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
-
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 -
Keyword rich domain names -> Point to sales funnel sites or to landing pages on primary domain?
Hey everyone,
Local SEO | | Transpera
We have a tonne of old domains we have done nothing with. All of them are keyword-rich domains.
Things like "[City]SEOPro" or "[City]DigitalMarketing" where [city] is a city that we are already targeting services in. So all of these domains will be targeted for local cities as keywords. We have been having an internal debate about whether or not we should just host sales funnel pages on these domains, that are rich in keywords and content......... ... Or ... ... Should we point these domains to landing pages on our existing domain that are basically the same as what we would do with the sales funnel pages, but are on our primary site? (keyword rich, with good and plentiful content) Then, as a follow-up question... Should these be set as just 301 redirects on these domains to our actual primary domain so the browser sees the landing page domain instead of the actual keyword-rich domain? ( [city]seopro.com ) Thanks guys. I know for some, the response will be an obvious one. However; we have probably way over thought this and have arguments for almost every scenario. We think we have an answer but wanted to send this out to the community first. I won't post what we are thinking yet, so that the answers can remain unbiased for now and we can have a conversation without it being swayed any one way. We understand that 301 redirects would be seen as a doorway page.
We are also only discussing in the context of organic search only.
If we ran the domains as their own sites, they would be about 3 pages of content only. Pretty static, but good content. Think of a PAS style sales funnel. Problem -> Acknowledgement -> Solution.0 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
What can I do to rank higher than low-quality low-content sites?
We lost our site in an actual meltdown at our hosting provider in January, and decided to do a new site instead of bring back a dated backup. So we've only been "active" at our URL since about May. That said, I have not seen any irregular or unexpected penalties. Not showing up is natural if you have literally nothing to show. We have had a site since then, though, and while it isn't going to win any award, we've built it with best practices using sites like this, trying to use natural, helpful, actual language to convey what we do and why we do it (we're web developers for small business making WordPress sites). Paying attention to titles, keyword frequency and variability, alt tags, etc. Always erring on the conservative side. While we build sites for people across the country (and a few in places like the UK), we just moved into an actual office space in our hometown so it's never been more important to push our visibility locally. We've just come back on the scene, in relative terms, so there's no expectation we'll crack the top five or ten; they all have teams of people and bags of capital and have been around many, many years, plus they link to the dozens upon dozens of sites they have done and promote their appearances in press releases and such. Their content is not bad, and most of it is good and not spammy. They are being genuine. That said, we're in the late 40s to late 50s right now. Happy to show up at all, but after that first group of legitimate sites, there are automatically generated webpages (which I thought couldn't even be listed...one is an MP3 download site that mentions one of the top companies in the page title, and just has a random video on the page) local companies touting themselves as SEO "experts" that say things like "Here at Company X, we work hard to bring you the best Rochester, NY web design in the hopes that when you make your Rochester, NY web design decisions, you'll think of us first Rochester, NY web design." I changed the company name and the location, but that's an actual line from their site job listings from places like Craigslist and Indeed hair stylists dentists (?!) Our code validates, we've incorporated Schema for our addresses, our site is usually fast (650ms to 1.3s in Pingdom from Dallas). We don't do any redirecting, our metas likes everyone else's don't count for ranking but are thoughtfully produced, we pay attention to using concise and accurate URLs without stop words, etc. There are also very very few resources loaded on a given page. That said, there's not a lot on the blog that's new and all told we have I think 13 total pages including a few posts. Is it even possible to get close to the actual pack if we, for example, posted more regularly? I was just reading here about how we shouldn't put our links in the site footers of our clients (which we don't always anyway), so I have them only as branded links, only on the homepages, and only on sites that, when crawled, didn't have nonzero spam scores (everyone else has a nofollow link in our portfolio). I realize this is a super generic question but I wasn't quite sure how to search out this particular use case given that our aspirations are so basic...just trying to figure out if there's something obvious we're missing and shooting ourselves in the foot over. A thousand pledges of gratitude! (if this is too common and I just didn't see a duplicate, let me know and I will delete it or ask for it to be deleted....also, I don't want to appear spammy so I am not linking to my site unless it's absolutely necessary...not sure what protocol is...I'm pretty self-aware so I do believe everything I've said above is true).
Local SEO | | eaglenestmedia1