Stop Targeting Multiple Keywords on Your Homepage. It’s Costing You Money.

This is one of the most common mistakes in SEO. It's why targeting multiple keywords with a homepage is costing you money. You money, an agency you know money, an SEO friend you know money. It is just one of the biggest blunders in the SEO and digital marketing community. In this episode of the show, I'm going to share how this mistake is usually made so you can avoid it yourself, why SEOs are doing this mistake or aspiring SEOs are doing this mistake, why it doesn't work, my alternative to doing it, and then is there actually a way to target a single keyword with the homepage. That's what we got on this episode of the show. So, despite what the gurus out there may claim, Google is actually a very simple machine. It prioritizes relevance, so just having the language that you are targeting, your keywords in your URL slug, page title, H1, beginning of the first sentence. It prioritizes authority. Authoritative websites and authoritative pages. And this authority is derived from backlinks on ranking pages, from referral traffic. Some may argue it is also from brand mentions. And authority is derived from having your own pages on your website that rank, that rank on Google, and that don't have searchers immediately clicking back. You don't want people immediately clicking back if they've just come to your page from search or Google's AI or whatever it is. There is sophistication where it gets complex, and that's with detecting spam. But, the way that it decides what ranks is still pretty simple. Relevance, authority. And you got to understand that because it explains why so many SEOs or aspiring SEOs or marketers or making this mistake. This mistake, it's usually done like this. A marketer has a a keyword and they put that in their H1 heading, in their big heading. And then they have other keywords, and they put that in their H2s and around the copy. And remember, this is only in the homepage that the marketer is doing this. Have a primary keyword put in the H1 of their homepage, and other keywords put in the H2s and in the copy of their homepage. And you see this pattern all the time. This is why a lot of marketers do this. The logic is, well, the homepage gets all of the backlinks, and so therefore has the most ranking power. Let's throw all of our keywords into it. It has all the backlinks, so it has the most authority. Let's throw all of our keywords into this homepage. And most SEOs or marketers have this misconception of thinking of SEO mostly in terms of just backlinks and authority, and not enough in terms of relevance. And that's a mistake because relevance is a lot more important than most SEOs realize. Like, just having a page that is maximally relevant is so critical, especially for keywords that are competitive, that are being targeted by lots of other websites. And the thing is, the types of SEOs who stuff all of their keywords into a homepage, they're usually doing this going after obvious keywords. Most people just go after the obvious keywords, and that makes them more competitive keywords. The other reason that targeting keywords with a homepage is bad is because you are optimizing the page on your site that gets the most visits from other marketing channels, direct, public relations, social media, referral traffic. You are taking this page that marketing channels, and then you're optimizing it for SEO copywriting and not for conversions. I'll talk about this more in a couple of moments, but that is a huge L right there. So, my way of doing it, if you don't want to make this mistake yourself, one of the most common mistakes there is in SEO, if you don't want to make it yourself, I recommend optimizing your homepage purely for conversions. Think about all the people who are coming to your homepage from other marketing channels, and when you're making your homepage and writing your homepage, attack it from a perspective, how do we convert as many people as possible? Every keyword that you want to rank for, instead of stuffing these keywords into your homepages H1 or H2s, give dedicated pages for these keywords and have these pages be one to two clicks away from the homepage. Sometimes, you will build backlinks to a hub page that houses your SEO pages or posts that are targeting these keywords. So, like blog, that's an example. If you build links to your blog and your blog is linking to a bunch of articles that are targeting keywords, now your blog posts are closer to a point of authority, which is the blog hub page that is getting all these backlinks that you're directing towards it. Same thing if you have a services page. If you're a services business and you're listing out your services with dedicated pages for them because you want these pages to rank for the corresponding services, you build links to your services hub page, which helps the individual service pages rank. Sometimes, you build links to individual SEO pages and posts, too. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't build links to your homepage, by the way. You keep building links to your homepage, but if you have an opportunity to build backlinks to a hub page or to a specific SEO page, you do that, too. Now, is there a way to target not multiple keywords, but a single keyword with the homepage? There is. You would pick an umbrella bottom of funnel keyword, so maybe it would be roofing repair Austin or something, and you would put that in your H1, your page title. Again, this is with the homepage. The H1, the page title, the beginning of the first sentence, the meta description, and in the alt text at the top image of your homepage. Since you don't have your URL slug, because it's just a homepage, you don't have your URL slug available to use for targeting. So, you are putting your keyword in extra places where otherwise, if you did have the URL slug, you would be over optimized for this keyword. You wouldn't have it too much. But, since you don't have the URL slug to use, you're putting it in other places. However, you still run the risk of losing leads, of losing a lot of leads, because you're optimizing the page on your site that is getting the most visits from non-SEO channels, and you're optimizing that page for SEO. You're better having an H1 and a hero section that emphasizes the benefits that your brand offers, not targeting a keyword. You don't want to have to be weighed down by SEO copywriting for your homepage. Again, you want the copy that is maximally converting. So, for me, targeting multiple keywords or even a single keyword with the homepage just really isn't worth it. Again, you're better targeting your primary keyword with its own page or key any keyword that you want to target with its own page, unless all of these keywords fall into a topic where the search engine results pages for all of these keywords is really similar and the intent for all of these keywords is really similar. And then, you can target multiple keywords with one page. But, you are still targeting a group of similar keywords with their own page, and then you can build a couple of links to that page only if these keywords are competitive, or building links to a hub page that houses these multiple SEO landing pages. Anyway, that's one of the most common mistakes that people make with SEO. That's why they do it, and that's what to do instead. If you know somebody who is making this mistake, please send them this video. I hope they will watch it, and then they will change their SEO strategy. And if you want to save years not making mistakes and focus on only the part of SEO that drives results in the form of customers, users, leads calling you up. I spent a year making my SEO course Compact Keywords, compactkeywords.com. I update it several times a month. I got this a few days ago in the comments section of episode 1053 of this podcast from Yassine Builds who said, "Compact Keywords is hands-down the best SEO guide that I've ever purchased {slash} learned from. This is coming from someone who already grew a site to around 5,000 visitors a day from SEO. I'm four videos into Compact Keywords, and I stopped just to come here and drop a review. Wish you all success. What a gem you are." Yassine, you are a gem as well, and all the listeners or viewers of this podcast, you are all gems. I hope you will check out the course at compactkeywords.com. That is everything that I have got for you on this episode of the show. This episode 1057 of my daily search engine optimization podcast, The Edward Show. 1057 days in a row without missing a single day. I started this podcast 1057 days ago, [music] and I've not missed a single day since starting then. If you watch this on [music] YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.