Your website homepage is the single most important page on your website, people will judge your site (and your company) within 5 seconds of landing on it. You need to bear in mind that visitors are a fickle bunch, they have come to find information and don’t want to trawl through many words or pages to find it, so there is certain content that needs to be easily findable on your homepage.
1. What do you do?
This may seem like teaching you to suck eggs but you’d be surprised at how many brands are not clear on their site about what they do. Just because you know what it is doesn’t mean new visitors do and this is the number one most important content on your homepage. Make it simple and make it clear what you do.
2. What’s in it for them?
Another one that tends to get taken for granted, make it really clear what the benefit is to your visitor of dealing with your company. Why should they speak to you above others? What makes you so special? Remember to talk in their language and don’t just list benefits but back them up.
3. Testimonials/Customer logos
Which leads nicely on to this point – get some rave testimonials from your current clients that back up why you’re the best option. Make sure they’re from a good mix, not just huge brands or teeny ones and get a good cross-section of all the industries you work in. Customer logos where you can get them add a nice dimension to this so you have words and colourful logos to grab attention. And put these where they can be seen, not hidden at the bottom of a page – these are your references!
4. What do you want them to do?
When a visitor lands on your site you should make a nice clear path for them to follow – don’t just rely on your top navigation and expect them to end up magically at your sign up page or picking up the phone. Decide what you want the next step to be from the homepage and make it clear with a bold button or arrow. Don’t have too many paths or they will get confused, 2-3 is a good number.
5. How can they contact you?
Sometimes what you have on your site isn’t enough for them to make a decision, and pointing them to a web form will just frustrate or put of prospective customers. Give them options, a phone number plus an email address plus a web form if you really want – and put them somewhere easy to find. A nice trick is to measure what phone calls come from the website and you can do this using technology such as Ad Insight or Fresh Egg – they basically show a different phone number to each person that visits the site and then you can see where they came from , how many visits they had inbetween calls and even mark leads against them
