For most businesses, the most visited page on your website is your company's homepage. However, it's typically one of the most neglected when it comes to creating a high-converting website.
Many people approach their company's homepage from the wrong perspective and think about the wrong things. Let's take a look at five ways to quickly and easily fix your homepage without being a developer:
- A Clear Headline
- Acknowledge the Customers Biggest Problems
- Social Proof
- Answering Customers Critical Questions
- Call to Action
Creating a Clear Headline
When somebody visits your website, you have about two seconds to get their attention and keep them engaged, so they want to stay. Otherwise, they'll just bounce and move on to the next result.
The headline should send the message that "we acknowledge who you are. We acknowledge that you have these specific problems. And here's what we do in order to fix that."
Companies usually try to create a catchy tagline or something people can remember and use later on. But if you remove the company and brand from the discussion, if the headline doesn't resonate with exactly who you are and what you do, you won't be memorable.
What Do you Do?
The second thing is to answer the question of what you do right away. Oftentimes, we see companies using buzzwords and jargon that sound cool. They'll go through a long process of deciding what the slogan should be. And they'll come up with things like "data-driven solutions for a complex world," or something equally uninspiring.
I guarantee that if you use the words "data-driven" or anything like that to describe your company, you're completely missing the mark. (And the customers.)
Because that word, like most other buzzwords, can apply to almost any industry. So you're wasting expensive website real estate. You need to be more focused on who you're talking to and how you solve their problems. And it should be their biggest problem.
Building Social Proof
As we move through the page, we've acknowledged our customers and now we want to tell them, "We see you. We understand you because we know these are your three biggest problems."
You need to tell them what you do at the start so they know they're in the right place. We want to highlight the issues that they're facing in a way that's very simple. Nothing convoluted or wordy. We're not creating a great big blog post (like this one).
The social proof doesn't have to be a big section of your website. You can often get away with just three columns and three boxes to discuss it. This is a great way to help people understand they're in the right place and to understand more about what you do and how you solve their problems. Building social proof allows you to have more credibility for prospects.
But it's not time spent talking about yourself. No one wants to buy you, they want to buy solutions. If you go back to the late 1990s and early 2000s of websites, you'll see that people spent all their time talking about their websites and what their companies did.
They would say "We've been in business for 50 years servicing the Whitewater Valley are. Our customers love coming back to us time and again." Except they never told the customer that they need to do business with them. It was all about them and not the customer.
And it hasn't changed. Your social proof is not just all about you, it's about your customers.
Having said all that, you can't ignore your history either; you need to do it a little.
It's a fine line to walk between talking about yourself and talking about your company. Some buyers want to know they're dealing with a legitimate company. And if that lends credibility to your brand, then we have to make sure we highlight it. But we can do it in very tasteful ways.
So instead of making the whole page about your history, you just want to show that you know what you're doing. You just can't be boring.
One way is with client testimonials. Just some quick words — about 50 or so — of success. Maybe it's an excerpt from a longer testimonial, or maybe from an email they sent about their experience. But let other people tell your story, not you.
I especially like to take the case study route and add anything that's visual, like screenshots of results you've generated or photos of projects you've completed. Anything visual is good to add, but videos are even better.
Answering The Right Questions
List the most common questions towards the bottom of the page, like a frequently asked questions list. It could be something like, "How much does it cost to work with you?" or "How does this process go?" The more questions, the more likely people will Google those questions, which will bring them to you
If you can get the questions in front of them as they move through the website, they're subconsciously checking off those items they want to have answered. One of the best ways to find them is to literally go through previous sales conversations. Think about your last several clients, write out the questions they've had, and see which ones stand out the most.
Some of them can be answered quickly and easily, others need extensive content around them. Some even deserve entire blog posts and social media campaigns. If one person has that question, odds are other people do too, so the more you can answer, the more you're likely to hook them.
Create A CAll to Action
Generally, calls to action are activities you want visitors to do on that specific page, like "Call us" or "Request a free demo." But just putting your phone number or email on the page is not enough.
You need a very clear CTA of what you want people to do. If you sell software and want people to sign up for a demo, then you need to literally say "Sign up for a demo" or "Get a free 14-day trial."
Or maybe you're a consultant trying to schedule strategy sessions. You want your CTA to be extremely clear and prevalent in different sections of the homepage plus all the other pages on your website. You want visitors to see it over and over as they move through your website.
Expand the CTA and give them a clear path to success within that action. For example, tell them the three steps that have to happen in order to get started with you.
"First, you'll book a call or a demo. Second, we'll assess your issues. Third, we'll lay out your game plan. If you want to take these three steps, just click this link."
This way, you're breaking down their barriers and hesitations, as well as giving them a clear outcome of what success looks like.
So to recap the five ways to make your homepage convert better.
- Write a clear headline that says what you want to say.
- Acknowledge their biggest problem.
- Build social proof with testimonials (and a little bit about your company).
- Answer their most critical questions that keep them from their success.
- Be very, very clear about the call to action you want them to take.
Putting these five easy steps into place can transform your website's overall success. Remember, it's most likely the highest visited page on your website, so you want to make sure it's the best and most informative that it can be.
Our own call to action
If you want to dive a little deeper into transforming your webpage, we're happy to help. We have a website conversion assessment that goes through six areas of our website conversion framework.
You'll answer several questions, and your answers will generate your own detailed report that's customized to your company. You'll also receive a checklist of things that you should work on for each individual area. And we can even walk you through the entire report. Take your free website conversion assessment today.
