While every part of your website is important, your home page stands out above the rest. After all, your home page is a lot like the physical storefront of a brick and mortar retailer. It’s what gives the first impression of your business — and not just to prospective customers.
As it turns out, your home page can be one of the biggest factors in how you rank with Google and other search engines.
How Google Views Home Pages
In a recent podcast episode of Search Off the Record, Gary Illyes of Google, while describing debugging technical SEO issues on a website, explained: “From Google’s perspective, the homepage is the most important page on the site. , and homepage is a little vague here, because it can be the page wherever users are landing on when they enter your domain name or host name. Like, if www.example.com redirects to www.example.com/foo/bar, then that will be your homepage. Check that because we, as in Google, will try very hard to index that or crawl and index that. If that’s not indexed, then you probably have some problems.”
So, from a technical standpoint, whatever page serves as your homepage is viewed as the most important part of the website. Subsequently, the importance of other pages on your website are often judged based on how closely linked they are to the home page.
It would make sense that Google would view the home page as the strongest or most important part of a website, because it’s the first page audiences visit. It’s also generally the first page that Google crawls for ranking and analysis. If technical or content aspects aren’t up to par, you won’t rank where you’d like to be.
Making Your Home Page Useful For Customers (and Google)
By carefully evaluating your home page based on its content and design, you can get a pretty good idea of whether it does a good job of providing useful information to your customers. If your home page has an attractive design and contains a lot of relevant information, it will make it that much easier for customers to find what they’re looking for — and when that happens, Google will notice, too.
Quality content and an easy to navigate layout ensure that audiences spend more time on your home page and engage with the other links on it — activities that send a clear message to Google regarding its quality.
Of course, you should also be mindful of the technical SEO aspects that can affect your home page. Ensuring that the page is properly indexed and that features like meta data are properly implemented will help you rank higher so more potential customers can see your website in their search results.
Win With a Great Home Page
No matter what kind of business you run, you can’t underestimate the value of a high-quality home page. By giving your home page’s design, content, and technical aspects the care and attention they deserve, you can win with both customers and Google to turn your website into a true strength for your business.
