SEO downsides to minimalist (copy-light) homepage?

[PerfectPitchConcepts]

Curious for your thoughts on this - are there any SEO downsides to not having any substantive content on the home page (big background design)? We would obviously have appropriate page titles and link structure, etc.

Our guess is that if the home page doesn't have much copy, that odds are that other specific pages will tend to perform better for non-brand search terms, which seems OK.  If people DO find the homepage, it would likely be a brand search or an ad referral, in which case the minimalist, non-copy design would be conversion-friendly. Does that theory hold any water?

I suppose a middle ground might be a single H1 line unobtrusively on the page.

Thanks in advance for any insight, guys!

Sincerely,

Stephen

[ontarget-media]

Hi,

There isn't a lot negative about a minimalist homepage other than you missing out on an opportunity to attract more organic search traffic.  There are lots of companies that seem to be adopting a minimalist home page look these days --- but personally, I am all in favour of more content than less on the home page. EGOL has listed reasons why you'd do better with more content and I agree with him.

[EGOL]

let's say you have a site loaded with pages with 2k+ word articles.

This describes my  site.

Would a lightly-populated index page (less LA Times, more Big Background) have a negative impact, beyond the obvious missed opportunity for having that page have more content as well?

If I reduced my homepage to minimalist content I would miss at minimum, 50,000 visitors per month.  The diverse words on that homepage pull in nearly 1/2 of its traffic and they also enable it to rank better in many SERP.

This homepage also holds lots of #2 rankings, where one of my article pages holds #1.  That occurs because the homepage is made relevant by the diverse words.

We can assume the minimalist index page would have appropriate page optimization, including some content (just not lots).

To me this means that you will get "some" traffic rather than "lots".

Many websites have more search traffic entering through their homepage than any other page on the site.  And it is usually the strongest page to use in battle for difficult keywords.

We seem to be from different perspectives.  I sense that you are married to a visual effect... and I am married to using my homepage as a traffic-pulling machine.

There are design features that allow a page to contain a lot of spiderable text that is revealed with a click and pages that rotate visible content one cell at a time but hold lots of total text.  Perhaps one of those would be a way for you to have both.

[MarieHaynes]

I have a story as well about something that happened to me today and it is relevant to your question.  We have a real estate site and today we started getting hits for "top realtor in [city]".  I was trying to figure out why because we haven't optimized for this at all.

Well, it turns out that I recently wrote a silly blog post called "Top 5 videos about....", and I also had a post on our site called "Top 10 neighborhoods in [city]".  The fact that the keyword "top" and the keyword "realtors" and the keyword "[city]" were on our site actually makes us rank on the first page for "top realtors in [city]".

The more content you have on your site the better!  As a result of this discovery today I actually rewrote our home page to include more keyword phrases that I want to rank for.  (You have to be careful to write for readers and not just search engines though.)

[PerfectPitchConcepts]

Craig,

Thank you for your response. I do get a lot of use out of the Optimization Tool, it's very helpful. As I noted in my above reply, I'm curious is a light index page can have a negative impact on a content-rich site, other than the obvious missed search opportunities that might come from additional content on the homepage.

[PerfectPitchConcepts]

EGOL,

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I think we can all agree that investing in more quality content can help generate additional traffic/conversion opportunities. I'm curious though if that effort overall is hampered by a minimalist index page.

To use your story as an helpful example-  let's say you have a site loaded with pages with 2k+ word articles. Would a lightly-populated index page (less LA Times, more Big Background) have a negative impact, beyond the obvious missed opportunity for having that page have more content as well? We can assume the minimalist index page would have appropriate page optimization, including some content (just not lots).

Best,

Stephen

[EGOL]

are there any SEO downsides to not having any substantive content on the home page

These are not thoughts.  They are facts.  If you have a homepage with just a few words you will get a certain level of traffic.  However, for almost every relevant word that you add to the page you will probably get more traffic as those new words combine with existing words to create many more combinations of new queries for which you are relevant.

Here is a short story....

We had a lot of pages that had one sentence descriptions of photos.  They got a little traffic.  When we increased the text content on those pages to a couple hundred words the rankings increased and the traffic went up by 10x.... When we upgraded those pages to 2000 word articles with several photos the rankings went up again and the number of visitors went up significantly - some to thousands of visitors per month.  Now some of these pages get more visitors in ten minutes than the one-sentence pages received in a day.

Our guess is that if the home page doesn't have much copy, that odds are that other specific pages will tend to perform better for non-brand search terms, which seems OK.

I think that your guessing is harmful to your wallet

If people DO find the homepage, it would likely be a brand search or an ad referral, in which case the minimalist, non-copy design would be conversion-friendly. Does that theory hold any water?

Most of the visitors who enter my site by the homepage are coming from queries that have nothing to do with my brand.  My homepage looks closer to the LA Times than to what you are describing.  I want my visitors to say DAMN!  Look at all of this stuff!

The retail sites where I have this convert really well.  I would be very hesitant to use your proposed homepage unless I was selling just one item on that website.

[craigyboy]

Hi Stephen,

If I were you I would run the page through SEOmoz On Page Optimization Tool, I used this and transformed my page from an F to an A in about 20 mins. That said and judging by what you are saying, It doesnt appear to be key to your campaign that the homepage is the most visible from an SEO poiint of view.

However running through ther optimzation Tool you will find that you dont need to be stuffing your page with thousands of keyword's in order for it to look appealing to search engines, a couple of key phrases subtley faded into the design of the document will suffice, if your using images be sure to use any desired keyword in the Alt atributes, you also have as you said, your title, H1 and there is your Meta Descrip. Possibly use bold for your H1 but reduce the opacity considerably so as help merge with your page design and not be obtrusive but also gives your page some SEO Kudos so to speak.

Dont use the Meta Keywords Tag, possibly also add the prime keyword in your URL for that page but try and keep it short and relevent and the same as your H1, if it is more than one word then separate it with hyphens.

There is quite a lot you can achieve with minimal content on this page as long as you ensure that everything else you do is done correctly, I am redesigning our site at the moment and a minimal homepage is my kinda trip also.

Anyway hope this helps but do have a look at the Tool, it will provide excellent guidance, not just for this page but all pages within your site.

Kind Regards,

Craig