Your business’ website is one of your most valuable assets. In fact, your website may be the only impression of your business that some potential clients may have. Of course, you want to get those warm leads to become actual clients by taking the next step from visiting your website to actually contacting your business for products or services.
In order to accomplish this, your website – and particularly your homepage – needs to have several key components to be successful. For a good homepage that actually converts, review these 4 important tips for optimizing your homepage for web traffic.
Tip 1: Good Content = Good Homepage
Determine the long-tail keyword that is most relevant to your business and develop your homepage content around that keyword. Don’t overwhelm your site visitors with too much text: instead, use headlines to draw attention as well as columns and bullet points to organize content. Keep your main points and all calls to action above the fold so viewers don’t need to scroll.
Tip 2: Optimization for SEO
Be sure to incorporate the ONE long-tail keyword that you chose in your main page content and value proposition. Include it also in: the meta description, your headlines, your title and even on images. Don’t waste your time by trying to optimize the homepage for more than one keyword.
Tip 3: User-Friendly Menu
Your menu (top navigation) should be branded to match the rest of your site and should look the same on every page of the site. Be sure that the menu is large enough to see clearly: a good way to test this is to step 5 feet away from your computer and see if you can still easily read the menu. Make sure your menu is descriptive so users can find what they are looking for. Include up to 8 tabs, but no more – your menu is supposed to be a helpful guide, not an overwhelming mess of content.
Tip 4: Effective Calls to Action
Remember that you have about five seconds to grab web visitors’ attention.
Good calls to action are the most critical aspect to having a good homepage that converts. Develop at least one call to action from the homepage that will take the user to a landing page where they can enter their contact information in return for more information or a special offer, etc. It is a good idea to include a 2nd and even a 3rd call to action so that you ensure that you are appealing to the majority of your visitors by emphasizing a couple of different points. Set a goal of having at least a 25% click through rate on your calls to action.
In conclusion, you will want to continuously observe analytics on your homepage and test it in order to tweak and optimize it for maximum performance. Some suggestions for testing include:
- Ask employees, clients or even friends of your company to take a quick look at your homepage and provide feedback.
- Create a survey (Survey Monkey works pretty well) to send out to customers who have actually converted while on your site. Use this as a tool to identify what made the difference for them and then focus on what you are doing right.
- Occasionally change the placement or wording of your calls to action to determine what converts best.
