The role of the home page

You may be forgiven for thinking that optimizing our most competitive keyword on the home page would lead to the best results. However, when we take into account the relevance of our home page, does it really match our keyword? The answer is usually that it doesn't.

In most cases, the home page should be used exclusively as a platform for building our brand identity. Our brand identity is the face of our business and is how customers will remember us long after they've purchased our goods and exited our website.

Note

In rare cases, we could optimize keywords on our home page that directly match our brand; for example, if our company name is "Wooden Furniture Co.", it might be acceptable to optimize for "Wooden Furniture" on our home page. It would also be acceptable if we were selling a single item on a single-page e-commerce website.

In a typical Magento store, we would hope to see the following keyword distribution pattern:

The role of the home page

The buying intention of our visitors will almost certainly differ between each of these types of pages. Typically, a user entering our website via a broad phrase will have less of an intention to buy our products than a visitor entering our website through a more specific, product-related search term.