Optimizing Your Home Page for Increased Conversion
For every online business your home page is vital to your conversion. Business owners who know this spend time and money putting their home page in good shape for big time business.
What is a Home Page?
A home page is the door into your business. That’s where you welcome people into the services and products you offer. You need to put that door in order so it’s not shut against you and your business.
Your home page is a conversation between you and your customer. You must use the content of the Home page to connect vitally with your visitors. If the communication is strong it will make the visitor stay on the page to listen more to what you have to say.
A Home Page is where you work hard to remove what I call ‘’buyers block’’ some call it ‘psychological resistance’ to buy, my mentor calls it ‘friction’. Your Home Page is not where you sell. It should not be salesy. It is where you win the mind of your prospects to buy.
The first 4 inches of your Home Page is very strategic for attracting the attention of your prospects. This is true especially if you do PPC ads. People will click and land on your home page the question is what do you have on your page that will grasp their attention and get them to hang around and hear you out.
People click from search engine and PPC ads to some pages and only find prices brandished all over the headline nothing really to convince them to hang around so they hit the back button.
Sometime I see web pages where the key elements of the page are hidden down below and written with tiny fonts that are difficult to read. Though they are what will convince a visitor to consider doing business with you, it is not where they will easily see it. Remember a visitor only has 7 seconds to decide if he will stay on your page and consider you or hit the back button. This is why there is high bounce rate.
Common Errors on Home Pages
- Your Home page does not have a “wow factor”.
- Multiple columns
- Your Home Page is beautifully designed but no real content that converts. Remember you’re not in a beauty contest but business.
- Misuse of color.
- Distracting slides and visuals.
- Multiple call-to-action on one page.
- No clearly stated value proposition
- No proper messaging to connect with the prospect
- No headline and sub headline to make a visitor engage with the website.
- Your Home Page display prices within the vital inches of a page. There may be cheaper prices elsewhere. So what you should display is your USP. That special thing about your company that customers will love and cannot get any other place.
A Home Page that will Convert Must Have These:
- A strong attention grabbing Headline
- A strong complimentary sub headline
- State with bullet points what makes your company or product trustworthy.
- Make it punchy. Use the right words.
- Don’t make bogus unverifiable claims.
- State facts. Don’t say you’re the fastest or largest. Give numbers and stats to prove it.
4 Clearly state your evidential.
5 Use testimonials strategically.
6 Why should they do business with you?
7 Why should they trust you?
Your Only Factor
What is your company’s ‘’Only Factor”? By this I mean what do you do or offer that any other business or company do not have or do? If you don’t have one then you should begin to create one now and display it where visitors can clearly and easily see it.
Your Home Page should be able to tell the prospective customer in a simple and understandable way why you are the right company for them. You have several competitors out there who are also doing well but what makes you the go-to company. What makes you the company a customer should bring out his credit card and order your products?
Your ‘’Only Factor’’ is your Unique Selling Proposition/Position, some call it Value Proposition. It is your selling point, your ‘’magic wand’’ if you like. Remove all distracting elements on the page. Anything that will take away the prospects attention away from the page or your USP or “wow factor” or “only factor” should be removed.
Your home page should resonate with your products “only factor”, every element on the page should point to it. No visitor on your page should miss it. It should be so clear, simple and penetrating enough to pass the message to all your prospects.
© 2017 Kevin Ashwe
