Homepage Optimisation Checklist

You may rank your homepage for all the different keyword phrases, but you need to consider whether this is the best strategy. Targeted landing pages tend to be better at this sort of thing. It’s probably best to think of your homepage as a demonstration of who you are and what you have to offer. You can use your website as a launching pad for all these conversions. Plus, a great website helps build and strengthen your brand! Take a look at this optimisation checklist

What is Home Page Optimisation?

Everyone knows what a homepage is, but we often find it helpful to think about multiple homepages. You can serve as a home for different target groups, e.g. commercial buildings and consumer buildings if you offer products and services for both.

One of the most annoying things a website owner can do is write “Welcome to our website”. When we greet our visitors, we want to let them know what they can find on your website. What is your main product or service? What can be found on the website about your product and the company itself? And most importantly: What is the main benefit (USP; Unique Selling Point) for visitors?

If you do a quick search online, you will find that many sites struggle to resolve this issue. But it’s not always easy to explain precisely what your business provides customers. You often see business training websites that say, “I’ll help you grow!” This is not a great introduction or slogan because it says absolutely nothing about its goals.

It must hence be ensured that your introductory content relates to the main benefits you offer visitors.

What is the home page optimisation checklist?

SEO is an in-depth strategy that may seem overkill, but it doesn’t have to be! With our website optimisation checklist, you can go through every step of the SEO process to ensure you have a well-optimised website! Read on to find out what to include on your SEO to-do list! Before we get into the essence of SEO, there are a few things you should pay attention to first.

Configure Google Analytics

One of the first things to make sure of is setting up your Google Analytics account. Google Analytics is a free and valuable tool that gives you an idea of ??the effectiveness of your website. This tool lets you track essential website metrics that determine your website’s performance in search results. You can visit Google’s marketing website to sign up for a free account. You can then follow the steps on their website to create your account and link your business website.

Configure Google Search Console

Once you have Google Analytics set up, the next thing you should do is review your website optimisation checklist to set up Google Search Console. Google Search Console gives you the tools to understand your search traffic and show your content in search results. This tool is invaluable in helping you optimise your website for search engines and identify issues that might prevent you from ranking in search results.

Install SEO plugin (WordPress users only)

If you have a WordPress website, you should install an SEO plugin to make your site’s SEO more user-friendly. The most popular SEO plugin is Yoast SEO, and you can find it in the WordPress Store and download it for your WordPress site. This plugin helps you optimise your SEO pages before publishing them.

Identify your competitors

Next on our SEO checklist is identifying your competitors. Your competition may differ depending on the search results you are targeting, but you should have a general idea of ??who you are fighting against in the search results the most. Let’s take this cake recipe search as an example.

If you search for “apple pie recipes,” you’ll see results from sites like All Recipes, Home Flavors, and Simple Recipes. So, based on this information, you can assume that these three websites are competing for your business. To do the same for your business, you can search for topics related to your business and see who ranks in those search results. If you have physical competitors in your geographic area, you can add them to your competitor list.

More things to keep in mind while home page optimisation

Optimising your website involves several steps. This isn’t just a technical SEO issue, but as we’ll see below, other elements must be present to have a highly optimised homepage. Remember that SEO isn’t just for search engines. It’s primarily for users and ease of use. From an SEO perspective, homepage optimisation is no different from SEO on other website pages.

Optimise homepage title

Don’t just use your company or website name as your home page title. Try to be more creative by giving users and search engines more information about what your website focuses on. Use all 60 characters at your disposal to combine keywords and business information in one sentence.

SEO Rules for Homepage Titles:

• Keep titles up to 60 characters long.
• Don’t just use your brand name. Add keywords that represent your business or website.
• Make sure your target keyword is at the beginning of the title.
• Don’t confuse Google by adding too many keywords to the title. Add the keywords you want to be known for.
• Without filling in keywords, for example, don’t do “Digital Marketing | Search Engine Optimisation | Social media links” instead “Low-Cost Digital Marketing Services by [your site name].”
• Add your domain or company name at the beginning of the title.

Optimise meta description on home page

The description on the homepage is also fundamental. As mentioned above, the report is what users will see in the SERP, so you should think about it.

Optimise H1 tag

Next, the H1 tag needs to be optimised. Every page on your website (including the home page) must have one (and only one) H1 tag. The H1 tag is usually at the top of the page, and most themes are configured to display the page title wrapped in an H1 tag. If you have the option of assigning an H1 label to your homepage, be sure to include some related keywords.

How to check the H1 tag on your homepage:-

• Open your home page in a browser, right-click anywhere on the page and select VIEW SOURCE.
• Press CTRL-F (to search for a phrase) and search for “h1”.
• Usually, you only need to see the opening <h1> and the closing </h1>.
• If you find that your HTML contains more than one active set, you can hire a developer to remove them and leave only one.

SEO for homepage images

A good website should have images, and they make pages less tedious and the message you want to convey to your readers clearer. In terms of SEO, images can be used to provide other signals to search engines that are crawling your content.

When using images for your homepage, keep the following in mind:

• Provide ALT text describing the image
• Include keywords naturally in your ALT text
• Try separating the image portion from the text if the image contains the text. Search engines cannot read the embedded text in JPG or PNG format.
• For maximum SEO, save images without text and add text with CSS and HTML.

Optimise your logo

Every website must have a unique logo. What you can do to optimise your logo is two simple things: Make sure the image file name includes the name of your website. The ALT text also consists of the name of your site. Add proper markup to structured data. Structured data has become increasingly important in recent years, and while it is not yet part of Google’s ranking algorithm, it will soon be included.

What is Structured Data Labeling?

Simply put, structured data is a way to describe your data to search engines. All major search engines have agreed upon a standard structure for representing various forms of data (i.e. articles, products, organisations, companies, events, etc.). Your job as a webmaster is to add the necessary “tags” to your HTML code.

Google may use structured data in the SERPS (in the form of rich snippets or knowledge graph entries), and this makes your data set more user-friendly, which means a higher CTR (click-through rate). When it comes to homepage structured data, you should make sure that you define the following schema:

• Organisation (if you are an online business)
• Local Business (if you have a physical presence, such as a shop)
• People (if you run a personal blog).

SEO for content

Homepage must-have content and textual content that search engines can read and understand. In general, the home page can have three options:

• In the case of a company website, this contains company details, images (perhaps a slideshow), and links to internal pages of the website.
• For e-commerce stores, the homepage can show the latest products, offers, breaking news, and links to various product sections.
• In the case of a portal or blog, the homepage usually displays the latest blog posts and submitted articles.

Regardless of the style of the website you have, it is imperative to ensure that page contains enough text. Avoid having just an image or video with no text. Make sure your content includes your target keywords or variations.

Your home page should clearly show what people can find on your site. It would help if you focused on your unique selling proposition. And it should direct your visitors to your most important pages. Maybe you can focus on those things and still optimise your homepage for specific keywords.

Team EMB

Our team of expert writers is committed to bringing insights on topics ranging in the fields of technology, marketing, and business. With a wide-reaching range of services on our platform, we help businesses achieve digital transformation end-to-end.