Homepage SEO: This is How to Optimize a Startup’s Homepage

Struggling to figure out what keywords to use on your startup’s homepage? Well, this guide to homepage SEO is for you, then.

And let me start with perhaps a bit of a blunt statement (but a true one, though):

Every website I worked on had the same problem: a poorly optimized homepage. 

Actually, in most cases, those homepages weren't optimized at all. Some felt as if these founders chose keywords on a whim. Others targeted no specific keywords at all. And needless to say, that poor or lack of optimization hindered the startup’s SEO efforts.

In this guide, you’ll learn how not to make such mistakes. Instead, I’ll show you how to optimize your homepage for SEO, what keywords to use, and where to place them.

Let’s get right to it.

The challenge with homepage SEO

FACT: The homepage is by far the most difficult page to optimize on any website.

Even the seemingly simple task of choosing keywords requires a completely different approach with a homepage than if you were doing the same for a blog post or a landing page.

The process is completely different from choosing keywords for a blog post or a landing page, for one. 

Sure, you still have to find the right keywords to target. But overall, with a blog post or a landing page, you pretty much know what sort of phrases you want to use for that content. 

This is because these pages have a clear topic, clear SEO value (and clear SEO goal, too.)

A landing page, for example, targets a specific topic, use case, feature, selling point, or maybe even keyword in the case of SEO or PPC-focused landing pages. A blog post naturally focuses on a particular problem, and so you optimize it for keywords people would use when searching for information on that problem.

But the situation is completely different with a homepage, and to make matters worse, it’s for a whole range of reasons, actually.

First of all, the homepage is often the main driver of conversions. For many startups, it’s often the main and also the most important page on the site. By most important, I mean that it contains the most content and the most sales-focused information.

In many cases, the homepage is the only meaningful webpage on the site.

Look at these startups, for example. Their websites feature just a handful of pages in the taxonomy, and most of those don’t actually play any specific role in convincing the visitor to try the product out.

That tasks is on the homepage entirely. 

Example 1 - The taxonomy contains only supporting pages, such as pricing or book a demo. 

Example 2 - Homepage is the only main page on the site. 

Example 3 - The taxonomy features only one additional commercial page, Features. 

Naturally, none of these examples do anything wrong. It’s perfectly fine to have a small website, without any other pages. 

But it also means that the homepage bears the brunt of having to do all the sales work, and more. 

The homepage is where you send all traffic. It’s the page your calls to action point to, and as a result, that’s also where you want those visitors to convert.

So, if you look a bit closely at it, that one page needs to do quite an astonishing number of jobs.

It needs to:

• Welcome visitors
• Make a strong first impression about the brand AND the product
• Convince those people that the product can solve their pain points.
• Explain the value of using the product.
• Overcome sales objections as well as any skepticism toward signing up for new tools the person may have.
• And it must provide almost all the information a person needs to make a buying decision - top benefits, features, testimonials, and so much more.

Then, there’s brand awareness, brand recognition, and trust.

Since the homepage is often the primary landing page on a website, it bears the brunt of introducing the brand and building trust, which, by the way, affects your SEO, too.

Let me illustrate this with a quick example - A well-known brand like ClickUp, Asana, or Hubspot can use any fancy label in their homepage’s meta title, for example. They don’t have to worry about making it very SEO-focused.

And they don’t. Just look at their title tags now.

Clickup says, “One app to replace them all.”

Hubspot uses “Software, tools, and resources for your business.”

Asana - “Manage your team’s work, projects & tasks online”

But here’s the thing:

Everyone knows these brands. 

People google their names all the time, too. Not to mention that they have thousands of other pages to target various commercial and informational keywords.

As a result, they can get as creative with their meta tags as they wish. Or leave them blank, if they wanted to. It wouldn’t matter. 

(Well, I mean, leaving the tag blank would matter, I’m just using this as an extreme example.)

You don’t have that luxury yet. Your brand may not be known at all. And even if it is, you’re still relatively new within your niche or product category. And most likely, you don’t have those thousands of pages to target all your keywords.

You have to do it with the homepage, at least for now.

That’s why optimizing a startup homepage is so challenging. But it’s also absolutely necessary to do.

Why you absolutely must optimize your homepage for SEO

There are several reasons, actually.

Firstly, the homepage helps you communicate authority. Since the page is your primary commercial page, it contains the most information about your product, its value, the audience, and so on.

Needless to say, the clearer you are in explaining what your product does, what category it falls into, and what value users get from it, the easier it will be for the search engine to establish how to rank your domain in the search results.

Another thing - The homepage will attract most if not all, organic links at first. One reason is that you don’t have any other assets others could link to. But also, whatever mentions, media references, or other PR your product acquires will likely link to the homepage, too.

How to optimize your homepage for SEO?

The trick with optimizing the homepage for SEO lies in three types of keywords that you need to use. 

I know I know, it does seem unusual- three types, right? Everywhere you look, you hear that you need to focus on a single topic only.

But remember, homepage is different, and you approach optimizing it differently, too.

And so, to optimize it well, you need to target three types of keywords.

1/ Branded keywords

The first type of keywords relate to your brand. It’s quite an obvious one, naturally, and ties in with what we discussed just a moment ago - That you need to use your homepage to build brand awareness.

But I get it that brand keywords might not seem like an important element of your homepage SEO. Yet they are. 

For one, brand keywords help build awareness of your, well, brand. 

In connection with the next group of keywords we’re going to cover - category keywords - they also help establish your brand within the right product category. 

Plus, brand keywords provide quite a number of insights that you could track and measure:

• First of all, growth in brand-related searches (and clicks) will signify that the audience learns about you and starts considering your product as a potential solution. 
• Branded traffic helps identify any reputation issues. 
• It can also help you spot issues with the website. This is because, typically, you would rank at the very top for your brand. So, any sudden ranking drops for branded keywords could be a sign that something’s wrong with the site. 

So, include your brand in your meta title and description. Naturally, you would have it scattered throughout the copy, too, so you probably don’t have to do anything else with this here.

(Where to place branded keywords on the homepage)

2/ Category keywords

Product category-related keywords describe the primary category that best defines your product.

These aren’t the keywords that might define the project’s attributes or functionality. They are more general and broad phrases that tell a user what the product is.

In fact, these are often the phrases you use to describe the product to clients, investors, or various stakeholders – Some examples of product category keywords include:

• email marketing platform, 
• content management system, 
• social media scheduler, and so on.

But there is a catch: For startups, category keywords often prove the most challenging to find.

There are several reasons for that:

• Your startup might be so new that even you aren’t entirely sure about its actual category. 
• The industry you operate in might be referring to your product in multiple ways, too. For example, one of my clients told me once: 

“Our SaaS operates in a space where practically everyone invents their own vocabulary, after all. We really didn’t think that we could find universal keywords that would attract relevant traffic to us.”

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t find relevant keywords to target. Here are some ways how to do that. 

1/ Research your absolute top-level category. 

Note - This wouldn’t be the actual product category but the absolutely most generic term that relates to your target niche. For example: email marketing, content marketing, SEO, etc. 

For example, let’s say that you’re building a software that “does something with ecommerce payments.” You know what its features are but you have no idea how the audience refers to a product like this. 

So, research the most generic term - ecommerce payments - with an SEO platform of  your choice. 

Most such platforms, be it SEMrush or Ahrefs or another tool, not only list keywords. 

They also preemptively split those into separate categories. Here’s an example how the platform I use does it.

Rresearch those categories, looking for anything that resembles what your product does. 

Or, look for categories that relate to commercial phrases (anything with “software,” “tool,” “solution,” etc.)

The chances are that you’re going to find either an entire group of category keywords, or at least one or two specific phrases that describe your product. 

2/ Research your competitors.

Sometimes, there just isn’t a point in trying to reinvent the wheel. You might not know what your category keywords are but there are people who might… your competitors. 

And the best way to find out what category keywords they target is by …. yup, you guessed it… looking at their homepages.

You can simply visit their homepage and check what category keywords they include in the <meta title> tag. 

Or, you could turn to an SEO platform again, and evaluate ALL keywords their homepage ranks for. 

Most SEO platforms allow you to research not only entire domains but specific URLs. So, type in your competitor’s domain into the search box, and select “Exact URL” as the option. 

(Note, the option might be called differently in your platform but overall, it would be something similar to this.)

The platform will display all keywords in its database that this homepage ranks for. 

Note how this particular homepage ranks for the brand keyword (growform) plus several other category keywords. Granted, it does not rank too well for those, and there is (most likely,) a good reason for that. 

Often, category keywords target a different search intent than what a homepage can target. So, in spite of having the homepage optimized well, Google might choose not to rank it, as there is an intent mismatch.

You can check whether that might be the case quite simply by googling your category keyword and analyzing pages that rank at the top. If you see commercial pages ranking, then it might suggest that your homepage will stand a chance of joining them, too. If you see home page ranking, even better. But you might also see Google ranking informational content like blog posts or listicles of tools, and that would suggest that you’ll need to create a similar content as well to appear among those search results.

So, what to do if that’s the case?

You have few options here, neither of which is better than the other. As with many things in SEO, you need to test them to see what works best for you. But overall, your options are:

• Leave the category keyword on the homepage and create a separate page that matches the keyword’s intent better. Of course, you risk Google focusing on the wrong page, in this case, the homepage, which will prevent the other page from ranking. But resolving this requires you just to remove those category keywords from the homepage, so it’s not a risky test to run. And if it works, you’ll have the homepage focusing on the product category and another page ranking for those keywords and attracting relevant traffic.
• Re-optimize the homepage for more generic keywords (or go deeper into your niche.) So, instead of saying email newsletter software for SaaS (which would be the category keyword), you could use something like Newsletters for SaaS Made Easy. This would still help you communicate the category but without risking it clashing with the other page, you’ll create to target that search intent.
• And finally, you could just focus on the brand and leave it at that. This approach would also work and completely eliminate any risk of Google ranking the wrong page for the category keyword.

Where to place category keywords

Include your category keyword (or its variation, of course):

• In meta tags.
• In the page’s H1 tag.
• In the page’s body content’s opening.
• In alt tags, etc.

3/ Core functionality keywords

The third category of keywords to use on the homepage includes phrases relating to your product’s core functionality. 

These phrases do not relate to the overall category but to individual features or capabilities of your product. 

For example, in the case of an email marketing software, core functionality keywords might include:

• Visual builder
• User segmentation
• Campaign automation, and so on.

Note how, basically, these are the actual features that the product offers. 

Worth to note - Having those keywords on the homepage is not going to make a huge dent in your ranking for those phrases. In most cases, you will have to create dedicated feature pages or other content to target them. 

However, they will help communicate and provide greater context regarding the whole scope of topics your site is relevant to. This way, Google and other search engines will be better able to determine what overall product category to rank your website for. 

Now, I wouldn’t recommend squeezing those keywords into your meta tags and other key on-page elements. But it’s a good idea to have them scattered around the homepage, like on a list of features or so.

By having them:

• You’ll increase the topical relevance of the homepage. Google and other search engines will better understand what your product does and what phrases would be relevant to your domain.
• You’ll be assisting visitors in finding any content that’s relevant to their needs.
• And finally, you’ll be strengthening the page authority of those additional assets you’ve created to rank for keywords related to the product’s features or functionality.

And that’s it…

That’s all you need to know about homepage SEO for startups. All that’s left is to research those three types of keywords, and optimize your homepage for them. 

Good luck!