# Why Your Homepage Shouldn't Rank for Keywords (Old SEO is Dead) Channel: Edward Sturm Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WilybpfpTBg Duration: 6 min Language: English Words: 1111 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/WilybpfpTBg --- [0:00] This is what to do and what not to do with a homepage for SEO. Also, this is an episode that I want to make because I see a lot of old school SEOs doing this and it drives me crazy. Stop targeting keywords with your homepage. The homepage is not for ranking for keywords except for your brand name. This is what a homepage is for. It's for building topical authority, establishing that you are an authority in your topic, in your niche. It's for actually selling your brand, for making people want to use your products and services. If you're an affiliate, again, looking like an authority in your niche so people trust [0:36] the recommendations you give. It's for looking good so people want to link to you. Oh, this this site, this brand looks reputable. We're okay with linking to it and recommending it. And that gets you backlinks. And it's for directing people to different parts of your website. Again, different products, different services, to your bottom-of-funnel SEO landing pages, to your blog, to funny Easter eggs that you might have on your site. But it's it's for directing people. Oh, showing product screenshots as well or service screenshots, testimonials, FAQs, all of these things. That's what a homepage is for. Now, again, the homepage is not for ranking for keywords. For example, you [1:16] see this sometimes. You see homepages that are basically a long list of H2s and each H2 is a keyword. So, it's a long list of subheadings. Each subheading is a keyword. And then under the subheading is one paragraph of text meant to satisfy search engines. And you'll have this long page and it's the homepage that is targeting so many different keywords using these H2 subheadings. And this is an older way of doing SEO that really just does not perform very well anymore. It doesn't perform well anymore. It used to perform a lot better. It does not perform well anymore and it's not it's it's it's not [1:56] a good way of doing SEO. In my original recording, I forgot to explain why this approach doesn't perform as well as it used to. Stacking H2s and paragraphs like this, it lacks topical focus. A homepage that's trying to rank for many keywords lacks the depth and specificity that Google expects for targeting individual search terms. That's why I say always go after keywords with a specific page. One paragraph blurbs under an H2 targeting a different keyword this is thin and shallow content [2:27] and it's just not good enough anymore. It doesn't provide enough value to actually satisfy search intent. It's a poor user experience. The pages are cluttered, they're hard to navigate, they often confuse visitors rather than guiding them to relevant content. Google expects homepages to reflect brand identity, to build trust, and then to direct users to the right places in a [2:49] website, not act as SEO landing pages. The best way to target a keyword is to have a single page targeting that keyword. You have proper information architecture and URL structure and that suggests a full site and a full brand. These pages, these individual pages that target keywords, they're easy to navigate to. Now, you might be listening to this and thinking, "Okay, well, what about exact match domains, EMDs?" And you see this, you see people making these exact match domains where the domain is literally the keyword that they want to rank for. And I would say that this is the only way to target a keyword with your homepage, but there [3:28] are some very important things to consider. The most damning is that it was revealed in the Google API leak last year that exact match domains get a demotion in Google's algorithms. So, this is from Mashable. Mashable wrote in an article, "Around a decade ago, Google did share that exact match domains would no longer be held in high regard as a tool for earning rankings, despite being [3:52] favored by the algorithm at one time. However, we now have evidence thanks to this leak that there is a mechanism to actively demote these websites in Google search. It turns out that Google views many of these types of domains in the same light as keyword stuffing practices. The algorithm views this type of URL as potential spam. And there's another reason why you wouldn't want to use an exact match domain. It's a very limiting. If you have an exact match domain, it makes it hard to target many more keywords. It just doesn't work well to target keywords aside from the keyword in the domain name or a [4:29] variation of the keyword in the domain name. So, maybe your domain would be nyccarpetcleaning.com and then you would also be targeting NYC carpet cleaning best price NYC carpet cleaning most thorough, but you're still super limited because you can just only target keywords that are just a variation of what is in your domain name. So, again, what should you have on [4:54] your homepage? You should look credible. You should give people reasons to explore your products and services. You should give links and call to actions to explore. And what should you not be doing on your homepage? You should not be trying to rank for keywords with your homepage. This is something that used to work no longer works well, especially with having the keyword in your domain as sites that do that get demoted or don't make a huge long block of text homepage trying to rank for so many different keywords at once. Don't do that. Go after keywords with individual pages and posts. Have a clean information architecture so that it's [5:36] easy to navigate to these pages and posts. And that is what you do with your site and that is what you do with your homepage. If you want to learn more SEO that works, my full strategy and method, which is very different from the conventional ways of doing search engine optimization, check out compact keywords.com. The video at the top of the page will explain how the method is different, and that is all for episode [6:01] 713 of my daily digital marketing show. 713 days in a row doing this podcast. Absolutely crazy. Principal SEO of Yoast is supposed to come on the podcast tomorrow, and I'm really excited. I'm really excited to have him on. Thank you everyone so much for watching if you watched on YouTube, if you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you [6:26] again tomorrow. Bye now. --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts. Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt