Worried about changing local SEO homepage tactic

[Cooper1]

Our current home page is texty, talking about why choose us and general information on what the service involves. We are currently developing a new web design and content architecture involving moving all the content out of the home page, and making the homepage a beautiful guide to the site, as is the best practice. I think the home page will generally result in a better user experience.

SEO: we currently rank second for "service city" (going to our homepage). Our domain is service-city.co.uk. While the change is going to involve us adding lots of new good-quality pages with new keyword targets, our most important keyword by far is "service city" and the home page would probably still be the most appropriate page for that keyword.

And I'm gravely worried the change will negatively impact this keyword.

I would appreciate your thoughts

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Ali!

I like Ryan's thinking and also want to emphasize one important point. Just because the new homepage will be beautiful, doesn't mean it can't include any text. There should still be crawlable text on the homepage, meaning you can still talk about your service there. Don't do away with all text.

[RyanPurkey]

Is there a happy medium that could include both the navigation and architecture you want but also keep a decent portion of the old content?  Have you ran any split testing to gauge how well people react with the new design versus the old design?  Do you have current conversion rate numbers on "service city" for your site?  If this keyword went away 100% how would that affect business?

Modernizing a site usually is a benefit, and it sounds like you have the right mindset in place for considering what you want to do accomplish by doing so, along with what you want to keep in terms of past ranking success. Perhaps take the time to also run a campaign around the redesign to gain a burst of press and links around the changes as well as still providing the same service in the same city that got you to second in the first place. Cheers!