undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. SEO strategy for conversion-optimised home page

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

SEO strategy for conversion-optimised home page

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
3
3
592
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • LondonAli
    LondonAli last edited by Jan 24, 2015, 6:47 PM

    I'm working on a very conventional-type site with a home page (why come to us), methods we use, pricing, reviews, FAQs and contact us.

    After reading the Moz case study at (http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/), I have been working on a conversion-optimised home page that consolidates much of content in all these pages.

    At the bottom of the home page, I then plan to add a list of blog posts "Want to read more? We have a lot of useful information on our blog. Here are the most popular articles:" with articles that explain more about the methods we use for example (content that was formerly on our methods page). Obviously this new blog will also have more interesting information (but a lot that could actually be converted into pages)

    This radically changes the site into just a home page full of selling points and calls-to-action and a blog.

    I have some questions about this strategy:

    1. How do we keep our search engine ranking for keywords such as "[our service] prices" or "[a particular method] London". We rank quite well on Google for these and it goes straight to the relevant page. Shall we keep the pages active somewhere even though the information is also on the home page?
    2. Is a blog actually necessary here (SEO wise)? The things I'm planning to write could easily be made into more pages.
    3. Am I going about this completely wrong by trying using the CRO guide? Should this sort of page be reserved for landing pages? The reason why I'm considering making a conversion-generating home page is because we only sell one service pretty much (although there are differences in how we do it on children vs. adults) and because we are quite niche so most of our traffic comes from organic sources.

    Thank you

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Unleaded
      Unleaded last edited by Jan 25, 2015, 12:30 PM Jan 25, 2015, 3:12 AM

      My first suggestion after reading your question, is to create a plan before making any changes to the website architecture. I have seen on numerous occasions, websites lose up to 90% of their organic traffic after a website redesign due to poor planning. Every page holds value, and each link on that page passes value to the page being linked to. For instance, if you are planning on removing links from the navigation menu on the home page, that page is in jeopardy of losing rank.

      Look at Your Top Pages in Webmaster Tools

      You will see a link in the left menu, "Search Traffic." That will expand, then click on the first item below it, "Search Queries." Once you have clicked on it, you will see a tab over the graph labeled "Top Pages." Once you have clicked on that, you can view your most popular organic landing pages. If the page is receiving enough traffic, there will be a toggle arrow next to it. By clicking on the page link, it will expand with a list of search queries used to find that page. Take a look at each page's keyword list and look for semantic patterns or correlations they have to that page. You may not think that every keyword you see is relevant for that page, but that doesn't mean that keyword shouldn't be there. The keyword in question may pass semantic value to the primary keyword your page is ranking for.

      Take a look at one of Rand's slide decks he posted, Cracking the SEO Code for 2015. Focus more on topic association rather than keyword matching. You may also find a blog I posted on Semantic Search useful. It covers some evaluation techniques you could use.

      Check Your Backlinks Using Open Site Explorer

      If you plan on removing pages that are ranking well for high converting keywords (which I would not advise), you may be losing important backlinks to that page. Remember, even though those backlinks are directed toward that specific page, doesn't mean that it won't affect the rankings for your entire website. Any link on that page is passing authority to the pages they're linking to.

      If you decide for sure that you have to remove a page, make sure you at least create a 301 redirect pointed to the page taking its place. If that page happens to be the home page, then direct it to the home page.

      Think about every SEO factor and content asset

      When it comes to Organic Search, there are many variables that come into play. Here are just a few that come to mind:

      • Semantic Structure of each page
      • Number of pages indexed by Google
      • Backlinks passing juice to each page (even nofollow links should be considered as a factor)
      • Internal Link Structure of the Website
      • Keyword Specific Anchor Text
      • Structured data
      • Indexed PDF files
      • Self-Hosted Video assets
      • Images and alt text (consider universal search)
      • Keyword Specific URL aliases

      Conclusion

      One of the reason's Moz did so well was because they told a great story about the brand and it was easy to digest. I would keep your blog as well. Moz definitely didn't get rid of their blog. Instead, I would think of some new ideas to make your blog interesting and engaging.

      As far as the pages are concerned, I would keep them where they are at, and I wouldn't remove any links that are currently directed toward them. Instead, since they are already ranking well and garnering traffic, leverage them as an asset you can build into your conversion strategy. Somehow funnel them to your landing page. Set up Google analytics events and goal funnels to evaluate what works and what doesn't.

      I'm not sure if that answers your question, but at the very least, I hope it helps guide you in the right direction.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
      • RyanPurkey
        RyanPurkey last edited by Jan 25, 2015, 12:30 PM Jan 24, 2015, 7:17 PM

        I think one of the best takeaways from Rand's work with Conversion Rate Experts is the understanding Rand got from talking about his services in person and how well such conversations "converted" versus how Moz was talking about what it did and offered on the site.  For your specific case the solution is probably somewhat similar, how would you first describe and introduce your product (home page, very well crafted)  and then how you would address specific examples and use cases (blog post, referencing your core service) or other pages.

        Home pages can often rank for a robust set of terms so you might be alright in ranking with the smaller site format, still spend the time going through your Analytics carefully to see what pages you should keep and redesign versus what pages you could most likely redirect to the higher converting new ones.  Also, test test test. Make sure you're making improvements with the changes you're making. Optimizely should be able to help you in that regard: https://www.optimizely.com/statistics

        If you're very local, spending time seeing how your referrals and leads arrive via sites like Yelp, Google Local and others would be good too.  It sounds like you're on the right track though and just need to tie things together with Analytics.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • 1 / 1
        1 out of 3
        • First post
          1/3
          Last post

        Got a burning SEO question?

        Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


        Start my free trial


        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.

        • See all categories

        Related Questions

        • JH_OffLimits

          Home Page Disappears From Google - But Rest of Site Still Ranked

          As title suggests we are running into a serious issue of the home page disapearing from Google search results whilst the rest of the site still remains. We search for it naturally cannot find a trace, then use a "site:" command in Google and still the home page does not come up. We go into web masters and inspect the home page and even Google states that the page is indexable. We then run the "Request Indexing" and the site comes back on Google. This is having a damaging affect and we would like to understand why this issue is happening. Please note this is not happening on just one of our sites but has happened to three which are all located on the same server. One of our brand which has the issue is: www.henweekends.co.uk

          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 7, 2019, 8:29 AM | JH_OffLimits
          0
        • Caro-O

          Home page suddenly dropped from index!!

          A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
          Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
          Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
          Caro

          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 17, 2016, 2:16 PM | Caro-O
          0
        • jagdecat

          I have a lot of spammy links coming to my 404 page (the URLs have been removed now). Should i re-direct to Home?

          I have a lot of spammy links pointing at my website according to MOZ. Thankfully all of them were for some URLs that we've long since removed so they're hitting my 404. Should i change the 404 with a 301 and Re-Direct that Juice to my home page or some other page or will that hurt my ranking?

          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 25, 2015, 12:00 AM | jagdecat
          0
        • Philip-DiPatrizio

          Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?

          If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage?  Nothing?  Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?

          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 30, 2014, 2:43 PM | Philip-DiPatrizio
          0
        • Dillman

          How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??

          I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages. SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website. SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link. WHY?  and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is. THINGS I"VE TRIED: (1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page. (2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag. (3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference.  I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/');  to $redirect_url = home_url('');       nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file  (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) :   RewriteEngine on
          RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
          RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
          RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Please help friends.

          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 16, 2014, 11:00 PM | Dillman
          0
        • Kingalan1

          Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page

          Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
          Alan

          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 10, 2014, 1:22 PM | Kingalan1
          0
        • Visually

          Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?

          For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.

          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 6, 2012, 11:04 AM | Visually
          0
        • Grenadi

          301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?

          Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony

          Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 6, 2011, 2:54 PM | Grenadi
          0

        Get started with Moz Pro!

        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

        Start my free trial
        Products
        • Moz Pro
        • Moz Local
        • Moz API
        • Moz Data
        • STAT
        • Product Updates
        Moz Solutions
        • SMB Solutions
        • Agency Solutions
        • Enterprise Solutions
        Free SEO Tools
        • Domain Authority Checker
        • Link Explorer
        • Keyword Explorer
        • Competitive Research
        • Brand Authority Checker
        • Local Citation Checker
        • MozBar Extension
        • MozCast
        Resources
        • Blog
        • SEO Learning Center
        • Help Hub
        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
        • How-to Guides
        • Moz Academy
        • API Docs
        About Moz
        • About
        • Team
        • Careers
        • Contact
        Why Moz
        • Case Studies
        • Testimonials
        Get Involved
        • Become an Affiliate
        • MozCon
        • Webinars
        • Practical Marketer Series
        • MozPod
        Connect with us

        Contact the Help team

        Join our newsletter
        Moz logo
        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
        • Accessibility
        • Terms of Use
        • Privacy

        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.