Home page with no content

[bchilders22]

Hi,

I just want to know if there are any impact on seo ranking if my home page has no or less content, for example I only have a slider with my logo, slogan, navigation and my company info schema?

Advance thanks for the help!

[Ray-pp]

Yes, there is a large impact on SEO ranking if your home page doesn't have content.

What would you expect to rank for without content on your home page? Brand terms only?

[BruceA]

Your home page content is the front door to your business or blog.  No front door..no visitors.

Google has to make decisions about your site from the front door onwards and if there is nothing to work with, then nothing will be worked with

Hope that helps

Bruce

[bchilders22]

We are using a this restaurant theme built by an elite author on Themeforest with over 1600 sales. Only one site on their showcase and that site has no content on home page. After looking at some of the sites from the theme author's comments section, we noticed they too had no content on the home page. http://preview.ait-themes.com/index.php?bartype=desktop&theme=ristorante

We've only build a few restaurant sites and this is the first situation we encountered where the client just wants an image on the home page. Thanks for your replies and advice. We'll add content to home.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Yes I agree! You should strongly urge your client to add content to the home page of their site. As Bruce and Ray mentioned above, the home page is the FRONT DOOR of your site. This tells both your visitors and Google "What you do" and "Where you do it".

Always be sure to make a STATEMENT on your home page!

[benjaminmarcinc]

I think content is always better for: first off your visitors then for the search engines. I helps educate them on your products and services. On the other hand I have seen websites rank for major keywords with hardly any content.

[WhiteboardCreations]

Hi bchilders22,

Great question and hope I can add to the discussion points. I'd like to approach from 2 angles:

1. To answer your question directly, assuming your goal is to optimize the website (no matter the industry), then yes your SEO ranking will suffer with a lack of content on the Home page. Just like everyone else has stated. If your goal is to optimize the site for other keywords outside of the brand/company name, then the content on the Home page becomes extremely important. If you are seeking to optimize the brand, then you may not be in so much trouble. BUT, if that is your goal, then I would recommend a couple minor items to implement to help. Create a paragraph on the Home page which hits the branded name, maybe placed just above the Footer under the Slider. Use that as your foundation and then create your Title and Description to be relevant to that content, again tagging/referencing your brand and location to coincide with your Schema markup. If you want to hit more keywords, then you'll need more content and maybe focus to section off the content. For example, if this is a restaurant, then hit on sections of the menu or meal time frames ie: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Drinks, etc. Then link to those inner pages.

2. I'm only stating this because we have several clients with ZERO content on the Home page. It's exactly as you mentioned. Social media buttons, logo, large slider, address and navigation tabs. This is all great because these clients do not care a thing about SEO and investing in SEO. They are shopping centers and their brand is very strong, so keeping the Home page clean and simple and directing their visitors to their Directory and Map and Events is their main focus.

In conclusion, it's all about what your client wants. If they want to rank, then get some good, original content on the Home page and tagged appropriately. If they are focusing their efforts on having a cool Home page to highlight their logo/brand and some nice images, then having content may be "too much clutter" for their tastes. Looking at it from both perspectives, it's asking those questions upfront before the design and development begin are highly important.

Hope this was helpful! - Patrick