Wix | SEO Webinar: Why Your Homepage SEO Matters

So let's get going. Welcome to your homepage. SEO matters. Your homepage is the most important page on your website. It's literally the core of your website. It gives so much power to your domain. Which is why I'm so excited that we're going to be talking about what works, what doesn't work. When thinking about SEO for your homepage, we're talking about mindsets and concepts and practical hands on tips to get your homepage up in the rankings. More traffic, more conversions, more revenue. All the great stuff we all want out of our homepage. My name is Morty Oberstein. I'm the head of SEO Branding here at wix and I'm joined by my homie, Crystal Carter, the head of communications here at wix. Hey, how's it going, Crystal?

Hi there. I'm great, I'm great. Are you at home today? I'm at home. I hope everyone's feeling at home. Me, Internet casa Sue. Internet casa. I don't, I don't know. But yeah, welcome to everyone and we're

going to see if we can't get that chat fired up. But, but yeah. Thank you all for joining us.

Super excited to talk about this.

This is something that I love implementing as an SEO and Morty and I

are both really passionate about this, but in slightly different, in slightly different ways. So Marty's very passionate about it from one angle and there's, there's, I've got a few, a few other things, which I obviously support everything Morty's saying. But yeah, between the two of us, we've got a lot of good perspectives on making sure your homepage is awesome.

You'll get like a real 360 degree perspective of your homepage, I think by the time you're done, which is amazing. So it's really nice that we have different ways of thinking about the homepage. Before we dive in, I have a little bit of a tease. Crystal and I are soon to be launching wix's own SEO podcast called SERPS up, which we launch in the next week or two. Keep an eye out for it on the WIX SEO Learning hub, which is Wix.com SEO learn. And of course, check out all the other great resources from the webinars like this one to blog posts and guides all about how you can get started doing SEO, as well as some really deep dives into what's happening in the SEO world. Now there's a ton of great content out there, so check out again the WIX SEO Learning Hub. Okay, quick note. About the format. So I'm going to present. I have my take on the homepage and Crystal has her take on the homepage. So after I'm done presenting, Crystal will share her outlook on the homepage and SEO. In the meantime, if you have questions, there's a Q and A feature in your Zoom panel. Definitely throw in questions relevant to the to your homepage and SEO, and we'll do our best after we're done presenting to go through as many questions we possibly can. Just know there are moderators as well who will try to answer some questions along the way, so we will try to get to as many questions as possible. There is no such thing as a stupid question, so please don't feel shy about asking questions. We love questions. Throw them into the Q and A feature inside of your Zoom panel. And I think with that, I think we're ready to go.

I think so.

I'm ready. Let's do Ready

to Talk About HomePages,

Part 1 mindset matters most when it comes to your homepage. So your site is an entity, and as an entity, it needs identity. And that's a. This is the underlying concept of what I'm going to be talking about as it pertains to your homepage. And you're all like, what? I will do my best now to explain all of this to you, so by the time you're done, it will make sense that your site is an entity and you need to give it identity through the homepage. So let's have at it. There is one ginormous mistake people make with their homepage. In fact, I once did a study, went through a thousand homepages, and the only goal that I had was do I understand what this site does by looking at their homepage. And I found that 70% of these sites, or 700 out of these 1000 sites, I had no clue what they did. Zero. None. To give you a really far out practical example of this, just saw him. Big sports nut. And the Pittsburgh Steelers recently renamed their stadium from Hines Field to Acrisure Stadium. One of the biggest sports podcasts in the US The Rich Eisen show, was talking about the renaming. He's like, I don't know what Acrisure is. And he did exactly what this company wanted him to do. They spent millions upon millions of dollars to get the naming rights for an entire stadium so a person like this could do this. He went to the homepage, he's oh, what do they do? This Aqua Shore. And he went to the homepage and he said, I have no idea what they do. They spent millions and millions and millions of dollars to rename their web, to rename the stadium in their name. And in the end, from this perspective, kind of pointless. I can't invest, I can't buy their. I can't do anything because I don't know what they do. So you're. This is the single most, you know, problematic thing the homepages face. I'll give you a really practical example of this. So this website has as their H1 looking to scale your technology to power your growth 10 miles square, solve the toughest issues in technology and accelerates digital transformation to succeed in a customer centric world. I have no idea what that means. I have absolutely no clue what they do. As opposed to my favorite WIX site. Well, not my favorite, one of my favorites. Oh, they're all my favorite Renegade Blitz, the Stealers blog. And their headline or their H1 is all the latest news, all the latest commentary, all things Steelers. I get it. They're a site that talks about news and analysis about the Pittsburgh Steelers. Really simple, really easy, really well done. If you take what happened here with these two sites and you zoom out a little bit, conceptually the problem here is a lack of identity. Well, not in this case. There's plenty of identity here. In this case there's a. I go backwards in my slides, by the way. It's a thing. There's a lack of identity. The problem facing the first website that I showed you was this. I just. There's no one has any idea what they do. Not just users, but also bots. Also Google has just no idea what that actually means. And it's obviously problematic from multiple points of view. In other words, identity. Having an identity is what it means to be an entity. Your site. Think of your website as a thing because that's how Google is thinking of it. It's a thing. And is this thing, is it relevant to the searches that people are doing? Well, which searches is it relevant for? When is it not relevant? When is it relevant? The way that Google understands if your site is relevant or not relevant is through identity. It's understanding what your site is all about. And therefore it understands that this thing, this entity, also known as your website, is or isn't relevant for certain topics and all sorts of things. This is fundamentally how Google is looking at things. Just trying to understand when it comes to your website, if you want to break it all down, what Google's trying to do is very much what a user is trying to do is Understand who you are, what you do and what your site is all about. In other words, this entity that is a site, what is this thing all about? So think of your site as an entity, as a living, breathing, distinct thing that needs identity and that identity is born through the homepage. Your homepage is like the agent of your website. It's the, it's the representative of your website, it's your website Senator or congressperson, I don't know how to put it better than that. Everything you do, that identity that you create on your homepage, it's creating identity for your entire domain. So when you think about creating your homepage, you have one job and that's to do what Aquasure didn't do, that's to create identity. It's to create a very distinct and very clear and understandable identity for your entire website that spills over to your entire website. And to that when you create that identity in your homepage, that should be your guiding light for all of the other pages on your website. So if your website sells widgets well, you shouldn't have product pages about sprockets. The identity that you created on your homepage should spill over to your product pages. If your, if you create identity on the homepage, you set up who you are, what the site, what this domain is all about, and that's X. Well then don't write about Y on your blog. And if you do write about Y, make sure you connect it back to X. Make sure you connect it back to the identity you created on your homepage because otherwise you're going to create a schism between what you've established for the domain via the homepage and all the other things you're doing on your pages. So let your homepage be your guiding light. Everything you do on your website should fit into the identity you establish on the homepage. Practically speaking, what does this mean? So I have a three step framework and some most of the time this works, sometimes it doesn't work and sometimes there's give and take. Crystal's going to show you some websites later where this may not be entirely applicable. But as a general framework for most websites out there, or at least conceptually speaking, I break it down the homepage to do three things. Say who you are, what problems you solve, what are the, you know, addressing the pain points of the user and then how you go about solving those problems. Let me give you some examples. So great website from Wix they they, they talk about we develop award winning music, sound design and licensing across all platforms I know in a single sentence was, by the way, you should do this in a single sentence. You should be able to do in a single sentence. I know from this one sentence this website creates sound assets. And that's super important to know that. It's important for users to know, obviously, and it's important for Google to know. And it's important that it's done really quickly. Just like that. Now, what problems do you solve? So Monday.com does an interesting job with this and they could have done a little bit of a better job is why I point. I wanted to use this example. So there. One of their H2s is stay on track, reach your goals faster. So what they did a good job was they realized, you know, users have like, what's the pain point of the user? Someone who wants to buy our product. What is their problem? And it's I, we have so many things to work on. I don't know how to manage all this and I'm getting off task and not being efficient with my work. So they said on their homepage, here's the problem we saw. We're speaking right to your pain points. Stay on track to reach your goals faster. What they might have done a little bit better in that age, too, is the particular goals, at least for the, you know, for Google, you stay on track with your business goals, that sort of thing, to sort of refine that identity. By the way, different conversation for a different time. They also, by the way, this is something you should think about doing on your homepage. They accent the H2, the header with a couple of lines in body text. What this does, obviously this speaks to users, which is what you primarily, primarily should be doing on your homepage and your website in general. But this contextualizes for Google the identity you're establishing initially in the homepage with who you are. Okay, who you are. Great. You give me one line, two lines about who you are and what you do. But talking about the problems that you solve gives Google more context to exactly what it is that the identity of this website is and what you do and at the same time speaks to users. So it's like having your cake and eating it, too. The next thing, how do you solve these problems? Okay, it's one thing to tell me the problems that I'm going to solve, but how do I actually solve them? By the way, and this is what's great about this framework is it speaks to users, it speaks to Google and it speaks to conversions. Because once you're saying, okay, here's Who I am. Here are the problems that I solve, and here's how I solve them. Well, now that I know how you solve them, I'm going to click, which is really what you want. You want them to dive deeper into your website. So you should really be thinking about your website from an SEO point of view or from a user point of view and from a conversion point of view. And those all kind of overlap. And they're really one thing in my mind now. So I'll take an example from Lyft. So by where I mark, number one, that's the age to write. Set your own business hours, earn your own terms. That's the. They're solving the problem there. Underneath that, they're telling you how they solve this problem. So they're saying to a driver's working, say, for a taxicab company, he wasn't any flexibility. Hey, you need flexibility. We understand your problem. Come to us. Okay, well, how do you solve this problem? Oh, get paid instantly. Cash out your earnings whenever you want. Okay, now I understand how you solve this problem. So again, it speaks to users, it helps with conversion. But all of this is giving Google context to who you are and what you do, so they understand what your domain is all about and they're able to rank you for relevant things. So let's go back to the idea of an entity and having identity. Because, yes, who you are, the problems you solve, how you solve those problems are all great, but there's a certain. You have to frame it a certain way. Your identity and who you are and the problems you solve and what you do lives sometimes in a larger context. And you have to frame that identity a little bit. And how you frame that identity as all things in SEO, it depends. And if you don't understand exactly what I'm talking about, I'm going to run through an example. Let's take a health site. So what this health site did is they did step two. They talked about the problems they solved before they talked about who they are. And that's fine. You can go out of order. You can play around with the framework. So for example, here they said, the right care when you need it most. Talk to a doctor, therapist or medical expert anywhere you are, by phone or video. So they talk to the pain point first and then better explain exactly who they are. But it's very clear. I understand exactly who they are. And the pain point is pretty clear. I wake up in the middle of the night, I've got a thing on my side. It hurts. I want to Call the doctor. I can't call Dr. Weinberg, it's 12 o' clock at night. I can call these people. So they're speaking to a pain point and clearly identifying exactly what they do right away. Top of the fold on the homepage. So now they're probably going to go through telling me exactly how their product works and how they solve my problems. Nope. What this website does is they talk. They show things like testimonials, awards that they've won reviews, they go through their doctors, how they're board certified, they're the top 5% of medical specialists in the whole world, and so forth. In other words, they're trying to build trust. Because if you're a medical website, yes, you need to tell me who you are, yes, you need to tell me the problems that you solve, yes, you need to tell me how you solve those problems. But if I can't trust you, all of that is meaningless. So for a health site, you have to frame that identity. That identity exists within a larger framework and a larger context. Context, which is trustworthiness. So it's one thing to create that identity, establish who you are and what you do, but you have to think about the larger context that your site lives in and how to frame that identity. In the case of a health website, that's trustworthiness, which might not be important for a gossip site. Do I really care how trustworthy they are, or do I really care how exciting and novel the information is? Trustworthy, not my main concern, but I really care about what the Kardashians are doing. So how do you know how to frame that identity? I think it's pretty easy to figure out how to say who you are and what you do and the problems that you solve. But framing that identity and giving it some context, how exactly do I do that? I understand how I do it for a health site, but maybe I'm not a health site. If you're not sure, then you should go to the serp, go to Google. Literally what I did here, I typed in online doctor. I took the first website that ranked and I going to go back in my slides like I always do. Saw that they talk about their doctors and their awards, all this. I'm like, oh, they're framing their identity in terms of trustworthiness, which is evidently working. It makes logical sense. That's why what Google would want, it's what users want, it's what everybody wants. So to sum it up really quickly, the homepage, it's where you build identity for the entire domain. For people and for bots, meaning Google. Part of identity is how you frame it. So in the case of a health site through trustworthiness, it's going to be the same through anything like that, like a financial website, anything where trust is a major component, frame that identity and trust. But again, if you're not sure for your particular niche, look at what's going on in the Google search on the Google serp, on the results page, type in a query that's relevant to your niche. Look at the top ranking site, see how they're framing their identity. Don't just copy what they're doing. Think how you can do that differently and better. Don't advocate for copying. I think you should be unique and different in all cases. And again, your homepage is what guides the rest of your website. The identity you create, your homepage spills over to the other pages and it should sort of reign you in and, you know, keep you focused on what you should be focused on topically. Keep that identity aligned across product pages, blog pages, whatever you're doing, let the homepage be your guide. And that's all I got. So I'm going to hand it over to you, Crystal Carter.

Thank you so much, Morty. And I think that, you know, a

lot of the stuff that you're talking about there is applicable to most businesses. And I've definitely been working with clients

where I couldn't figure out what they did. We had somebody come to us and they're like, oh yeah, we'd like help with your SEO. And I look at them and I'm like, I don't understand, I don't know what you do. And the example of, Was it Aquasure?

Is that what you said?

Aquasure, Aquasure Accursure. Yeah, it's a tongue twister too. I don't, yeah, it's such a big

amount of money to spend for people that don't know, don't know what you're doing. Oh, somebody asked what does SERP mean? That means search engine results pages. Yes.

Thank you very much, Rihanna. Lovely.

Okay, so Morty's been talking about sort of some of the concepts behind, behind helping your homepage to perform. I'm going to talk about some of, some of the hands on things you can do on WIX and generally to, to implement some of that stuff. So he's talked about entities, he talked about lots of different things. I'm just going to share my screen. And I'm going to hit the. There we go.

So people don't have to see all My tabs. I've only got one tab open, I promise.

Lovely. Okay, so we're going to get into part two. So in this section I'm going to talk about homepage examples and some different types and some different tactics. So Morty went through, through a few, A few. And I'm going to go through a few more. I'm going to. I've got five homepage examples that are sort of standard types of homepages from sort of big, big brands. Then I've got a couple of brands that are from WIX examples to, to see how and why people make the homepage decision do. And then we'll go into how we can implement those and I'll give some, some practical examples of things you can do on WIX and that you can do generally on it for SEO. So, so first things first. The first one we're going to talk

about and these are names that I've given them. So the first one is the Funneler. And this is, this is my, my. These are my names.

So the Funneler is essentially. This is a website that's, that's, that's not really. This is a homepage that isn't really designed to be the destination. This is a, this is a homepage that essentially sends people off to other places. Virgin is a great of this because Virgin does so much stuff. So virgin.com their homepage essentially serves as a, as a vessel for sending and a funneler for sending people to Virgin Galactic and Virgin Phones and Virgin Holidays and Virgin. All of the various different things that they do. This one. So this one, this one is very interesting. So I've looked at a few different, few different ones. What was really interesting about Virgin in particular was that this one had the highest percentage of backlinks. This one has 81% of their backlinks to the website overall are going to the homepage, which I thought was very interesting. And the reason why, I think is because when you take this approach of a Funneler approach, which actually fits with their brand, more to Morty's point, is because Virgin is sort of an evergreen brand that applies itself to lots of things, people expect that they'll be doing lots of different things. So they know that if they go to virgin.com, they'll find whatever other Virgin thing that they were doing. So it's perfectly works well for them to have all of their backlinks go to that. And when we think about smaller businesses, this is a, this is an example from a WIX site which I say it's smaller business to be fair.

It's ranking for 2,000 keywords.

And they are, they are, they are funneling not to the different businesses within their business, but they're funneling people to their biggest products. So they know that they have a few, they have a few sort of Rockstar products and they don't want people to have to go through the website to find all of those things. They want people who've heard about their brand to be funneled directly to that, to that Rockstar product. So there's a few different tactics that you can use use for this. So for instance you can use so, so you can do pointing people to high value content using buttons, also using UX segmentation like big pictures or different, different color schemes or that sort of thing. And you can also think about content priority. So particularly in mobile you have sort of, you tend to have one column and so if you put the things

that are most important on the top

then that, then that can help as well and the other. And when you're thinking about optimizing, when you're fun, when you're creating these fun, these are really good places to add keywords and the links for these things are also really good place places to add keywords. And you can see that this is also playing out into, into the serp. So Google is understanding that this is a very important page for this website and they're adding it as an indented page on this, on the search engine

result page, the serp.

Additionally you're going to want to take those funnels and add them into, you know, your core funnels and add them into your, your page title and your meta description so that, so that when people are seeing, on the SERP and, and they see this bit, this is your page title, you can see that they know that planners are really important for them. So planners is here, Planners is also here and then they've got the planner here. So you can funnel people before they get to the page and also when they're on the page. Another one is the converter.

Again these are my terms. So a converter is essentially a do thingsy site.

This is a site where you're, where you're, where you're trying to make sure that people can do something. So that might be that they want to sign into something or register or buy or buy. So a lot of E commerce sites are very focused on making sure that people can buy whatever they need. Sometimes there's sites where they have like

a, there's a percentage difference Calculator that I use a lot. And that page is, you know, the

homepage there is like, we have a calculator. Here's the calculator. You don't have to look for it. It's right there. When I was looking at sites, this one was interesting because this one had the highest percentage of traffic going to the homepage. So this site had 21% of its traffic going to the homepage. And the reason why that, that works for them is because they know that they can, they can get their business goals achieved with this particular business. And it also aligns with their business because their business is a, it's the, it's an app. So people do things on the app. So if they can get to the homepage and they can do things, then that also works for them for other, small, for other businesses. You know, this, this works for lots of, lots of businesses. So this is a, this is a Wix site that's ranking, that's ranking locally for 600 keywords. And it is, it is a limousine service. And as soon as you go to the homepage, you can book the limousine. You don't have to find where, where the booking page is. The top of the page has the booking, the place where you can book the limousine and you can get your limousine booked in and straight and ready to go. So again, things like forms, things like a chatbot or a chat can also help with this. If you, if you have a site that's, if you have a site that you want to make more dynamic, that you want to want people to be able to be, have more function, to be able to do more things on the site, then maybe adding a chat might be a thing that might, might be an easy way to do that and also purchase points. So you're going to want to think about with regards to optimizations. The forms are great, but if you

don't put a header for the form,

then sometimes it won't perform as well for SEO. So for instance, if you have, if you have, like this one, for instance, is going like rental, rental car, like premium car rental in Hanoi. So that's the header for that form, which, which is below. And then also he's got a little summary of what that form is about. And that also has some keywords in there. And so you're going to want to support all of these sort of elements with, you know, keywords like buy, shop, book, that sort of thing. And you want to add that into your copy, into your meta descriptions, that sort of thing. And then I'VE also got a point that says there, it says use the

conversion points to link to deeper content.

And what I, what I mean by that is that in the summary, if somebody isn't quite ready to convert, add a little link that lets them know more as well. This could be a good line link and this can also help to sort of give, give people, like people who are still on the fence a little bit more detail before they jump right in. Next is the Informer, which is not

the 90s song, but is the London Stock Exchange. So London Stock Exchange the Informer.

Again, this is one that serves to get people information. Lots, lots of information very quickly. So London Stock Exchange is a great example because they literally have a stock ticker that tells people exactly what's going on. And this is something that I've seen on news websites for the latest stories. This is also something that you see for local news websites or local websites where they might have the weather report or ski resorts where they have the ski report or that sort of thing. But basically places where people are known for their knowledge and they're known for, known for giving up to date knowledge and they're putting out a lot of content. Of the sites that I surveyed, this one was really interesting because this one had the most internal links. This site has 378 internal links on the homepage. That's a lot of links. And this helps with a lot. This, this helps with indexing, which I'll get into, which I'll get into later. But with regards to, to smaller sites

who don't have big budgets, like, like, like the London Stock Exchange, if you're

looking to, to surface more content, which is essentially what all of these links are doing, then you can add in a few different elements. So this is a site called all the Food, which is based in Dublin. And it's a food website that ranks for 2,700 keywords, including salad, Dublin, which

I think is quite impressive.

So they post about four new posts a day on average. And they, and they are helping to surface all of this new content using a few different methods. So for instance, they are using blog feeds, they are adding strategic internal links to some of their best content on the homepage and also to content that leads to other content. They're also using headers for their information. So this week's Top Stories, that's a header that helps tell Google that this is new content and this is the feed underneath of it. And if you have a content, if you have a website that's got lots of Content that, like, for instance, job websites are a good one for this. Or new people who have lots of new products all the time. If you're posting lots of blogs and that sort of thing, then you're going to want to think about making sure that you're absolutely submitted with Google Search

Console and also with Bing. I'm a big fan of Bing. It literally takes one click if you're already on Google Search Funnel. So it's definitely worth doing.

Make sure you're making use of your RSS and also think about your link hierarchy and priority. So priority is like where it is on the page. When we talk about link hierarchy, make sure that you're linking to pages that have good links within them so that you're linking to that page that has more links within it. When you're thinking about hierarchy, the next one is the billboard. I'm always fascinated, I've always been fascinated by Zara's SEO. This looks like it's just a website with a big picture on it. But actually when I looked at this, this has 96 internal links on it. The other thing that's interesting is when I was looking through it, we, in our last webinar last month, we spoke with Marcus Tober from Semrush and he talked all about keyword intent. And there's lots of different types of intent. Most of the websites that I looked at today, the intent for most of the people going to the website was informational. They wanted to learn more information about the brand. The intent for this website was navigational. And that is because Zara is all around the world, they have lots and lots of different types of websites and they're using their homepage to. They're using their homepage to navigate. Help people navigate to Zara in French, you know, in Trinidad and Tobago, for instance. And so they're essentially helping people to go to a certain place. This is something that I would say is not. If this is your own, the only thing you have on homepage, use this very carefully. Unless you are a giant brand like

Zara, you can do something, you can do it sort of a little bit

of a mix and match, for instance. But I would say, I would say generally this is the sort of domain

of somebody who can afford to not have any words on their. On their homepage, but you can do

a little bit of a mix on this. So, for instance, this is the Potter Trail, which is a wix site.

They do Harry Potter tours in Edinburgh and I'd really love to go.

And they do the Billboard at the top of the page. So what they are doing is they're using this to focus. So they have that book here button and they're using it to focus there. They've got their menu, it's sort of blended in there. But they're looking for people to focus on the book here. Now if you are using the billboard, the billboard method, it's really important if you're using images that you've got those images marked up. It's also really important that you've got clean composition and that you've got, you know, any dropdown that you're maybe making use of drop down menus so that you still have a menu. Maybe if you're, if you're going for a minimalist design but, but that it's the menu. The menu is drop down. So again, think about structured data for your images, think about image attributes and think, you think about well linked drop down menus. So the next one we want to think about is the feeder.

Again, these are my names. So this is fandom.

Fandom is very interesting because fandom was actually the website with the least traffic to it. But that's kind of because fandom isn't quite a homepage. They fan for fandom. People create their own wikis of different, of different things. So somebody's really into Game of Thrones and they'll create a, you know, there'll be a Game of Thrones sort of subpage within, within fandom. But essentially their homepage acts as a directory. So they're directing people to lots of different, lots of wikis within the sort of fandom website hierarchy. And they're, and they're surfacing lots of different content under lots of different, lots of different ways. We've got a big search, search bar there and that's what they're doing. YouTube is a really good example of this. Apartment Therapy is another one. Newspapers do a lot of this and this is a question of. They're making sure that they're sending people to lots of different, lots of different parts of the site using lots of different methods including feeds, including categories, that sort of thing for this sort of thing. This is a brand called Evolve. They're using, they're using a mega menu to do, to do a very similar, similar thing. This again is another wix site. And if you're looking to, if you have a lot of content, a lot of on your, on your website, then thinking about how you can surface lots of that via the homepage is important. A mega menu actually can do a lot for you to this, to this point, as long as it makes sense. So make sure that you're thinking about surfacing content as it's created and that you're thinking very consciously about your internal linking.

Speaking of our webinars, we have another webinar next month about all about internal linking. So do, do tune in for that

and make sure that you've got good headers and keyword copy for, for your, for your feeds, your collections and all of that sort of stuff. Stuff. So to summarize, when we think about the five.

The five things and Morty's smiling at my name, so we've got the funneler,

the converter, the informer, the billboard and the feeder. And they all kinds of do. They all do different things. And you can use a sort of combination of a few things at a time. But generally this is the sort of top five types of homepages that I tend to be, tend to be interested in. So I'm going to go through, if I can just pause.

I know this is a lot of information and we're going to go through

when we should use some of some of these elements. So I built a little site all

about women in space because I love women in space. I'm a big fan that I have this sits next to my desk all the time. It's Sally Ride and Mae Jemison. Anyway, you might notice it on the website later on.

So this website is using a few, a combination of a few of some of those elements that we were talking about. So for instance, the sort of women in space and astronomy learn and shop, that's kind of a billboard sort of style there. But I've also used a few other elements. So for instance, I've got a little bit of the feeder thing and I've got lots and lots of different links to lots of it. And I've got a few different dropdowns from the menu. This site that I built only has about 36 pages, but there are 38 links on this page.

So we're making sure that everything's linked

across the homepage and then across the middle, I've got a little bit of a funneler sort of activity. So for instance, for my keyword research, I know that a lot of people are searching for, for terms like women in space, female astronomers, women in NASA, that sort of thing. So I've got content that's dedicated to that and it's filtered for that. So if people arrive on my website and they want to know about those few things, they don't have to look for it. It's right there. And I've made it really simple. And to what Mordy was talking about

with making sure that people know what they're looking at when they get to your site, I tried to make sure that that's very clear as well. So it's women in space. You can learn things, you can buy stuff. You know, we're really into women in space here.

Thanks. So think about your internal links and think about your menu when you're, think when you're putting together your content. And for the back end of this. So we talked about how your website is an entity. So Morty talks a lot about your website being an entity. And there's a few different ways that you can, that you can help, that help Google to understand that. So within wix we have lots of different tools and when this, this deck will be shared and all of these things link to information about different things

on wix and how you can find these things on wix. So just hang in there with me.

So this is, this is your social share. So this allows you to, you can see that I replicated what the, what the banner looked like from the homepage and added that into the og, the

open graph for the homepage.

You can also see that I've got those funnel information. So learn and shop in the page title. And they've also got, you know, check out our shop, learn more about biographies, et cetera in the meta description. And then when, and then when we have the page title, then we also have the site name, which I'll get into that in a moment. That also helps to Google to understand what, what all of these things are. And all of these things feed into to the homepage. Further down the homepage we get into like a little, a few other other elements. So this is more like this sort of informer elements like making sure we've got a feed there. So part here, this biographies area, this is a, this is a blog feed. So this is every time I make a new content, every time I make a new blog, it automatically goes on the homepage, which means that it gets crawled very quickly. So as soon as I make it, not only is it on the, on its blog page, but it's also on the homepage. And we said that Google, Google's visiting the homepage. Lots of people are visiting the homepage. And so it helps that content to get indexed, it helps it to get ranked. And if you have set it up as a feed using, you know, based on the different categories which are within Wix, then that helps you to, that helps you to make sure that that's automated and you don't even have remember it. And then I bought an image here and images, you can also use images image tags. I talked about the big banner image needing to have structured data, needing to have information about it. You can add image attributes to also add some of those keywords and make sort of those things.

And if people don't know Mae Jemison was the first black woman in space

and she was on Space Shuttle Endeavor. So I'm adding that information in there and Google will be able to understand that that is on the homepage for

my page about women in space and they can connect all of those, all

of that information and then moving down to the sort of converter elements further down the page. Now because my, my shop there, my thing that I made, our shop isn't the main, the main thing that we do, it's a little add on. So I put that further down the page. If my, if the main thing that I was doing was having a shop I'd have this much higher up the page. But because it's, it's not, it's like it's a nice to have not a, not a, not a sort of deal breaker thing. I put it further down the page and we've added in some of those elements where we have you visitor shop which is a cta buy books. That's another, that's another active word telling people that this is a, this is a section of the website where you can do things. And so I've added those in and there's other ways that you can add this in as well. You can add in a gallery and again you can do the similar thing with the feed. So for instance, if you have a lot of content or a lot of products that are changing over, you can make sure that those things are, that the new products are coming through first or seasonal products are coming through first. And that sort of thing can help with, with you as well. And then getting down further, we can also see that we have. And then I've done the filter thing again to some of the other content that I think is important but maybe isn't necessarily like the sort of the big, big ticket stuff. So I've got it, I've got a review section. I've got the Find find activities and we also have this, this area, the Name, address, phone number and the mega menu. Now the name, address, phone number is super important particularly for local businesses because it allows you to get at schema markup. So for instance, in our business info area within wix, again, this is a link to this. If you, once you fill that in, this gives you the opportunity to have a local business schema markup. And Morty was talking about being an entity. This is how you, this is one of the ways that you define yourself as an entity. Schema Markup helps Google to understand you as an entity and as part of the knowledge graph.

And so it's not just a conceptual thing. It is also, there's also a tangible way that you can, that you can

add this to your site. And then when you add your name, address, phone number on the footer of your website, this also helps as well. Now, if this all seems like a lot, don't worry because a lot of this stuff is covered in your WIX SEO check, SEO setup checklist.

And if you go through all of

those, all of those, those things, you'll notice that the first section is all about the homepage. And one of the reasons why the first section is all about your homepage is because when it says connect to Google Search Console Google and wix have it, have, have an integration and WIX will, will, will index your homepage on, on Google as soon as you connect to, to as soon as you connect via the setup checklist.

And I've done this and I was like, this isn't gonna, this isn't gonna be that great. But on my, on my personal site,

I did, I did this and I set up my site and I, I, before I connected it on the 2nd of 2nd of March, I was not,

it was not on, it was not on Google.

And then within two days it was absolutely on Google. I'm sorry, this is blurry because this

is my screenshot that I took in March and wasn't expecting to use it for a website or for a free presentation.

But yeah, because I did, because I did the internal linking all the way through. Even though it's just, just indexing my web, my homepage, it also pulled through a few more of my, few more of my pages as well. And I mean, four might not seem very much, but I only had 12

pages on the site overall. So that's pulling through, you know, a good, a good chunk of the website going through, through. So I think that's essentially my roundup I got a little bit over. I'm sorry, Morty, but if you want

to know more about this, I've got a sort of. This deck will be shared after. So will Morty's and as will the transcript and all the resources. And the deck includes a few more resources for things like header tags, which we talked about, meta description, search console, also link to the SEO guide.

And yeah, that's, that's my, my. That's me on homepages.

So much there. And there's so many different types of homepages that you really can, like, really have fun with it. I mean, stay, stay in the boundaries of what you're trying to do and don't lose focus. But you can really get creative with the homepage. Like, don't listen to the first part of the presentation, please. I'm not saying you shouldn't get creative with the homepage. Get creative with it 100%. There's some really cool stuff you can do there.

Yeah, I think, absolutely. And I think, like, I think really think about it from your user's perspective. I think that's so important. And think about what are the questions that people always ask you? And if somebody comes to your website and they go, I don't understand what you do. Listen to them.

Listen to them. If they come to your. They come to your homepage and they, and they say. And they, they say, yeah, and they can't.

And they, and they still don't understand, or they're still asking you certain questions. You know, add an faq. You know, if you're, if people, if people can't find, you know, a certain part of the website, but they always ask, add that to the website as well. That can help your customer service team. That can help, you know, reduce calls. Lots, lots of different things. So.

And I think what was interesting is I remember I saw your deck, and when I was going through. I was going through my page because I built this, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna make a little homepage for this project. And I saw your deck, and I was like, I could probably do better with that.

I'm flatter. So, speaking of questions, there's an abundance of questions, really good questions. We're trying to get to as many as we possibly can in the next 19 minutes, by the way. And I apologize, I remiss. I should have mentioned this earlier. We are recording this. You will get the recording automatically through email. So do not worry. You'll get the slides, you'll get the recording, you'll get the links for all the ancillary information that we spoke about is coming right at you directly through email. I apologize for not mentioning that at the beginning of the webinar. Okay, are we ready? Crystal yeah. All right. Is there any rule or just a good SEO practice to add, and there's a few questions around this, to add menu items on the footer too, meaning add links to the footer to your homepage.

Yeah, absolutely. Add menu links to your footer. I absolutely think you should add menu links to the footer. You should certainly have a T's and C's bar. That's really good for users. It's also really good for Google. So I've had a client before where they didn't have like their shipping and returns and like privacy and all that sort of stuff. They didn't have it on the footer. And we added it to the footer and we saw boost straight away. It. It's a trust signal.

So when you added internal links, and there have been a bunch of questions around internal links, what we mean by internal link, by the way, is you're linking to another page on your website. So you're linking, say on your homepage to your about page or you're linking to whatever product page or a blog post, whatever it may be. So when you, for example, link in a blog post to your homepage, that link to the homepage that you add is called an internal link. And they're very important for SEO. One is they help Google understand what's on your website. Also, when Google crawls and comes to your website, they come to your homepage and you set it up through the SEO setup checklist in the, in the, in the, in the WIX dashboard. And Google instantly indexes your homepage. Once they're there and they see the other links on your page, they go, there's a bunch of other links. So Google finds pages from links on a page. So most definitely it just bouncing along. So most definitely I do it. All my sites include the links in the footer. Absolutely do that. It also helps give the user a general sense of, oh, here's everything that's on the website. So it's good for users and good for bots, which is the philosophy of all things SEO. Good for users, good for bots.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think the footer is a really good place to put like, unsexy links, links that, things that are, that are you. That, you know, everybody's going to. But like, maybe they're not. Like, maybe they're not. They don't like, fit in a lovely, lovely place in the menu. So that's what.

Yeah, those, those, you know, the on man out kind of thing. Good for the footer. Nicole Holst Asks I am a copywriter and usually write 600, 800 words for a homepage for clients for SEO, which is what I have learned is recommended. But they often think it is too long. How do you Balance Keyword Optimization vs. Length? Which is a great question.

So, so you're more the content bot. But in my, in my general experience

like the length of the, the length of the, of the, the copy on the homepage doesn't necessarily matter. The quality of the copy on the homepage does matter. And I would also say that the headers on the homepage are also really, really important. So you know, H1s, H2s, H3s, H4s. You know, get in there and make sure that you, make sure that you're breaking things down so that Google can sort of skim read what you do and so that you're, you're adding that value to it. Not just from a, not just from a, you know, a word count point of view, but from a sort of an information point of view.

I couldn't agree with you possibly anymore, a million percent. You know my, my SEO advice of all SEO advice is don't worry about SEO, which I know sounds counterintuitive, but worry about your users. So if you're from a content perspective, I'm talking about if you're writing content for SEO and there are a bunch of questions about keywords, how many keywords do I need to work? I put don't, don't worry about it. Right. Naturally for the user, think about the user, what are their pain points? Really empathize with the user and understand what they need, their life context and build a page for them. So if you're thinking about your homepage, what information do does your user need? How much of it do they need to have on the homepage for them to be satisfied and understand. And keep in mind the purpose of the homepage is to understand who you are and what you you do. How much do they need and do that. And I'll give you an exam a way of thinking about Google outside of the homepage. But in general, I'll quote my, my cousin used to be the head of SEO at SurveyMonkey and he used to live in, in Palo Alto and the Google used to test I wonder if they still do their self driving cars and he said that the car was able to detect whether or not a person ran out or a squirrel. If, if Google can understand whether or not this thing that ran out in front of their self driving car is a person or a Squirrel. They can understand what you're writing on your page, assuming that you're writing it in a comprehensive, natural way. In other words, don't worry about keywords, worry about writing naturally to your users. Because what other words are you going to use other than the words that really describe what you're trying to say?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think somebody asked them, what are H ones, H2s, H3s, H4s? So an H2 is a header tag. There's a link in my deck about

what header tags are. It's on our WIX SEO hub. So there's a whole blog all about it.

H1 is like, H1 is like a headline. So it's like so, so, so if you were to go like food, fruit,

oranges, clementines, like orange wedges, like that

sort of thing sort of, as you get further down, it's sort of, it's sort of, it's sort of narrowing, narrowing

into, to the, to the sort of

subsections of what it is. And, and if you have, let's say

if you have a website that is selling fruit, then you're going to want to break those down.

So you might say like, you know, we have food, we have fruit, we have apples, we have oranges, we have bananas, like, and you want to break. And you know, we have it for delivery for that sort of thing. So, so think about it that way. So how you parse the information because that's how Google's thinking about it.

And somebody also asked about how to use it on wix.

And within the thing, there's a thing that says paragraph. You click on that and then there you see the dropdown for the editor

right there in the blog there's a drop down menu for headers. The way I think about it, I think about a brook report. I'm an old teacher. So think about a book report you wrote when you were, I don't know, eighth grade, ninth grade, whatever it is, right? Book reports in ninth grade. Probably not. You have the, the, the title, you know, My summary of, you know, Of Mice and Men by Morty oberson. That's your H1, right. Then you have, you know, plot, that's your H2 and you have character. That's another H2. Then you have a little header for each character, like the mouse, Lenny. Right. That would be an H3 that exists within, in the larger paragraph of characters. So that's how I think about headers. I don't know if that makes it any clearer or not.

Yeah, no, it's good it's good. Let's keep going.

What's more questions?

Okay. David Hick asked, how do I display my resume experience on my homepage or focus on giving what the customer wants to buy? So, and there's been a few questions about this. How do I, how do I include information about what, who I am or doesn't it sound like I'm at. I should be putting my about page on my home page. So we can ask the question, what's the difference between a homepage and about page page. Those sort of questions. Let's answer it.

Yeah, so I would say, so as I said, within the thing, you can have, you can have a headline that's like, you know, Morty Overstein, book reviewer.

And you can sort of have, you

know, one or two lines like, Morty Overstein it. Like, you know, like, like your elevator pitch. Like what would go on your business card, for instance? Like, I reviewed so many books. I know all the books. Books are great, you know, and, and everybody, you know, everybody thinks I know lots and lots of things about that book's link.

Like, yeah, so, so you, so you

have your headline for what that is, and then you have a link to your about page that goes into like all of the details with all of the stuff about who, about who you are.

Unless you have a one pager, in which case, fine, just go for it.

But if you have, but if you have a wider site, then absolutely have a little summary, like a little taster, get people interested so that they want to know more and then have it link up to the big stuff but also have the, you know, it's basically a tld are on your homepage. It's really good to have yourself on your homepage, though, because with the schema markup stuff, you can add that into the, into your schema markup about, about your homepage on your homepage.

So Leah asked, I love this question. How do you manage 83 different internal stakeholders who all want their part of the business to be mentioned on the homepage and the homepage rank for their own terms. Such a great question.

Yeah.

Do you want to do, to start with that one there, Morty?

Okay, look, obviously you're dealing with a larger team. Everybody has their own, their own claim on the website and their own, I guess, agenda, for lack of a better word. So what you kind of wanted. My, my general experience is you kind of want to show how your agenda makes their agenda better. For example, if you're telling, look, you want to have your, your part of the business on the homepage and your part obviously is too much. The homepage won't rank if the whole page doesn't rank, pretty much nothing else on the website's probably going to rank either. So no one will see all the things that you're doing. So the very thing you are trying to do, which is getting more visibility to show how awesome you are, which is by the Westbee team players, but leaving that aside, you're not going to get that visibility because if we do what you want to do, you're advocating for on the homepage, we won't rank and no one will see anything. What we should do is let's bring in someone who knows a little bit about CRO conversion rate optimization. Oh your little aspect of the business. How can we work in maybe a CTA or a link in the footer and get clicks to there. So once we get the homepage ranking we'll funnel them into your little section of the business. So you'll get that visibility and everybody will love you.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

That's a great answer.

Great. I feel I have to bring up this question. So Saskia Jones asks how do I solve the issue of low text to HTML ratio on homepage pages? Since it's a home page it's not going to have much content.

So I've seen a few people in the chat saying that they are doing, doing a lot of photography and stuff and I think that, I think that with this like schema markup is your friend.

Absolutely.

So for instance, and, and that all those image attributes for your, for your images and you know they're, they're your friends if you can afford. Oh and also, and also a dropdown menu. So, so if you have a, if you have a drop down menu like make sure that you've got your drop down menu has all of the sort of, of important links through it and that your homepage isn't just the thing. So essentially when you're saying a low text to, you're probably have like you know the billboard style menu that we were saying. And, and if you look at the Czar example which seemed quite extreme, they, they had tons of links on there,

they had tons and tons of links on that page but it was one big old picture.

So so I think think about your menu and also use all the image attributes that you have. And with schema markup you can do a lot of, for your homepage. So you can do, you can get into the, who the publisher is. So for instance you're, let's say you're

a photographer and Morty Oberstein is both a, both a book reviewer and a photographer. So, so he's an amazing wedding photographer. He's very busy.

And so you can say, like, you know, this is a website. Website that was made by Marty and he is the photographer and he studied here and he's an alumni of this and he, he is this, and he's, in fact, and, you know, same as this, this social feed and that social feed and that social feed, you can add all of that schema markup into there, and that's totally fine on your homepage.