Although it’s not often talked about, SEO is technically a page-by-page thing. When you get down to it, search engines index individual pages. SEO techniques are implemented on individual pages. The concept of optimising page-by-page can lead to costly misunderstandings. A lot of businesses approach SEO as a page-optional process, opting to customise their home page and perhaps their main pages but no further.

This can be a mistake because the whole site needs to be taken into consideration in your search engine optimisation plan, whether you use it or not. Your internal structure and the whole of your content can be used to support the SEO of one page. The internal pages are some of your site’s greatest assets, as they can be used to draw search engine focus to a chosen page, so many internal pages may be touched to optimise a home page. In many ways, part of the work is done on optimising your whole site regardless of how many pages actually feature SEO techniques.

Optimising for a home page only is a bit of a waste of your business assets. While your site may be able to compete for a range of keywords, the SEO for your home page will focus on one or two keywords only. Having this kind of focus is not such a waste when you have a small site. When your site is larger, the waste of opportunity can really cost your business down the track.

Whole-site optimisation is also smarter. Not everyone pays attention to the front doors of the internet. Any page can be a landing page for a user, and every page needs to carry through the value promise of your home page. If your SEO plan has been carried out properly, you will be prepared with a number of potential landing pages within your site. The content throughout the site will be focussed because of the work done on keywords. The end result is a holistic approach that provides value to users through every page, rather than obviously reeling them in with the home page and dumping them.

In the end, optimising your whole site provides you with far more opportunities. While financial constraints are understandable limitations that may affect any search engine optimisation campaign, taking the long-term plan for your site into account is essential when approaching SEO. Applying SEO to one page only may turn out to be false economy, when the rest of the site clearly needs work to maximise your potential. Optimising only your home page is a little like building half an arch! For the solidity and coherence of your site, it’s better to build it all at once.

A very small amount of research within the SEO community will reveal that search engine optimisation isn’t a simple, step-by-step thing, and it’s why we advise on whole site optimisation here at SEO Consult. Although you can optimise your home page only, SEO isn’t entirely suited to optimising in this one-page-at-a-time way.

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