Our SEO suggests thinning our homepage - is this a good idea?

[LondonAli]

We provide a single medical service in London. Our domain is "service"london.co.uk. Our home page consists of:

• Welcome message (40 words)
• Reasons why customers choose us (720 words) - as bullet points
• Benefits of the service (380 words - as 6 subheadings)
• Then a small sample of testimonials

It currently looks word doc boring so that's definitely an area we are talking to our designer about. We currently rank second or third for our most popular keywords which are mostly variations of "service london" - these go straight to our home page. Our competitors do the same.

The only other pages that rank are /pricing (for "service london price") and /reviews (for a tiny proportion of rarer keywords)

The main variations in the services we provide is adult and children. We have /adults and /children pages for this where we describe the actual procedures (these are relatively new pages so perhaps they will rank for "adult/children service london" in the future, but right now, they still go to the home page).

Now our SEO agency suggests we spread the content into more pages: Why us page, Benefits of service page etc., (also suggested we add more high quality content pages). Our home page will be similar to what moz suggested on whiteboard Friday - a few key points then directing them towards the sub-pages to read more.

However I am unsure if this is suitable for us where the great majority of our organic traffic comes from "service london". These visitors should ideally still come to our home page and I'm not sure if Google will be thrilled that my home page is now poorer in terms of content despite the fact that the home page still links to these high quality pages on my site.

Would really appreciate this beautiful community's insights on this. Thank you.

[David-Kley]

One of the things I would start with is getting proof that your home page performance sucks. I am assuming you have analytics for your site, so go ouut and download the Google page analytics tool: http://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/fnbdnhhicmebfgdgglcdacdapkcihcoh?hl=en

This will let you see a live view of how users interact with your site. As it has already been stated, if you describe your homepage as a word document you probably have some issues. Even if you get good traffic, I would bet your conversion rates are taking a hit.

For the content, as long as other souces backlinking to you can support a content reduction I would go for it. (meaning if you have a good backlink profile, reducing your page content will most likely not cause any problems) Do some searches and see what shows up when you rank. Where is Google (and others) pulling content from? The page? The meta data? Once you see what they like, you can begin to weed out what they don't without as many risks.

[BlueprintMarketing]

ps

this is a must

http://www.usertesting.com/blog/2014/03/12/7-user-testing-templates-for-marketers/

http://d.pr/f/12f2k

[BlueprintMarketing]

remember that your homepage has to tell the visitor in under five seconds exactly what you do.

see this https://usabilityhub.com/tests/new/FiveSecondTest

your site currently is something I would really have to need to read in order to keep going and I'm not saying that to be mean at all I'm saying it to be honest it's not clear what you do immediately and it does resemble a Word document.

Now let's take this homepage and not forget about CTA You have a unique service you could get very creative like some of the examples below from the security world sorry

but they all will you the same thing in five seconds what they do then allow you to find the information you need how cool you could make your site if you used graphics along calls to action with words to tell the story

https://www.digitalocean.com/  tells you what they do

https://www.digitalocean.com/features/technology/ tells you a lot more shows you what they offer.

https://www.pingdom.com/

http://www.distilnetworks.com/

https://www.cloudflare.com/

https://sucuri.net/ 1

https://sucuri.net/website-firewall/ 2

https://www.tfl.gov.uk/

If you want to see what I would say is a very good-looking homepage that happens to have a fair amount of text

see gordonjamesrealty.com it incorporates the testimonials and gives a lot of information. I think your home page should tell people what you do then give them the ability to find what they're looking for via a very well thought out.

if the company you've hired is up to par they should be able to do this without you losing your traffic regardless of what page it ends up going to I would listen to what they have to say and definitely make your home page something that invites people to learn about what you do after  they know they've landed in the right place from your homepage.

http://www.usertesting.com/

then http://99designs.com/  save $99 with http://moz.com/perks

http://www.designcrowd.com/

https://www.crowdspring.com/

I think you should have an idea of what you want and I'll allow the designer to impress you. Never stray from the showing people exactly what you do in under five seconds.

Sorry  phone calls I will reply more I promise

[LondonAli]

Sure the domain is ***

Thanks and looking forward to hearing what you think.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I think that your description of your page being a "word doc" is a strong sign it is not user-friendly.

Use the MozBar http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar & look at the websites with non-personalized search on.

I think a good example of a site that contains a lot of text but is still compact and functional is http://websynthesis.com/  now there current company copy blogger does not have as much text on its homepage however I would suggest you look at the way they format text it is, big, with the right amount of spacing scannable if you know what I mean making it easy to read and the letters are big enough so it is comfortable http://www.copyblogger.com/

Look at  they have been able to keep the text on the homepage and do it in a method that makes it very easy to read. You want people the will to scan your site.

I have tried to go to the domain I have tried to follow the hints to get your domain you are going to have to write it out and give a very clear for people to find it. You can use  (service  London co.uk) keep it inside of some system that I can find your site using. Because I have gone to a lot of domains that are for sale.

I will respond promptly once you post that or simply send me a private message with it.

All the best,

Tom

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