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
-
Location based landing pages best practices
Hello, I am looking for the communities thoughts on location-based landing pages. That is, writing out dozens, sometimes hundreds of landing pages in the format of domain.com/[keyword]-[location] and recycling the same content over and over to localize organic search engine results. i have done it with multiple websites and seen tremendous success, however, i am considering getting rid of these pages and having all of the spammy location based pages 301 redirect to my main page domain.com/[keyword] I am considering this because the above practice seems to be a bit black-hat / spammy and those pages do not offer any unique or valuable content. While i have seen great results from this practice, i feel like Google will eventually penalize this or may already be penalizing me without me knowing it. At the same time, i am hesitant to because these pages are ranking. i.e. domain.com/[keyword-houston] is ranking but domain.com/[keyword] is not ranking Thoughts?
Local SEO | | RyanMeighan0 -
Home Service Ads Interview 2017 - Plumber
I am not sure how I feel about home service ads so far. They are supposed to make it easier for home service businesses to connect with clients but the difficulty level seems to be off the charts. I have my first client scheduled for an interview tomorrow. We have 2 previous interview schedules and something went wrong on their end. I have a Plumbing client about to do the video interview? Does anyone have any experience to help my client with the interview? What questions will they ask? What does he need to be prepared for to pass the interview? From a manager/consultant standpoint, does the client need an Adwords manager if he is running home service ads?
Local SEO | | PSLab0 -
To Keep My Company's CO.UK Page Or Redirect It...
Hi Moz'ers - I have a question... Just to set the stage, we're a small recruiting firm, with an even smaller marketing department. I'm essentially a one man wrecking crew and don't have a ton of extra time. That being said, I know that page rank (and local office rank) are critical to our inbound lead generation, so I'm willing to invest some of my time into doing it right. The issue I'm having is ranking high as a local business in Austin, New York, San Francisco, and London, UK (to name a few). So far I've solved this through building dedicated subpages on our .com site and link building key word anchor text towards those pages. The only page that's not really gaining traction is our London page. So I decided to clone (most of) the site, tweak the text (to try and avoid dup text), and try and get that page to rank. I'm also having it hosted on a local server, have it using a local domain address suffix (co.uk), using local hreflang (on our .com site), created dedicated web 2.0 sites, and done my best to do some link building. The problem I'm facing is crapy local ranking, and limited bandwidth to maintain two sites. Should I: A) Scrap the co.uk site and focus on the .com (and subpages)
Local SEO | | bettsrecruiting
B) Keep the co.uk domain, and just redirect the URL to our .com page
C) Keep the co.uk domain, send all links from the home page to the relevant page on our .com page, and set up 301 redirects for all other relevant pages.
D) Hire someone to clean up, rewrite, and upkeep the co.uk site because it has the most SEO value in the long run and is the only way I'm going to be able to rank locally in London. What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance! Tim Our European Site - http://bettsrecruiting.co.uk/
Our US Site - http://bettsrecruiting.com/0 -
Geo content and where Googlebot crawls from.
Does anyone have experience with geo-specific content on their homepage and how the location of the Googlebot impacts rank and/or traffic? I ask because looking in Search Console today, I noticed the thumbnail image of our site is different than usual and it was pulling in a specific geo-location and wondered if there is any value/concern on how Google sees our site from different locations and if it could impact SERP's.
Local SEO | | Shawn_Huber0 -
Francise Space: How to handle Duplicate Content?
We have a client - http://www.certapro.com/ with 330+ individual franchises. The individual franchisees all share the same content. If you perform a series of search by zipcode, you'll see the different regions all share the same copy blocks. How would you handle this situation? New content for all 330+? Canonicalize them to a single source? Keep in mind we need to scale and would have to work with the local partners who may not be web savvy. Also thinking about iframing the same content as an alternative.
Local SEO | | Aviatech0 -
Developing a content marketing strategy for a social security disability firm.
I have a client that I've been working with for a little over a year now and I've been struggling to generate new business from his online presence. Initially, I completely re-designed his website with semantically correct html markup, and used all of typical, site level SEO tactics, i.e., keywords in title tags, h tags, paragraphs, correct NAP, etc. We've only seen very low marginal returns off of our efforts. Part of the problem is that my client is not an attorney, but instead he runs a social security disability advocacy firm. He still performs all of the operations that an attorney performs, but due to the fact that he is not an attorney, we cannot optimize his site for search phrases containing "attorney", which is a common keyword that people would generally use to find the services that my client offers. So I've decided to try a different approach. A content marketing approach. The only reason I prolonged avoided this approach for so long is that, to be frank, I had no idea how to target his ideal clients with content. After talking to my client the other day and recommending this new approach, I uncovered some similarities between his previous clients. Most his clients live in rural areas, and they like nascar, hunting, fishing, etc. So I suggested that I create blog for him, and begin finding some freelance writers that can create some killer content about nascar, hunting and fishing. Admittedly, I don't have a much experience with a content marketing approach, but I want to learn everything there is to know about it. I guess I'm a little unsure about this approach that we're getting ready to try, and would love to hear from some people that have been down this path, and might be able to offer any advice. I really want to help my client's business flourish, and it's now very clear to me that solely relying on an old SEO line of thinking is not doing the trick anymore. Any tips, tactics and strategies would be greatly appreciated. Am I on the right track here? How would we get this content in front of his ideal clients, and market it in such a way that he will get a good return on his investment?
Local SEO | | ScottMcPherson0 -
Content Across International Websites
I am wondering if anyone could clear up some questions I have regarding international SEO and how to treat the content placed on there. I have recently launched several websites for a product internationally, each with the correct country domain name etc and I have also followed the guidelines provided by webmaster tools on internationalisation. All the websites are targeted towards English speaking countries and I have rewritten most of the of the content on there to suite the English style of the targeted country. This is being said however I am finding mixed bags of information on what to do in treating large chunks of potential duplicate content. For example my main .com website which has been running several years (and is targeted to the UK) has a lot of well written articles on there which are popular with the visitors. I am needing to find out if duplicating these articles onto the international versions of the websites, without rewriting them, would have a detrimental effect on SEO between all the sites. I have done a site search for each domain name to see if they are cropping up in other local Google versions (e.g .ca site in Google.com.au etc) and they are not. Does this mean Google is localised to its results regarding duplicate content or is it treated at the root level? Any information to point me in the right direction would be a big help.
Local SEO | | Rj-Media0