The Soul of your Business is your Home Page

Your Home Page is the soul of your business and is possibly the most important page on your website.  It’s the front door to your business and your opportunity to make a great first impression on your visitors.

You want your visitors to land on your home page and be compelled to dig deeper, to read additional pages, to take action.  It should clearly define who you are and what you do, and it’s your opportunity to showcase your key messages.  Think of it as the digital elevator pitch for your business.

Here's some important elements that should be on your home page (and if they're not, you need to talk to me!):

Key Messages

The last thing you want is for a visitor to hit your home page and not understand what it is that you do, and more importantly, what you can do for them.  You have about 5 seconds to grab your visitor’s attention before they give up and decide to go visit your competitor’s site, so it’s important you get this right.

Your key messages should use language that resonates and engages with your audience.  Don’t use jargon and eliminate the fluff.

You want your visitor to stick around when they hit your home page, so make sure your value proposition is clear and compelling.  Your value proposition is your way of telling your visitors “why you should buy from us”.

Whilst your slogan should encapsulate your value proposition, it’s not just a single line of text that conveys your key messages – headlines and sub-headings are an important part of the visual display of your value proposition and should permeate your whole site.

Call To Action

You want your visitor to delve deeper into your website and to read more pages, so a call to action is important.  By call to action, I don’t mean that your home page needs to have a big Buy Now link (although that may be important and relevant for some home pages).  But your home page should include links that encourage your visitor to click on – don’t rely solely on your top navigation for this.

Examples of calls to action include “Free Trial,” “Schedule a Demo,” “On Sale Now” or simply “Learn More.”  These links urge your visitor on to find out more about you and your products or services.

Visual Content

In the few seconds that you have to grab your visitor’s attention, visual content such as logos and banners are a critical part of the mix.  However, it’s important to make sure your images are relevant and clearly tied to your value proposition, and each image should have an appropriate caption.  If you can’t come up with a good caption for an image, then the image probably shouldn’t be on your page.

Keep in mind also that graphics and images will increase your page load time.  There’s been lots of research on the effect of page load times and abandonment rates, with the optimal page load time being 4 seconds or less, and Google has suggested from its own research that increasing load time from 4 seconds to 9 seconds leads to a 20% reduction in traffic.

User Friendly Navigation

Once your visitors have hit your home page, seen your messages and found it interesting enough to hang around, you obviously want them visit more pages and read more about what you can do to help them.

Your site navigation is absolutely critical here – it needs to be user friendly so a visitor can easily see how they can jump to essential information about your product or service from your home page.  The navigation should be intuitive and needs to speak the customer’s language.

Keywords

There was a time when everyone was keyword stuffing – trying to put as many keywords as possible into the website in the vague hope that it would help with search engine rankings.

Those days are fortunately long gone, and search engines today care more about keyword phrases rather than exact match keywords.  In fact, if you do resort to overuse of keywords in the hope that you will appeal to search engines you are more likely to be penalized by them rather than promoted (remember, search engine algorithms are very sophisticated and are constantly being refined).

The key thing to keep in mind here is that your content should be written primarily for your audience, and not for search engines – and by doing so you’ll increase the likelihood of a better ranking.

Having said that though, your keywords are important, but make sure they are relevant and use them sparingly – a couple of keywords on your home page are plenty, but make sure they are high volume keywords.

Your Virtual Shop-front

Regardless of your business type (professional services, retail, industrial, commercial, not-for-profit etc), your website is your virtual store and your home page is your shop-front.  It’s your window through to the rest of your website.  If it’s not relevant, interesting, appealing and a little intriguing then chances are your potential visitors are going to pass right on by.

Take Action Now

If your home page (or your whole website) isn't communicating all that's great about you and your business, contact Pauline today on 0400 514579 or email pauline@worddynamics.com.au.