How to optimize your homepage for SEO?

The home page of your website plays an important role both in your natural referencing strategy and for your online marketing, its optimization is always a specific SEO operation .

Homepage optimization from an SEO perspective is often overlooked in favor of aesthetic characters, neglecting potential traffic on competitive queries. However, the home page may also have no SEO vocation and only serve to distribute its popularity via links to more important pages.

The index page being generally the most powerful of the site in terms of positioning on Google thanks to netlinking, optimizing it for positioning in search engines can be interesting depending on the case.

Here are some tips and tricks to optimize your home page for SEO and Internet users, combining marketing performance and SEO efficiency, combining form and content.

Why is it important to optimize the SEO of the home page of a site?

The homepage is one of the pages that Internet users will always visit , even if they land on other pages of the same website. In many cases, this is the first page users first visit on a site.

The home page is also a candidate for ranking in the top positions for highly competitive queries and getting traffic, as it usually centralizes all the popularity through the backlinks and the internal linking of the pages.

The work of optimizing the homepage must be articulated around 3 main axes:

• SEO optimized content: the content of your home page is what Google robots analyze when they index a site. It will be responsible for determining the relevance of your content to potential visitors and establishing your authority.
• Backlinks: the strategy of netlinking to your index page is an essential step in obtaining the popularity necessary to position yourself at the top of Google's results pages.
• Marketing: to highlight the products, services, values ​​of the company and encourage action.

If you use the WP CMS, a multitude of SEO plugins help optimize the SEO of a WordPress site (tags, titles, texts, etc.).

What is the purpose of the site's home page?

The homepage content should provide an engaging introduction and overview of what your site, your business is all about.

You should have these main goals and tips when building your homepage content:

• Explain to Google what your site is about with the appropriate texts.
• Quickly make it clear to Internet users what your offer and work is, its importance for them.
• Help visitors understand why they should choose your brand over the competition.
• Facilitate intuitive online navigation and indexing by robots.
• Answer key questions visitors will have and dispel any fears via social proof.
• Arouse curiosity and intrigue with differentiating elements.
• Provide detailed information.
• Illustrate the need for your products, services, advice.
• Help visitors achieve their goals by providing a clear and effective call to action.

What are the stages of the optimization of the homepage in referencing?

The process of optimizing your homepage involves a number of steps . From an SEO perspective, optimizing a homepage is no different than optimizing other pages on your website. The SEO optimization process should integrate seamlessly with the on-page marketing optimizations.

How do you explain what your company does?

As a first step, you must explain clearly, simply and concisely what your company does and the products or services it offers.

• Your offer should be clear to visitors.
• What sets you apart from your competitors?
• Short and catchy texts should make it understood in seconds.

How to optimize the title of the homepage?

Simply indicating the name of your company is not optimal. Try to be more creative by giving users and search engines more information about your website activity. The optimization of the title tag is an important criterion for Google.

• The length of titles must be 60 characters.
• Include your target keywords.
• Stimulate clicks by best describing what you offer.
• Make sure your target keywords are placed at the beginning of title tags.

How to optimize the meta description of the home page?

The description is what users will see in Google's SERPS. Make people want to know more with a message that hits home .

• Include your target keywords.
• Encourage users to visit your website.
• Highlight your differences and values ​​with formatting that makes you want to click.

Optimizing the page description tag complements the title and has a positive impact on the click-through rate.

How to optimize the H1 tag?

Every page on your website, including the homepage, should have an H1 tag .

• Make sure there is only one h1 tag on your homepage.
• Include target keywords and related keywords in the h1 tag and other Hn.

How to use impactful visuals and optimize mages for SEO?

A good landing page should have images to convey a powerful message and illustrate your message. They make the page more attractive and the message you want to convey stronger.

• All images have ALT text.
• Optimize image filename .
• Compress images to load them quickly.

How to optimize your logo?

Each website should have a unique and recognizable logo to identify the business.

• The file name is your company name.
• Optimizing ALT tag text includes your business name.

If it contains other important images, you can optimize SEO tags to position the images in Google searches.

How do I add proper structured data markup?

Structured data tags are a way to describe your data to search engine crawlers . They agreed on a structuring of the different forms of data (articles, products, organizations, companies, events, etc.)

• Organization.
• Nobody, if you manage a personal site.
• Address.
• Phone.
• Notice.
• Products.

Google can use this structured data to enrich the results and promote your site in a more attractive way for users, and thus stimulate interactions.

How to take care of the content of the home page and integrate the main keywords?

You need to make sure that the homepage contains enough text to be used by Google. Avoid having only images or videos with no text and make sure your content includes your target keywords or variations.

Ideally, homepage content should be short, but provide sufficient and direct information.

• Make sure your homepage contains text.
• Use text content for links.
• Be sure to include your target keywords and variations in the homepage content.

How to check mobile friendliness?

More than 50% of searches on Google now come from mobiles and it is more than necessary to have a home page, and a complete site adapted to mobile devices.

You need to make sure that your mobile homepage has the same content as your desktop homepage and that navigation is optimal.

It is important to use a responsive design so that all SEO optimizations are immediately available on all mediums.

How to develop a simple structure and navigation?

Your site must be pleasant to visualize, easy to navigate and give access to the most important contents simply.

• A simple and elegant design is easier to digest and makes a better impression on users.
• Check that your font isn't hard to read by making sure it isn't too small.
• You need to make sure that all the important pages of your website are accessible from your menu in no more than 3 clicks.
• Your website should have a hierarchical structure, with the focal point being the homepage.
• A well-structured homepage can provide you with sitelinks in Google search.

How to give elements of reassurance to customers?

When a user visits your homepage, you have 3 seconds to grab their attention and gain their trust. Be sure to give them everything they need to know on the homepage.

All of these can help build confidence:

• Customers' opinion.
• References.
• Customer cases.
• Achievements
• Partnerships.

How do you nurture calls to action and conversion?

The home page, like any other page should have a clear purpose. CTAs can invite users to contact you, to call, to send an e-mail, to subscribe to a newsletter, to consult prices, etc.

If you sell products, the main purpose will be to redirect users to your products page, if you sell services to your services page and in case of a blog to your articles.

• Add clear CTA links.
• The CTA should stand out from the surrounding content.

How to optimize the loading speed of the home page?

A site should load quickly . 40% of users will leave a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

• Optimize source code.
• Use light plugins.
• Get a quality web host.
• Optimize images.

Having a slow website is one of the most common SEO mistakes in E-commerce.