Why is THIS the Perfect Shop Homepage for SEO?

Intro

Have you ever wondered if a crammed shop homepage is undermining your rankings? It is! Deleting half of your homepage links can boost your sales by up to 50% by the next link juice calculation of your shop. Google’s link juice calculation starts at the homepage; fewer links mean better rankings for the linked categories and products. You’ll learn how to delete unnecessary links and funnel link juice exactly where it matters using a lesser-known SEO component. In my 23 years of doing SEO, I’ve watched countless online stores undermine their own rankings by overloading their homepages. Here’s how you can clean up your shop homepage and become the hero of the year.

Link Juice Calculation

Almost all backlinks of an online store are aimed at the domain, and hopefully your online store homepage is set as the default page of your domain. In that case, all that external link juice is allocated to your homepage. Depending on the amount and quality of your backlinks, Google calculates a metric they used to call PageRank. It is a metric from 0 to 10, indicating how much link juice a domain has. Popular SEO tools try to replicate that metric and call it, for example, Authority Score in Semrush or Domain Rating in Ahrefs. Every tool has its own metric, but they are usually a number from 0 to 100. Take that number as an estimation and don’t take it too seriously. The link juice is distributed in a pyramid form from the top, which is your shop homepage, down to categories, subcategories, sub-subcategories, and so on, all the way to your products, filter pages, etc. Usually, URLs farther from the homepage get less link juice, and links in the menu get a lot of link juice because a menu is displayed on every URL of an online store. We already talked about link juice distribution; the only thing you now need to remember is that lower categories - especially those not displayed in the menu - get just a fraction of the link juice, and products get just a little bit of link juice on average. But let’s start at the top: Your top-level categories (so-called level 1 categories) are always in the menu, and your menu is on the homepage. So if your homepage has 100 links, each linked item gets 1% of the link juice. If you have 200 links, it gets only 0.5%, and if you have 300 links on it, each category gets only 0.33% of the link juice, and so on. So, if you reduce the number of links on your homepage, you strengthen every remaining link. And the most important links on your homepage are those pointing to categories. The question is what deserves to stay on the homepage, and what should be removed? Here’s the shocking fact: usually, more than half of the links on your homepage should be deleted, and by deleting them, you double the strength of the remaining links. This means that the rankings of the remaining linked URLs will increase and bring more sales. That sounds easy - and it is - but most SEOs never do this important step and instead waste their time optimizing vanity metrics like core web vitals. So, how many links on a homepage are too many? It depends. It depends on the mentioned authority score of your online store. If the online store has an authority score of around 30, it can be considered a low-authority domain. If the authority score is around 50, it is a mid-authority domain, and everything above 70 is considered a high-authority domain. If you multiply the authority score by 5, you get the recommended max internal link count. For most low-authority domains it’s around 150 links, 250 for mid-authority domains, and 350 for high-authority domains. Everything above that is too much and every second invested in the homepage cleanup will have a great impact. Here are a few examples of online stores, their authority scores, and the insane amount of links they have on their homepage. Feel free to pause the video, take a look at their homepages, and try to find out where most of those links are pointing to. Just remember, the Googlebot considers only HTML links in the prerendered version of your homepage as links and gives them link juice, calculating it only for them. So, in PHP-based CMSes, all links in forms with so-called PRG masks and JavaScript links don’t count. In JavaScript framework–based shops, only HTML links in the server-side rendered version are considered; all others are left out. Don’t ever use rel=nofollow links for internal links, don’t mix them up with the nofollow meta tag. Using the rel=follow on internal links won’t save any linkjuice!

Potential #1 – The Menu

Okay, let’s see which 7 parts of the homepage we can delete to boost rankings and therefore the online store’s sales. We have already covered this topic, so I’ll be brief. In low-authority shops, only LVL1 and LVL2 categories should remain in the menu; everything else needs to go. In mid-authority shops, the same is the case, but some LVL3 exceptions can be made, or just the most important LVL3 categories should be put in the menu. Look at the menu of edenbrothers.com, which has more than 150 links in just one category of its menu. They have 1147 links from their homepage and consider everything important, which can’t be true. This often happens in high-authority shops too. They should stop at LVL3 categories and maybe add some mega-important LVL4 categories, and that’s it. But most don’t listen. Take a look at diy.com, where they do exactly that, and now look at their organic traffic estimation graph. Impressive, isn’t it? Want that too? Then do everything you are going to learn in this video. Every link which can be removed is a step towards growth, which you’ll see in the next issue. If you see a video in the shop header or a big slider with more than three slides, you can be sure that this company has some huge issues.

Potential #2 – Header Sliders

Besides having a huge influence on page speed, those headers don’t get many clicks, don’t bring more sales, and most of the time, are completely useless if you look at the numbers. But if you ask department heads and category managers, they’ll insist these are the most important things in an online store. Your task is to remove it completely or at least limit the maximum number of slides to three and forbid using videos in it. If you can manage to design them so images take less space and load faster, do it. The main argument is that fewer than 1% of visitors click on them, and they almost never bring sales. Extensive studies show that. If you don’t believe it, do your own click tracking research.This might not sound like much, but remember, every link counts, especially in the next type of slider.

Potential #3 – Product Sliders

Product sliders are very popular because the online store can rent them out to big brands, along with homepage banners. Brands love to waste their money on those. They love to insert as many products as possible into them. Therefore, we often see arrows on the left and right of product sliders, sometimes hiding 20, 30, or even 50 linked products. Guess what? Users click only on those they see without clicking on the arrows, a really small percentage of homepage visitors click on the arrows. Everyone wastes money with them. Your job is to get the arrows removed. By doing that, you remove a huge amount of links for every product slider, strengthening more important categories. On average, you’ll find 4 product sliders, sometimes even up to 10. And that’s because online store managers also add their own useless product sliders. The only slider that makes sense in every shop is the bestseller product slider - especially if the product name has a significant search volume. Think of products that can be compared in popularity to a PlayStation or iPhone, taking into consideration the shop’s niche. Product sliders also have another big issue.

Potential #4 – Unified Product Boxes

Product boxes often have 2, 3, or even 4 links in them. Usually the image and the product title have a separate link, then there’s an “add to cart” button, and very frequently an “add to wishlist” heart icon. The whole box should be one link to the product page. That’s it. These are called unified product boxes. So if a slider has 20 products and each product box has 4 links, you have 80 links in just one product slider. If you leave only 4 products and create unified product boxes, you save your homepage from 76 links for each product slider. If you have 5 product sliders and do the same for each, you save 380 links. It’s amazing how much potential is hidden in just a few elements. Who would have thought you can save so much more link juice with this than by cleaning up a menu? Now we are past half of the homepage, where research shows fewer than 55% of users scroll to. For the rest of the homepage, only 15% of users see it.

Potential #5 – Banners

Usually, what you see next are either wide banners or smaller groups of rectangular banners, again mostly paid banners. Remove all unpaid banners, especially those pointing to categories and subcategories already present in the menu. You’ll be left with discount banners and paid banners. Optimize those images as much as possible to improve loading times, and then hide those banner links from Google. You can apply a PRG mask on PHP-based shops, and in JavaScript framework - based shops, just make them pure JavaScript links that aren’t shown in the server-side rendering, only in the client-side rendering.

Potential #6 – Brand Logos

Next to be taken care of, are the popular brand logos. It is very popular to put a lot of brand logos linking brand landing pages on the homepage. Do you hear the slider alarm? It might be funny, but those sliders can hide even more links than product sliders. Try everything in your power to reduce the amount of linked brand logos and make sure they have the brand name in the ALT tag, and that the brand name has a big search volume. Avoid any hover effects, for example showing colored brand logos when black and white logos are hovered, because if CSS is used, those images are being loaded and negatively influence loading times. Low-authority shops should stick to no more than 6 brand logo links, mid-authority shops to no more than 10, and high-authority shops should definitely stop at 20. Again, if they are listed in the menu, they shouldn’t be here. If you can’t find a compromise, mask them too. With masking, you can achieve your desired link count every time; you can’t overdo it. If you end up in discussions with other stakeholders after you submit your change request, don’t give the discussion up too early, just because you can mask everything. Brand logos will still influence loading times on PHP based shops. Your homepage should also load as fast as possible - ideally not slower than 3 seconds, and in the worst cases not slower than 5 seconds. Lastly, optimizing your footer links also plays a huge role. Let’s take a look at them. The footer is like a bunch of unclosed browser tabs you think you’ll need later but never revisit - like a “watch later” trash can playlist. First, delete all links that already appear anywhere on the homepage, such as login, register, my account, wishlist, and so on. Then proceed with deleting all category and product links. Then mask the payment provider and credit card logos, as well as all social media links. So you’re left only with legal links. Try to bundle the legal links if possible and leave only the ones required by law. Check this with the legal department; they need to provide proof that every link they say is necessary, truly is. Ask them to show proof of the fee you’d have to pay a fine if that link isn’t present. If they can’t provide it, bundle them on a landing page called “legal” and link to that page instead. Okay, now half of your homepage should be gone - at least in terms of links. You usually have some room left to insert new links. That’s where the magic happens.

Bonus – The Magic of Preefooters

You might have heard about prefooters, a footer before the footer, having several columns full of links. But what should be linked from there, and does that ugly thing really work? Yes, it does. Many shops have made huge sales gains by implementing it. Look at all your ranking positions for transactional keywords, and filter them to show only Top 11 to Top 20. Now sort them by search volume. Download the list and delete all category URLs already in the menu. You’ll be left with a list of LVL3 and LVL4 categories that just need a nudge to land in the Top 10 for transactional keywords with significant search volume. All you need to do is place a link in the prefooter to those URLs using the keyword from that report. The only adjustment should be to make it plural. You can sort them and give the column a name or call it just “trending searches” like target.com does.So if you rank for “Wooden kitchen door” in position 12 with your LVL4 category, add a link in the prefooter with the anchor text “wooden kitchen doors.” You can place 20 different links in the beginning or up to 50 if you have enough room. If you run out of categories, add product pages that fit the same criteria for product keywords. And if you still have room left, add category-filter combinations if they’re set to index. Again, do this only for transactional keywords where you rank from 11 to 20 and the search volume is high. You will see a big spike in organic sales after Google’s link juice calculation is done. That usually happens no later than after a core update, which occurs about every three months, but sometimes Google initiates a separate link juice calculation for your domain when it sees big changes. And what is a big change if not a huge homepage cleanup? If that happens, you will see results in just 2 weeks. You can confirm that by analyzing your crawl stats—if you see an unusually big spike, a link juice recalculation is very likely happening.