Your home page is one of the most critical pieces of your website, and if you use a squeeze page, splash page, or some other form of home page with little-to-no content, you’re shooting yourself in the foot!
Search engines value high quality, relevant content and links. That means that content and links into your website are the top things they are looking for when they are scanning websites and indexing pages to include in the search results.
To search engines, your home page is considered the main page and entry point of your website, so it needs to include valuable, relevant, high-quality content.
If you really want to benefit from high organic search engine rankings, you MUST put effort into your home page. Now I’m not talking about putting a lot of effort into writing your home page content once and not touching it again for months at a time. I’m talking about tweaking and testing different headlines, keyword combinations, bold text, and even the design of your home page.
When Your Home Page Isn’t Your Entry Point
The most successful site owners I know, work on their home page and highly targeted landing pages more than any other pages on their website. You see, for many website owners, the home page is often not the website entrance point visitors use. So while it is important to focus on your home page for the search engines, it is also important that you think about the other pages on your site people enter from and the experience they have on those pages.
The three most common “entrance pages” on small business websites are:
- Blog Posts
- About Page
- Services Page
As a site owner, you need to examine your site from a new visitors perspective as if you were entering your website for the first time through one of these other pages and ask yourself:
- Is the contact information easy to find?
- Is it obvious whose site this is (yes, some people don’t achieve this)?
- Is it clear what I do and specialize in?
- Is it obvious what type of services I offer?
- Is it welcoming and inviting?
- Is it easy to navigate through the site and find information?
- Do all of the forms, opt-ins, links, and buttons work properly?
Remember, for many new visitors, especially new visitors coming from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, your home page isn’t the first page they visit. So make sure that the important information they are looking for is easy to find no matter where they are.
