SEO is one of the top ways to get your business to get traffic organically, without having to pay for ads. There is a common misconception, however, is that getting your home page to the top of Google should be your highest priority. While you should determine a keyword to target for your homepage and optimize it as much as possible, stressing over it and continuing to tweak it without worrying about other goals will not help you to continue to rank.
The Limitations of Homepage Ranking
Your homepage is meant to be a landing page to your website and might have a lot of information on it. You might offer multiple services that are all on your homepage. Although you can and should optimize your homepage for a specific keyword, often times the keyword you want such as “Chicago Wedding Photographer” or “Tech Virtual Assistant” are very competitive and can be hard to rank for.
This is why it is important to focus on building a strategy for other pages on your site. Many of your target market is searching for other related things that are easier to keyword target. By focusing on those smaller keywords you can get more traffic to your site, thus helping your main keyword to rank higher.
Diversifying Your SEO Strategy
Once you have taken the steps to optimize your homepage, focusing on creating relevant content via a blog can be a great way to start building more authority for your homepage. Google prioritizes websites that have newer content continuing to come out, and so committing to writing a blog regularly can help to drive traffic to your site.
It is important to do keyword research for each blog post and optimize them so that they can attract more traffic to your website. The more traffic you can direct to your website through those blog posts, (and the longer those people stay on your website) the higher Google will prioritize all your other content on your website, including your homepage.
What Is a Good Goal?
Instead of just focusing on your homepage, it is better to come up with some other goals after you have optimized your home page as much as possible. Here are some other tangible goals that you could set for yourself:
1. Write ___ SEO Optimized Blog Posts Per Month.
This goal obviously can be tailored to what works best for you. Maybe you do two posts, maybe you can do four. But committing to being consistent with this will help build your rankings and allow you to grow higher in the search results for all your pages.
2. Reduce Bounce Rate: Decrease the website’s overall bounce rate by 10% within three months by improving page load times, optimizing images for web, enhancing content relevance, and optimizing internal linking. Run a site speed test through GT Metrix to identify any other things that might be slowing your site down.
3. Improve Keyword Rankings: Research SEO Keywords and aim to move five target keywords onto the first page of search results within three months.
4. Optimize for Local SEO: Increase the number of Google My Business (GMB) listing views by 30% and the number of calls or direction requests by 20% within the next four months.
Pick a goal that is obtainable to you and will help your overall goal of more visibility and visits to your website.
