Large block of several thousand words on homepage of Ecommerce site - opinions?

[Kinsel]

I work for a local SEO company who are continually adding content to the home page of clients websites. While i do agree that it is a good idea to add content to the home page and to link to inner pages, the home page of several clients exceeds 6,000 or more words.

Every month, an article based on a brand or category (which already has its own page which is optimised with an article) is added to the home page with links to inner pages. I have stressed that it is not a good idea to have so much content on the home page, and even more so that it shouldn't target all the same keywords.

I have pointed out that many of the brand and category pages do not rank well for their keywords, whereas in most cases it is the home page which is ranking instead, which i have suggested this is because the home page is too well optimised for those keywords.

What are your opinions on this? Are you for or against continually adding content (which already has its own designated page) to the home page of an Ecommerce website?

I should also add that this content is within a drop down div box at the footer on some sites and just above the footer on other sites. The category and brand pages also have drop down divs with an article just below the header.

[Nobody1560986989723]

Ugh. Not good. In my humble opinion people aren't going to scroll down to read that much content - so that's bad from a user experience point of view. So here's some pointers

1. Keep the Home Page Fresh - if they're in the position of being able to regularly add content, then keep the home page fresh, maybe with the latest post and then snippets to the preview 2 or 3 for people who may be interested. Or have an intro page as the home page with a 'latest articles' box that's prominent.

2. Move the other articles to their own page - this means you're growing the site, can better interlink between posts, can optimise each for carefully selected keywords and makes each one individually shareable by social media.

3. Link Build to relevant articles or categories - much more achievable when that content is not on the home page.

The drop-down DIVs are only helpful for users - Google will be seeing 6000 words of text, which is OTT. That content needs moving, so that unique pages of content are created and can be separately promoted.

Hope this helps - a website restructure sounds like it's in order.

[Kinsel]

Thank you Martin,

The websites are Ecommerce stores so the focus isn't on articles, but the articles are there on each category / brand page in order for search engines to relate the pages to a few keywords, so there's isn't exactly a 'latest posts' or similar feature we can make use of.

All of the pages on the site already have content, but I agree that interlinking between the pages is a good idea, although it's not very scalable as the main focus is on brand pages (so the majority of content for brands will not mention other brand names, thus having nowhere to interlink these).

[Nobody1560986989723]

Can you create a 'lower level' pages for each 'article' (and then manually edit the home page for 'latest' bits) or is the system quite restrictive - e.g. unless you add a new product or brand, you can't add a page?

[Kinsel]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'lower level' pages, but we are able to edit the home page to add a small piece of text such as 'latest products'/'latest brands' etc.

We can add extra pages of content (that aren't product or brand pages) but don't as the company i work for feels that adding a blog or article section will bring in non-converting traffic from search engines, thus the only non-product oriented pages are the basics such as 'contact us', 'about us', 'shopping cart' etc.

[Nobody1560986989723]

Right okay. Well then I'd suggest you move each of the blocks from the home page to a new page.

Then look at the calls to action on the new pages to encourage click-throughs to products. Or look at adding links/photos to products that relate to the topic being discussed. Anything you write on the site should be a standalone piece of content, but would presumably, in one form or other, relate to what's being sold on the site. That being the case, the traffic coming to the articles will be people interested in the type of things being sold, so you should be able to encourage the click-through to products.

Yes, you will get some non-converting traffic, but by putting each one on a separate page and working on the SEO of each, you can broaden your scope for MORE traffic, which you can then encourage to buy.

The home page is not the place for everything and will be restricting what you can achieve in traffic terms.