Homepage SEO gets more attention than it deserves in one direction and less in another. Teams agonise over which head term to cram into the front page, then ignore the thing the homepage is genuinely good at: holding links and sending them on.
The useful framing is simple. Your homepage is the page people land on when they search your name, the page other sites link to when they mention you, and the root of your internal link graph. Optimise for those three jobs and most of the rest follows.
Homepage SEO best practices that still hold
Ahrefs’ guide to homepage SEO, by Mateusz Makosiewicz and last updated in April 2024, sets out six steps. They are a reasonable checklist, and most of them survive scrutiny. Choose one target keyword that defines the product or service. Write a title tag, which Ahrefs says to “Make it eye-catching and accurate”, with the keyword in naturally. Make the content and H1 match search intent. Add organisation schema. Build backlinks through reviews, digital PR and guest posts. And use internal links to point at important content and back to the homepage.
Two of those deserve more weight than the rest. Ahrefs notes that “Your homepage will likely have the most backlinks” of any page on a site. That makes it the main source of authority you control, and internal linking is how you spend it. The keyword step deserves less weight, for reasons covered below.
| Ahrefs step (2024) | Still useful? | What to do now |
|---|---|---|
| One target keyword | Partly | Pick a term that describes the business, not the biggest head term |
| Title tag | Yes | Brand plus a plain description; “eye-catching and accurate” |
| Content and H1 match intent | Yes | Say what you do, for whom, in the first screen |
| Organisation schema | Yes | Name, logo, URL and profiles via sameAs |
| Backlinks | Yes | Reviews, digital PR, guest posts |
| Internal links | Yes, most of all | Link to the pages that make money |
| FAQ markup | No SERP feature now | Google stopped showing FAQ rich results |
| Sitelinks search box markup | No SERP feature now | Google retired it in November 2024 |
The homepage ranks for your brand, so let it
For almost every site, the homepage is the result for brand searches. That is its natural query. Someone typing your name wants to confirm they have found the right company and see what it does. A page that answers those two questions quickly is doing its job.
The trouble starts when a team decides the homepage should also rank for a broad commercial term. A homepage has to introduce the whole business: what you sell, who it is for, why to trust you, where to go next. A page built to rank for “accounting software” has to compare options, explain features and answer detailed questions. Those are different pages. Forcing the head term onto the front page usually produces copy that serves neither the brand visitor nor the searcher.
The better pattern is to let the homepage describe the business in the terms customers use, and to give the competitive head terms their own dedicated pages. Then use the homepage to make those pages stronger.
Use the front page to pass authority
If the homepage holds most of your backlinks, the links leaving it matter more than links anywhere else on the site. This is the part of homepage SEO that moves rankings for other pages, and it is the part most often left to whatever the designer put in the navigation.
The mechanics are those of PageRank: a page passes value through its links, so a strong page linking to a weaker one helps it. A homepage with a dozen clear links to your most important category, product or guide pages concentrates that value where it earns revenue. A homepage with two hundred links in a mega-menu and footer spreads it thin.
Audit the links on the front page with that in mind. Which pages would you most like to rank? Are they linked from the homepage body, with descriptive anchor text, or only buried three levels down a menu? Our guide to internal linking for SEO covers the wider structure; for the homepage, the short version is fewer, more deliberate links.
A home page SEO checklist
With the jobs settled, the checklist is short.
- Title tag. Brand name plus a plain description of what you do. Keep it within the length guidance in our post on SEO title length.
- H1 and first screen. One clear statement of the offer. Not “Welcome” and not a slogan that could belong to anyone.
- Body copy. Enough real text to say what you sell, to whom and why. A wall of images with three words of copy gives search engines little to go on.
- Organisation schema. Name, logo, URL and official profiles. See sameAs schema for linking profiles.
- Deliberate internal links. To the pages that matter most, from the body, not just the menu.
- Speed. Hero images and sliders are where homepages usually get slow.
Markup that no longer earns a SERP feature
The Ahrefs guide also suggests FAQ markup and sitelinks search box markup. Both suggestions have dated. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results, and it retired the sitelinks search box in November 2024. Neither now earns a feature in the search results, so neither is worth adding to a homepage for that reason. Our post on FAQ schema covers what is left of that markup.
Organisation markup is different and remains useful. It helps Google connect your site to the entity behind it: your name, logo and official profiles. That connection feeds brand results such as a knowledge panel, though no markup guarantees one appears.
Homepage advice ages quickly because SERP features come and go. Check that Google still shows a feature before adding the markup meant to produce it.
What the homepage cannot do
A homepage cannot carry every keyword you care about, and it should not try. It also cannot rescue thin pages elsewhere on the site: sending links to a weak product page helps it get found and weighed, but the page still has to deserve the ranking.
There is a limitation worth stating plainly. Nobody outside Google can say how much a homepage link is worth compared with a link from a deep page, or how far that value travels. The principle that strong pages pass value through their links is well established; the exact amounts are not public. Treat claims that moving one link lifted a page by a set number of positions with scepticism, because those changes rarely ship alone.
What can be said with confidence is the order of priorities. Make the homepage a clear answer to a brand search. Give it an accurate title and a plain statement of what you do. Mark up the organisation. Then spend the rest of your effort on where its links point, because that is where the front page does most of its work for rankings.
Frequently asked questions
Should my homepage target a keyword?
Target a term that describes the business accurately. Do not force a broad head term the page cannot satisfy; give it a dedicated page and link to it from the homepage.
What schema should a homepage have?
Organisation markup, with your name, logo, URL and official profiles. FAQ and sitelinks search box markup no longer earn a feature in Google’s results.
How many links should a homepage have?
There is no set number. Fewer, deliberate links to your most important pages concentrate the homepage’s authority better than hundreds of menu and footer links.
Why does my homepage only rank for my brand name?
Because that is usually its natural query. Competitive commercial terms are normally better served by dedicated pages that the homepage links to.
The takeaway Let the homepage win brand searches, describe the business plainly, mark up the organisation, and spend its backlink authority on deliberate links to the pages that make money. Skip FAQ and sitelinks search box markup.
