5 Tips to Optimise your Homepage
Picture this…Your SEO strategy is out of this world. Your marketing plan is right on point. People are learning about your business and product(s). They are streaming into your website, and finally, that feeling of success is starting to dawn on you. The leads are finally coming! All that time spent strategising and planning as you burn the midnight oil is eventually paying off.
With traffic now getting to your website, are you certain the homepage layout and content is adequate enough to keep that traffic engaged? Is it enough to result to conversion?
When potential customers visit your website, the homepage is likely the first thing they see. Of course, there are other ways for them to scratch beneath the surface of the site, but the homepage is likely to be the gateway. You need to have particular elements on the page to serve as a guide to visitors on where you need them to go because of the number of views that one page will receive.
Repeating an old cliché, first impressions do indeed matter, more so when it is about the most common thing potential customers will see on your website. A good homepage, it has been established, can result to many sales, so paying every component some thought is a good idea.
The Headline
The headline is what you would call the title of your website. And most likely, it’s the first thing anyone visiting your site will see. A typical headline consists of six to twelve words at the max which doesn’t seem much, right?
The headline though, remains one of the most important components of your homepage so much so that one study by Kissmetrics found a good headline to increase conversion rates by as much as 10.4 percent.
Granted, how do you come up with the perfect headline? Talking about it and blogging about the subject-matter may have led you to believe it’s no mean task. Quite on the contrary though. One thing you need to bear in mind is that writing for your entire audience is impossible to pull off. Rather, focus on writing for the 20 to 30 percent of visitors most likely to make a purchase after paying your website a visit.
Come up with a couple of different headlines, as many as you feel you need to jumpstart your creative motors. Leave the ideas as they are at this point. At times you can take parts from different ideas and bring them together to form the perfect headline.
Don’t forget your headline needs to answer the question, ‘What does this website offer me?’, just a few seconds of visiting the website.
Benefits
A great headline can pull in leads, but it can’t stick without revealing the benefits of your product or service. It’s a good idea to list what your product or service does, but what else the potential customers will be interested in knowing is how it matters to them.
Additionally, they will want to know why they should opt for your product or service as opposed to the competition’s. List your benefits in a clear manner, and let your customers know why they need your offering.
Read more tips on optimising your homepage on page 2
