Large block of several thousand words on homepage of Ecommerce site - opinions?
-
I work for a local SEO company who are continually adding content to the home page of clients websites. While i do agree that it is a good idea to add content to the home page and to link to inner pages, the home page of several clients exceeds 6,000 or more words.
Every month, an article based on a brand or category (which already has its own page which is optimised with an article) is added to the home page with links to inner pages. I have stressed that it is not a good idea to have so much content on the home page, and even more so that it shouldn't target all the same keywords.
I have pointed out that many of the brand and category pages do not rank well for their keywords, whereas in most cases it is the home page which is ranking instead, which i have suggested this is because the home page is too well optimised for those keywords.
What are your opinions on this? Are you for or against continually adding content (which already has its own designated page) to the home page of an Ecommerce website?
I should also add that this content is within a drop down div box at the footer on some sites and just above the footer on other sites. The category and brand pages also have drop down divs with an article just below the header.
-
Right okay. Well then I'd suggest you move each of the blocks from the home page to a new page.
Then look at the calls to action on the new pages to encourage click-throughs to products. Or look at adding links/photos to products that relate to the topic being discussed. Anything you write on the site should be a standalone piece of content, but would presumably, in one form or other, relate to what's being sold on the site. That being the case, the traffic coming to the articles will be people interested in the type of things being sold, so you should be able to encourage the click-through to products.
Yes, you will get some non-converting traffic, but by putting each one on a separate page and working on the SEO of each, you can broaden your scope for MORE traffic, which you can then encourage to buy.
The home page is not the place for everything and will be restricting what you can achieve in traffic terms.
-
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'lower level' pages, but we are able to edit the home page to add a small piece of text such as 'latest products'/'latest brands' etc.
We can add extra pages of content (that aren't product or brand pages) but don't as the company i work for feels that adding a blog or article section will bring in non-converting traffic from search engines, thus the only non-product oriented pages are the basics such as 'contact us', 'about us', 'shopping cart' etc.
-
Can you create a 'lower level' pages for each 'article' (and then manually edit the home page for 'latest' bits) or is the system quite restrictive - e.g. unless you add a new product or brand, you can't add a page?
-
Thank you Martin,
The websites are Ecommerce stores so the focus isn't on articles, but the articles are there on each category / brand page in order for search engines to relate the pages to a few keywords, so there's isn't exactly a 'latest posts' or similar feature we can make use of.
All of the pages on the site already have content, but I agree that interlinking between the pages is a good idea, although it's not very scalable as the main focus is on brand pages (so the majority of content for brands will not mention other brand names, thus having nowhere to interlink these).
-
Ugh. Not good. In my humble opinion people aren't going to scroll down to read that much content - so that's bad from a user experience point of view. So here's some pointers
1. Keep the Home Page Fresh - if they're in the position of being able to regularly add content, then keep the home page fresh, maybe with the latest post and then snippets to the preview 2 or 3 for people who may be interested. Or have an intro page as the home page with a 'latest articles' box that's prominent.
2. Move the other articles to their own page - this means you're growing the site, can better interlink between posts, can optimise each for carefully selected keywords and makes each one individually shareable by social media.
3. Link Build to relevant articles or categories - much more achievable when that content is not on the home page.
The drop-down DIVs are only helpful for users - Google will be seeing 6000 words of text, which is OTT. That content needs moving, so that unique pages of content are created and can be separately promoted.
Hope this helps - a website restructure sounds like it's in order.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsure about improvement of inner sites
Hi ! I want to improve the ranking of Home on my site. Now I did some on-page SEO on Home itself for the keyword "Webdesign Freiburg". How much does it make sense to put this keyword also into inner sites - although I primarily want to rank Home for this keyword? Does Home profit from putting the keyword into subpages? Cheers and thanks Marc
On-Page Optimization | | RWW0 -
Pre-launch site or not
We are going to set up a new site in four months. Historically we always set up a simple Wordpress "Pre-launch-site" with relevant texts to start ranking in the SERP. Anyone with experience of doing/not doing this and what is had led to? A site with relevant texts also should have incoming links, which needs more work.
On-Page Optimization | | fredrikahlen0 -
Ecommerce Product Reviews - Show All, Most Recent, Sampling?
Just curious what you guys are doing in the way of displaying product reviews on ecommerce sites. I couldn't find much on best practices here so I'm turning to the Moz community. We're moving our main site to Magento and plan to launch it in a few months. Some of our products have 1,000+ reviews and we're wondering what the best way to show them is. I'm thinking just put them all on there (provided it doesn't slow down the page) to increase unique content per page, more keywords, etc. We've also thought of showing just the 50-100 most recent reviews or filtering the reviews and showing a sampling we choose. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Kingof50 -
To change or not to change site URL structure?
I am learning my way around SEO, having always used professionals for it in the past on previous businesses i have decided to do it myself and learn more about it. Now the dilemma i am up against is i recently changed some of my permalinks on quite a few main pages throughout the site. The site launched in April this year so we're quite new. The problem is since my last change i have not seen any increase...a decrease which in fact hasn't recovered at all. Having now analysed them in more depth and read up more on the whole subject of SEO, (which is endless) i have put together a complete new strategy; with this increased understanding of what i am doing (but by no means conclusive) i want to complete a full overhaul on all SEO (via Wordpress which i use along with YOAST SEO tools), ensuring i have all my keywords, permalinks and descriptions spot on throughout every page, post and picture. I spent a lot of time mapping these out, ensuring there is no Focus keyword duplication, and that the site is relatively flat in terms of its layout. What i am unsure about now is whether changing my permalinks again is a bad thing to do?
On-Page Optimization | | MrCostello
Could it permanently damage my rep going forward?
Should i just focus on my content and keywords/descriptions? I am at a loss as i don't want to do irreparable damage to our reputation. The site is still reasonable easy to manage so changing now is the best time to do it, but if changing the URLs is a waste of time then i may just forget that and just work on the keywords, descriptions and content. Advice is 'oh so welcome' 🙂0 -
Canoncial tag for homepage?
I have a site that gets most of it's traffic from one keyword combination, but I've noticed lately that instead of sending people to the homepage, it's sending people to an internal page. This isn't a problem, except for the fact that all the best link juice and domain authority has been directed at the homepage. There's not a lot of content on the homepage, so is it worth setting up a canonical tag on the homepage for this internal page to ensure that the page authority/link juice helps to boost this page that is already being indexed for the keyword?
On-Page Optimization | | Bigheadigital0 -
Only homepage in Google
Hello SEOmozzers, A colleague of mine started up a site here: www.wikiboedel.nl. Sadly only the homepage is indexed in Google. It's a wordpress install. Robots.txt seems fine, all pages are on index and follow. Can't see why only the home is indexed in Google. Do you know whats going wrong? Please tell me. Tank you.
On-Page Optimization | | B.Great0 -
Website redesign: site going from .php to .html
A site I'm working on is being redesigned because the current platform does not allow for content to be changed easily. In the process, they are going from .php to .html. I am concerned about their losing link juice. Can a site work with the old content remaining .php and the new content being .html or should all pages stay .php?
On-Page Optimization | | cakelady0 -
Improve Site SEO
Hey Guys I was wondering if you could give me advice to improving my SEO. I have used all the tools on this site and have improved it a lot already, but wondering if there is any glaring issues, that I could fix now www.treelifedesigns.com
On-Page Optimization | | treelifedesigns0