Should your homepage target your most important keyword?
-
I was looking at the title tags/keywords of the top ranking sites for my most important keyword phrase, and I noticed all the pages that were beating us were homepages. Our homepage is not optimized at all. It's very generic, because 1, my boss wanted it that way, (but she's not married to it) and 2, I built out landing pages for all our keywords. For the really, really competitive keywords, I can't get my landing pages high enough. My homepage however, according to OSE, is on par with the other sites, especially the page. I included the screenshots of it, just in case, my analysis was way off. But, those are the top 4 sites and I'm on page 3.
Here's my questions: Should I optimize my homepage for the keyword phrase, if it's our most important one? If I do that, what should I do with the landing pages? Lastly, if you look at the screenshots, is my analysis correct that we aren't woefully behind all four of these people (we're kempruge.com)?
I know I'm asking on a lot on this one, but it's a pretty big decision for us. I could really use the help making sure it's the right one.
Your time is much appreciated,
Ruben
-
Alright, thank you all for your time. I appreciate it!
- Ruben
-
I think you have got the site hierarchy down just fine. However, taking a look at [what I presume to be] your landing page, I think that you could improve your search position by providing more information on the page here.
Start with your company USP's, maybe include a short explainer video? Then work on your written content. Make your page better than your competitors page and you should be rewarded.
I have a site in a very competitive industry with a landing page that ranks within some huge business homepages, and our domain authority is about half of theirs! You just need to keep working on that page.
Dont be tempted to throw too many links at it either. Work on weeding out only the best links from your competitor profiles.
-
Hi
I would say you have done it correctly, optimising the most useful pages for the best user experience.
This key phrase that you are considering putting on your home page - instead of that, why not simply spend more time building links to that page. Instead of focusing links to your home page, focus relevant links to the specific page.
Think of a customer, do they want to land on your homepage and then have to navigate to the correct page to find the information, or do they want to land on the correct page and don't need to navigate away.
There is a really good article (sorry I can't find it), but it talks about the more steps you make a customer make to find the product the less they are likely to buy - I know your not exactly selling a physical product, but you still want the person to sign up and get in contact. So the more difficult steps you make it the less chance you have.
I hope that helps.
-
Which niche you decide to target on your home page is up to you, but in general, the better user experience leans towards broader terms. You can focus deeper on internal pages, but be welcoming to a large crowd (an important, more general key phrase) on your homepage.
Why I say it's up to you, is because it's important to know the risk vs. reward, there is no definite answer. Going too broad will have you fighting against giants you can't yet compete with. Focusing too narrow will limit your demographic scope and traffic. As the SEO, it's up to you to do the research and discuss the levels of risk and reward with your client. What will take longer, what kind of results can they expect from each, etc.
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
-
Changing domain name, witch is better - brand name.com vs keyword + brand name.com?
Hi, I just made one decision and now I'm bit worried, if I did right one. I hope that you can give me feedback and advice regarding it. I'm in hookah market, so I do not have any possibilities to buy adds, so SEO is really-really important to us. I know a lot of things what has to be done to perform better, but currently I have just few really important questions. In international market the main keyword is "hookah" and everything related to that. We are small company and our brand is not that well known and do not have high volume traffic on website. Hookah in front of that we tough will give better understanding to audience about what is the page. Which domain name is better for SEO and also branding purposes? Currently we were using the first one without keyword, no we switched to the second one (just about week ago). https://hekkpipe.com https://hookahhekkpipe.com Regarding it, some really important questions: Would the longer version of domain helps us better rank with important keywords to us or not? When we will write good content, which domain is more likely shared? I'm bit afraid that first one and that we made a mistake changing the domain name. When the 1st one, then how big difference does it potentially make? Thank you
Branding | | Karel_K0 -
Use of Keywords throughout articles
Hi everyone, I have another (very basic) question! It's about the use of keywords throughout articles - is it worthwhile putting keywords and associated phrases in bold and italic and also underlining them at various points throughout my website articles? I have read that this helps google to know what the article is about. Any comments would be much appreciated!
Branding | | ClareO0 -
Is it OK to choose a Domain Name with Brand-name followed by keyword? Part 2
Last month I have posted a question about choosing the right domain name for a website which is currently popular in india, which also needs to be popular in USA. Here's the link to that question (http://moz.com/community/q/is-it-ok-to-choose-a-domain-name-with-brand-name-followed-by-keyword) As you can see the question got 3 helpful responses from experts. But if you scroll down and see.. there is a 4th response which I myself posted throwing some extra doubts, (This was left unanswered.) Could someone please check that thread and clarify my doubt ( the 4 response)
Branding | | PaulineRose0 -
Using keywords instead of brand name on G+ to rank for local terms.
I noticed something this morning, when performing a search on Google UK for "Intensive driving courses southend" the first position is awarded to a driving school that is using exact match keywords instead of brand name on their G+ page to rank for local terms. See this for yourself here: https://www.google.co.uk/#q=intensive+driving+courses+southend Until then, my site had held position 1 for this term for well over a year. Every gut instinct I have tells me that this will not work forever and its not something I should implement, however I'm interested to hear if anyone else is using this tactic, and how its working for them? How can I compete with this "grey hat" tactic?
Branding | | Silkstream0 -
.NET VS .COM VS Keyword Density in the URL, What do you suggest?
I am about to launch an eCom project for a new company. The client has three URL's available. I recognize keyword density is slowly becoming less and less of a factor, but still has significant relevance. I haven't had much experience working on .NET URL's and would like to know anything related to the effects of .NET url's vs. .COM url's. Also, just what you would go with and why? Option 1 "EXACTMATCHKEYWORD.net" (17 total characters) Option 2 "MOSTLYMATCHINGKEYWORDcompany.com" (21 total characters, with company) Option 3 "ABEXACTMATCHKEYWORD.com" -AB represents the company's initials/logo. (19 total characters) USEFUL POINTS 1. 95% of purchases will be one time purchases (so I'm not focused as much on company branding as usual). 2. The company name is actually "exact matching keyword Company" 3. We will be targeting 100's of terms, but the "exact match keyword" represents 1/4 of total search volumes and thus is extremely important.
Branding | | mgordon0 -
SEOMoz homepage - the lack of img alt tags
This might be a stupid question but the homepage of SEOMoz doesn't have img alt tags on the three feature screenshots. I've hovered my mouse and looked at the code, the images just have the link to www.seomoz.org/features Everyone goes adding image tags is key, any reason why SEOMoz don't?
Branding | | Bio-RadAbs1 -
Land Rush for an entirely new suite of keywords ;-)
Big business associated with "pets" and other terms used for animals might fall away to terms such as "animal companion". Some people think that the term "pet" is politically incorrect. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2011/05/09/dnt.pet.politically.incorrect.CBC?hpt=T2 Time to go out and register "AnimalCompanionSupplies.com" I doubt that very many people are going to start searching for "animal companion food" but. the people who adopt these new terms will be, in my opinion, the same folks who buy high end goods and stuff a lot of items in their shopping carts. 😉 J/K
Branding | | EGOL2 -
Domain Name Masking Redirect for Brandname to Keyworded Domain
Hi mozzers I have 2 domain names, brandname.com and keywordname.com and but have a question related to web vs print marketing on deciding which domain to use or redirect. We already have established unique content first on the Keywordname.com site over the last 6 months and it has started to climb well in google rankings. But now we'd like to do some print advertising and think it would make more sense to use Brandname.com when refering to our website. So the 2 question are: Should I 301 redirect brand.com to keyword.com (preferred as all content and rankings on keyword.com) or vice versa, as I realize I can only have one site to avoid duplicate content. And is it possible to use domain name masking on brand.com if redirecting to keyword.com to avoid risking our rankings, or is masking bad for seo? Thanks!
Branding | | emerald0