Secondary Homepage

In this email I want to share an SEO concept we call “secondary homepage” that we created 10+ years ago when Google first starting penalizing websites for bad backlink profiles.

What is the “secondary homepage”?

The “secondary homepage” is another page on the site that essentially acts like a homepage that you send links to instead of hammering the Homepage of your with links.

One of the ways Google’s started penalizing sites was where there was a disproportionate amount of links hitting the homepage versus the inner pages on the site and this tactic was a way to work around this problem. We essentially build a page that acts similarly to the homepage and then send our anchor text heavy links there and leave the branded and other general links pointing to the homepage.

Once we started introducing the “secondary homepage” concept into our work and started deploying these secondary homepages to client sites we discovered another one of the fundamental SEO strategies we continue to use today, “no page, no rank and the homepage doesn’t count”

When we started building these pages we realized many of these sites were missing individual pages that matched the primary keywords the sites were trying to rank for. It was assumed by pointing the Homepage at the primary target terms that’d do the job but it seems that’s not the case. Even though the Homepage for a site may rank for a search query it seems that it’s the inner pages that still drive these rankings.

We talked about “no page, no rank” in a previous email. If you missed it there’s a copy paste below of that content

Sidenote: this secondary homepage concept also works extremely well with 301 domain redirect strategies too

No page no rank and your homepage doesn’t count

If you don’t have a page for something on your site you can’t rank for it, no page no rank.

You’d be surprised how often we see this issue in our SEO audits.

There are some weird technical and edge case examples where this rule isn’t 100% true but broadly speaking, if say you’re a dentist and want to rank for searches relating to teeth whitening, then you need to have a page on your site for teeth whitening.

Each page on your site can only rank for one theme or topic too – your teeth whitening page is not going to rank for “dental implants” and stuffing 15 services onto a single services page doesn’t work either.

A simple action step we try to have all customers do is to list out all the products and services they sell. along with all their physical locations and then make sure there is a page to match each one. Often, by simply adding a page for a product or service you’ll start to rank and get traffic.

Building Your Secondary Homepage

For ecommerce sites, the secondary homepage should almost always be the primary product category page. For content sites, the primary category page for the content and for sites selling services or local business sites, this should be the product or services page for the primary thing the business sells.

Here’s an example of a secondary homepage for an ecommerce site, this is the first one of these pages we ever built and it’s still performing after 10 years: https://www.didgeridoobreath.com/didgeridoos/

That’s it for this email. If you’re looking to do more with your SEO, our SEO Audit service might be worth a look. If you’re not sure whether it’s for you, click here to request a free site audit and we’ll review your site and tell you how we can help.