Whether you’ve pledged to start working out, eat less junk food, read more, or volunteer in your community, the new year is a time for change, and our web design and SEO team at Big Red SEO wants you to also consider changing up the way you think about your homepage. Google’s recent changes, coupled with a decisive shift in visitor habits, suggest that the traditional ways we’ve gone about structuring homepages may not be as effective any more.Your homepage is the most trafficked page on your website. Essentially the starting point for visitors to get to know you and your company, so in the past it made sense for homepages to take a scattershot approach—homepage real estate is important, so if your company had an imperative message it was put on the homepage so visitors would read it first thing. This often led to homepages acting as discovery points for everything on the site, with many messages that competed for visitor attention.
Today, though, our team at Big Red SEO urges you to consider a rather radical paradigm shift. Google has recently taken a more sophisticated and holistic approach to judging a website’s importance, in other words looking at the website as a whole. As such, the emphasis we’ve gotten used to placing on homepages in order to rank should change as well.
What Are Your Visitor’s Habits?
Think about how visitor/website interaction has changed over the years. It used to be that the homepage would serve many different types of visitors coming for varying reasons, and these visitors would expect the homepage to guide them to their eventual destination on your site. For this system to work, the homepage itself had to be optimized for SEO through a number of techniques (lots of text, lots of keywords, etc.); now though, visitors most often navigate straight to your site’s internal pages through search engines.
As visitors’ habits have changed, so has the way Google ranks sites by importance and relevance. It used to be that your homepage would automatically be your highest PageRank page and earn the most links, but as Google has become more sophisticated, it views sites as a whole. It understands that a site can be about many things at once, and ranks based on the total strength and authority of your website, not just the homepage.
Homepages Moving Forward
So what should we take from this change? It’s still important for your homepage to act as a portal to the rest of your site, through obvious and easy-to-use navigation, but it’s no longer necessary for your homepage to be a compendium for everything that happens on your site. Our web design and SEO team at Big Red SEO thinks that this will turn out to be a very good thing, as it allows you the opportunity to use your homepage first and foremost as a conversion tool. The most effective homepages in the future will focus on an easily explainable unique value proposition, social proof, and call to action, all in a visually appealing package that drives visitors toward conversion.
Contact Big Red SEO Today at (402) 522-6468!
As a full-service web design and SEO company in Omaha, Nebraska, Big Red SEO specializes in developing cutting edge inbound marketing strategies that help our clients make their businesses more noticeable by potential customers. Contact us today at (402) 522-6468 and let us help you raise your business in the search engine rankings!