pages to your homepage. For example, if you talk about a specific product on your homepage, link to the page on your site for that product. If you discuss your brand on a product page, link to your homepage.

Focus On the User Experience

SEO is important, but remember that getting people to visit your site and buy your products and services is the main point. Focus your content and design decisions on making your homepage as useful, appealing, and easy to use as possible.

Because the primary goal of search engines is to get users to the content they want to see, search engines reward sites that give users the best experience. Boost the usability of your site by:

• Making it easy to navigate
• Using a mobile-friendly design
• Designing an accessible page
• Incorporating easy-to-read text
• Providing useful content

Don’t overcomplicate your site or confuse visitors with flashy elements that don’t serve a purpose. Visual appeal is important, but focus on getting readers to the content they want as quickly and easily as possible.

Where Can You Get Help With Your Homepage SEO?

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the homepage SEO process, don’t worry. BKA Content has got your back. With over 15 years in the SEO content writing industry, we know what it takes to get your homepage to the top of the rankings. Contact us today to find out more about how we can help you reach your goals.