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.
Home page with no content
-
Hi,
I just want to know if there are any impact on seo ranking if my home page has no or less content, for example I only have a slider with my logo, slogan, navigation and my company info schema?
Advance thanks for the help!
-
Hi bchilders22,
Great question and hope I can add to the discussion points. I'd like to approach from 2 angles:
-
To answer your question directly, assuming your goal is to optimize the website (no matter the industry), then yes your SEO ranking will suffer with a lack of content on the Home page. Just like everyone else has stated. If your goal is to optimize the site for other keywords outside of the brand/company name, then the content on the Home page becomes extremely important. If you are seeking to optimize the brand, then you may not be in so much trouble. BUT, if that is your goal, then I would recommend a couple minor items to implement to help. Create a paragraph on the Home page which hits the branded name, maybe placed just above the Footer under the Slider. Use that as your foundation and then create your Title and Description to be relevant to that content, again tagging/referencing your brand and location to coincide with your Schema markup. If you want to hit more keywords, then you'll need more content and maybe focus to section off the content. For example, if this is a restaurant, then hit on sections of the menu or meal time frames ie: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Drinks, etc. Then link to those inner pages.
-
I'm only stating this because we have several clients with ZERO content on the Home page. It's exactly as you mentioned. Social media buttons, logo, large slider, address and navigation tabs. This is all great because these clients do not care a thing about SEO and investing in SEO. They are shopping centers and their brand is very strong, so keeping the Home page clean and simple and directing their visitors to their Directory and Map and Events is their main focus.
In conclusion, it's all about what your client wants. If they want to rank, then get some good, original content on the Home page and tagged appropriately. If they are focusing their efforts on having a cool Home page to highlight their logo/brand and some nice images, then having content may be "too much clutter" for their tastes. Looking at it from both perspectives, it's asking those questions upfront before the design and development begin are highly important.
Hope this was helpful! - Patrick
-
-
I think content is always better for: first off your visitors then for the search engines. I helps educate them on your products and services. On the other hand I have seen websites rank for major keywords with hardly any content.
-
Yes I agree! You should strongly urge your client to add content to the home page of their site. As Bruce and Ray mentioned above, the home page is the FRONT DOOR of your site. This tells both your visitors and Google "What you do" and "Where you do it".
Always be sure to make a STATEMENT on your home page!
-
We are using a this restaurant theme built by an elite author on Themeforest with over 1600 sales. Only one site on their showcase and that site has no content on home page. After looking at some of the sites from the theme author's comments section, we noticed they too had no content on the home page. http://preview.ait-themes.com/index.php?bartype=desktop&theme=ristorante
We've only build a few restaurant sites and this is the first situation we encountered where the client just wants an image on the home page. Thanks for your replies and advice. We'll add content to home.
-
Your home page content is the front door to your business or blog. No front door..no visitors.
Google has to make decisions about your site from the front door onwards and if there is nothing to work with, then nothing will be worked with
Hope that helps
Bruce
-
Yes, there is a large impact on SEO ranking if your home page doesn't have content.
What would you expect to rank for without content on your home page? Brand terms only?
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
-
New business / content marketing
Hi all SEO experts, if a website is brand new, so published in the last 3 months- new domain name and website design. We have rebranded recently, using a new domain as entered new business partnership, there doesn’t seem to be much guidance on this at all, from various SEO websites, so our question is would you delay publishing new blog posts / content marketing as frequently because the company website is brand new? So would SEO’s decrease the frequency of publication of blog posts, because the website is new? Or perhaps it does not matter, and would still post every week as you would if the website has been live for a long time? So, in nutshell, what we are wondering is, is the “Google Sandbox” still in use?
Local SEO | | Ryan070 -
How to optimize landing pages for local search?
I'm trying to understand how to optimize landing pages to appear in local search. For example, if someone in Chicago searches for "plumber", Yelp has a page "Top 10 Plumbers in Chicago." They are generating these pages for numerous business types and cities. I can't see anything on the page or metadata that indicates a geographic location or business type. What optimizations are they doing to get Google to know that it's a page for a specific city and type of business?
Local SEO | | Tourizee0 -
English pages given preference over local language
We recently launched a new design of our website and for SEO purposes we decided to have our website both in English and in Dutch. However, when I look at the rankings in MOZ for many of our keywords, it seems the English pages are being preferred over the Dutch ones. That never used to be the case when we had our website in the old design. It mainly is for pages that have an English keyword attached to them, but even then the Dutch page would just rank. I'm trying to figure out why English pages are being preferred now and whether that could actually damage our rankings, as search engines would prefer copy in the local language. An example is this page: https://www.bluebillywig.com/nl/html5-video-player/ for the keywords "HTML5 player" and "HTML5 video player".
Local SEO | | Billywig0 -
Is it okay to update Page Titles and Meta descriptions over a period of time?
Some of the page are not performing even after having good content, videos, images and faqs. I am planning to update the page titles and planning to use Long Tail keywords in it for example, Contact US - Brand name would be Contact US - Brand Keyword. Is it okay to do that for all the pages?
Local SEO | | Ravi_Rana0 -
Category pages are treated as duplicate content - is that a problem?
Hi there I have analyzing a webshop where we sell products for pets, gardening and the like. I am getting a lot of "Duplicate Content" alerts from Moz when doing a site crawl and I am told that the pages for e.g. cat products and gardening tools show duplicate content. Those two pages contain no identical products, so I am guessing that it is just the "set up" of the page (they look almost identical, except for the products). My question is: Is this really a problem? Does it affect my ranking in a negative way, and if so, how can I counter it? Best regards Frederik
Local SEO | | fhertzp0 -
Best Practice For Multisite Targeting Different States With Same Content
I am auditing a Joomla website that uses the MightySites component to create multiple versions of the same site for different state/province areas. For example, the site structure looks something like: example.com/fl/
Local SEO | | MatShepSEO
example.com/mn/
example.com/ny/
example.com/wa/ etc. Each of the state home pages are largely identical and much of the content within each state sub-folder is a copy of the original content on the main example.com site, with minor changes here and there. The client is a national organization and needs to keep this structure to allow each state to be able to edit and change their own content, though as far as I can see content doesn't actually vary much. What's best practice here in reducing duplicate content issues? We can't use hreflang as it is all within one country (although it does also provide two different language versions of content, for which I will use hreflang.) Should we just canonical everything back to the corresponding pages on the example.com site? Any thoughts or recommendations much appreciated.0 -
Duplicate page titles because of multi language setting
Hey SEO-ers! I've run a Moz crawl on my clients site, and I'm getting back over 4,000 duplicate title errors which is a real headache for me! The reason why is because my client has 5 different languages on their website, so if you spoke French for example, you could change the language of the website to all be in french, so the domain would change from www.example.com to www.example.com/fr/ The duplicate titles are being picked up because all page titles are in English for all 5 languages - which I know, is an issue anyway - why would a French browser using Google.fr choose a website that has English meta tags!? Crazy. So my question is... if I translate all page titles from my English title to the native language, will this fix my duplicate page titles as now they will be in the correct language? OR will it still be classed as a duplicate because in theory I'm just translating the same content 5 times? Anyone had any experience in this? I'm using Polylang on my clients Wordpress site to change the locales, so if you have knowledge on this plugin too then great!
Local SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
How can I personalize content based on a state/region? Is it possible?
I'm getting a lot of traffic from different regions throughout the US. I need to personalize the content in my website or on a certain landing page based on the users state/region. Is it possible? For example, forwarding a user that lands on page "x" to page "y" if he's from California and to page "z" if he's from South Carolina. And of course, can this somehow affect my rankings in Google? Thanks!!
Local SEO | | OrendaLtd0