SEO isn’t easy – it’s a consistent, sustained and subtle process that involves using Google’s numerous tools, taking the time to write great website content, ensuring that your website is ‘healthy’ in terms of its coding and structure, and tweaking and refining (although not too often) the way the homepage and inner pages are structured to best suit your business activities.
Getting the focus wrong
All too often, website homepages focus on high-level entry points or visual calls to action that aren’t actually what a visitor is looking for. If you’re lucky enough and the visitor clicks through on one of these, invariably it’s actually the next page that gives them what they’re actually looking for (or closer to it at least).
That means that what the website has actually done is caused the visitor to make an extra and unnecessary click to find what they’re looking for.
As an example – let’s say your business sells garden sheds, and has a service that offers delivery and installation. Your website homepage has two main calls to action – Products and Services. These are now both H1 and H2 level headers, and therefore more likely to rank in Google, but of course, that’s not what people are actually searching for.
Getting the focus right
‘Garden Sheds’ and ‘Shed installation’ are far more likely to be the terms people would search for (with variations that some keyword research would reveal). But because these keywords have been relegated to a click away from the homepage, they’re less likely to impact as positively on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
Google judges so many factors around website content and content hierarchy that we’ll have to write another article just to cover them all, but in the end a simple approach is best – ensure your website content is keyword-orientated and answers the questions your visitors would most likely ask.
So, it would be far better to have a homepage that brings what people are actually searching for to the front. Answer their questions as fast as possible – that’s the key to good SEO, and great User Experience… and that’s good for business.
If you would like more information about how to ensure your website content is answering the right questions, please contact us or call 01223 550800, we can start with our free, no-obligation website audit.