Albert content writing for a homepage. My Search Engine Optimization (SEO) team suggests I add 550 words to my homepage, but that's a lot… how do other teams suggest we add enough written content to a homepage to help it rank? I'm thinking of an editors section at the bottom, or what about a drop down box? its an entertainment blog, with a lot of thumbnails on the homepage to goto our videos and such. 9 👍🏽9 33 💬🗨📰👈
Ammon Johns 🎓 This is bad advice from the SEO team. Your homepage will rank for your brand terms regardless, *if* you do proper SEO well for the site and business as a whole. Think of your site as a company headquarters (or if an ecommerce site, as a department store). Your homepage is simply the street entrance and lobby, the bit people may pass through not to get *to*, but to get to specific departments. The job of your homepage, just like a lobby, is to help them get to the specific department (content/page/section) they want if they don't already know the way, but to provide as little friction or distraction as possible for those who already know where they need to go. So if your site were for an insurance company, it may have departments that sell or explain the policies, departments that handle changes, additions, cancelations or claims, etc. Anyone contacting your company, or wanting to speak with your company wants one or more of those departments. In search terms, this means that ideally they want to land in one of your category pages or specific content pages representing their intentions and needs. They don't want to land on your lobby and have to find it for themselves – they just came from a search. Your SEO team apparently don't know this most fundamental of all principles, despite it being a core fundamental from before Search Engine Optimization (SEO) even had a name. Their advice sucks. Build content pages that deal with specific user needs and wants. Your homepage will rank well on what it needs to, your brand terms, just on the links to the homepage from all those content pages. 💟👍🏽23
Kathy » Ammon Johns Exactly. This is a core principal for Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), served well by SEO Kathy » Ammon Johns Can't tell you how many times I've had to overcome this objection with clients. It's always news to them when I say, "The job of the home page is to get them off!" (and over to where you can speak to just one audience) 🤔👍🏽3 Ammon Johns 🎓 » Kathy Absolutely. Help without friction. Although, having started out heavily in the adult industry websites in the mid 90s, I had to chuckle at your phrasing. 😃 👍🏽🤭4 Kathy » Ammon Johns Ha! You did that too? LOL Maybe you're familiar with a famous blog of mine "How to market adult sites online." (or something akin to that, might have been sex toy sites). It was number 1 in the WORLD for years! It was an audit I did for a friend in exchange for a donation she made to my cause. I finally took it down because it generated too many calls from businesses from all over the world who couldn't afford the $1M/mo budget I said they needed for ads in order to compete. 🙂 Anyone want to buy that article? 🙂 🤭2
S. M. Fahim If you want to rank for only the branded keywords, you don't have to worry about content that much. Just provide whatever needs to convert. On the other hand, if you want to rank for certain broad keywords, then you should provide some information which might increase word count. What I do is to write the content, mainly focusing on conversion and then SEO, divide them into multiple headings, and send to the UX designer. The User Experience (UX) designer creates a design so that the text does not look shit. Instead it creates a good transition. For inspiration, you can check the WP Rocket homepage. Albert ✍️ Hi Everyone, wasn't really expecting such an enormous amount of help, insight, and explanation. I did not want to add word count and sacrifice space just to compile with this request. But i wanted to check in with this group, because i find a lot of great tips here. So thanks for the moderators for jumping all over this. Haider Ammon explained it very well and content pages should do the job with proper internal linking. "But" Sometimes home page is competing in Search Engine Result Page (SERP) instead of a proper service/category page. Weird case-scenario but adding content actually helps in this case however it's proper solution is to well classify and structure your site as you may get more traffic from a specific search term but losing other golden opportunities. Agreed Ammon Johns
Ammon Johns 🎓 » Haider If in the scenario the homepage is consistently in the top position of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP), with only ads above it, there's no need to change anything, as how can it rank any better? If it isn't ranking that high, then something can outrank it, and if YOU are not making that page, which would be the internal content or category page, one of your competitors will. There is NO situation where you ought to be trying to rank the homepage for a query that is best served by a specific category or content page, where a content page is what the search user is wanting (search intent). None. In almost any market or situation, the only searches that should deliver the searcher to the homepage are brand searches, and navigational searches. The rare exceptions tend to be where a site is a kind of search engine and the homepage *is* also the most functional page of the site. In practice, 99% of those situations will also fall under 'brand search' anyway. Optimising the homepage for a query because you don't have a content page beating it is sort of like optimising your car for being pushed, by fixing handles to the back and doors, because it's engine doesn't work. Make the thing work properly if you want any kind of efficiency. Haider » Ammon Johns Absolutely right!
Jeff » Ammon Johns Advice is solid as always; however, I wanted to add that trying to "rank" a home page for anything other than the brand is really some two-dimensional thinking in the world of organic search. For the most part, Google ranks web pages, not websites (yes, there are a few things, such as quality, that are looked at on the site level, but not authority) and because of search engines, literally every page on your website has the potential to become a "home page", that is, the first page a customer sees. Each page on your site is a potential touchpoint along a consumer's journey to purchase – it's your job to create content for those touchpoints that move them along that journey. Why bother to try and rank your home page for a particular item when you probably have dozens of other pages that can do a better job. Also, just so it is said (again), there is no magic number for the amount of words of content on any page – Google doesn't count words. In general, pages with more words rank higher not because they have more words, but because they go into greater detail about a topic. Trying to match a competitor's word count is like trying to match the computing power of Apollo 11 and expecting to get to the moon.
Ammon Johns 🎓 » Jeff I always prefer to say that while a site has only one 'Home page', every page can be a starting page or a landing page, and that often the Home page is not the one the customers or visitors want to start from. Usability wise, having to go through the homepage is like those annoying companies where in order to speak with the department you already know you want, you first have to go through an automated system and dither around selecting menu options before you can.
