How to Design a Home Page That Converts?
The home page of your website is extremely important. It is the most visited page and usually has the best chance of ranking high in search engines. Therefore, it is important to make sure your home page is designed well and converts visitors into customers or leads.
In the entire blog, I will be sharing some tips for designing a converting home page.
Let’s Start With Some Obvious Stuff
Logo
When it comes to your logo, people expect to see it in the top left corner of your website. This is because it’s generally the first thing people see when they visit a website. And, clicking on a company’s logo usually takes visitors back to the home page. Don’t mess with this tried-and-true convention – it’s there for a reason.
However, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to have a professional-looking logo. In fact, text-based logos can be just as effective – and they only cost a fraction of the price.
Creating a text-based logo is easy. Simply pick a font and background colour that you like, and you’re done!
Navigation
The classic menu is a familiar and comfortable way to navigate a website. People are used to seeing menus that are either horizontal or vertical. When you’re designing your website, it’s best to stick with a familiar layout that people will be able to navigate easily.
Remember that people spend most of their time on other websites. They’re used to seeing the “contact” link as the last link in a horizontal menu or the bottom link in a vertical menu. When you’re designing your website, make sure that your “contact” link is easy to find in a familiar location.
Keep your menu simple and easy to understand. Avoid any surprises that might confuse or frustrate your visitors.
Footer
When people visit your website, they expect to find your contact information in the footer. This ensures that they can easily get in touch with you if they need to.
Make sure your contact information is prominently displayed in the footer of your website.
Mapping Your Buyers’ Personas
What are buyer personas?
A buyer persona is a research-based profile that depicts a target customer. Buyer personas describe who your ideal customers are, what their days are like, the challenges they face and how they make decisions. — Amy Wright
If you want to be successful in marketing, you need to optimize your site for buyer personas. This means getting away from an egocentric point of view and talking to users about their needs and wants. People care about themselves and their problems, so buyer personas are essential for marketing success.
Why Use Them?
The key to selling anything is understanding who you’re selling to. What are their needs? What are their hesitations? If you know the answers to these questions, you’ll be in a much better position to sell them.
For example, RightNow Technologies increased its conversions by 4x by building a persona-focused site. The right selling position helps them to understand their target market and create content that resonated with them.
If you want to be successful in selling, take the time to understand your target market. It will make all the difference in the world.
How To Build Them?
Most companies only have a faint idea of what drives their customer’s purchasing decisions. A buyer persona is a tool that can help you see deeper into the buyer’s thinking.
To create buyer personas, interview your existing customers. Find out what motivates them, what challenges they face, and what they consider when making a purchase.
This information will help you create profiles of different types of buyers, which you can then use to improve your marketing and sales strategies.
Value Proposition
What’s the most important part of your home page? Your value proposition. It is a concise chunk of text (headline, sub-headline and maybe a few bullets points) that should address these questions:
- What do you do?
- Why should I buy it from you?
- What makes you different from your competitors?
If you can answer these questions in a clear, concise and compelling way, you’ll be well on your way to creating a strong value proposition that will help you win more business.
It is because people’s attention span and patience are running thin. In a world filled with distractions, it’s harder than ever to capture someone’s attention and keep them engaged.
If you don’t have a strong, attention-grabbing headline on your home page, you’ve already lost them. And if your content doesn’t deliver on what the headline promises, they’ll quickly move on.
To stand out and succeed online, you need to understand the new rules of engagement and learn how to create content that captures attention and keeps people reading.
Build A Connection
I’m sure many of you have seen the following scenario before. You have a product or service. You create some marketing materials and put them out there into the world. And then… crickets. You get no responses, no interest, and no sales. You wonder what went wrong.The problem is that you were trying to sell to everybody. And when you try to sell to everybody, you end up selling to nobody.
Let me explain with a simple example. Let’s say you have a pair of shoes that you want to sell. You could target your marketing to everybody, in the hopes that somebody, somewhere will want to buy your shoes. Or, you could target a specific group of people who are most likely to want to buy your shoes.
Which group do you think is more likely to buy your shoes? It’s the second group, of course. And that’s because when you try to sell to everybody, you’re not really selling to anybody.
When you try to sell to everybody, you’re not really selling to anybody. Why? Because you’re not speaking to anyone’s specific needs or desires. You’re not solving anyone’s specific problems. You’re not addressing anyone’s specific pain points. And when you’re not doing those things, people aren’t going to be interested in what you’re selling.
So, if you want to make more sales, you need to start selling to somebody. You need to start targeting a specific group of people with your marketing. And to do that, you need to know who your ideal customer is.
Who is your ideal customer?
Your ideal customer is the person who is most likely to buy your product or service. To find out who your ideal customer is, you need to answer the following questions:
- What needs does your product or service meet?
- What problems does your product or service solve?
- What pain points does your product or service address?
When you know the answers to these questions, you can start to narrow down who your ideal customer is. For example, let’s say you sell running shoes. Your ideal customer might be a runner who is looking for a specific type of shoe to solve a specific problem.
That is why you have to state what is your product or service and who is suitable to use them!
Most Wanted Action
Think about it, what’s the most important thing you want people to do on your site? Make that the focus of your home page. If you want people to buy something, make the buy button prominent. If you want people to sign up for your newsletter, make the signup button prominent.
Choice paralyzes, so make the next action you want people to take crystal clear. In one experiment, they changed the home page to focus on a single action and saw the users doing exactly what they wanted them to do.
Figure out what the most important thing is that you want people to do on your site, and make that the focus of your home page. Call attention to the buy button if you want people to buy something, or the signup button if you want people to sign up for your newsletter.
Thinking is hard, so don’t make your customers think. Instead, clearly indicate the next action you want them to take.
Call To Action
The best way to improve your conversion rate is to test your call to action. In one split test, by changing the wording from “Buy SMS Credits” to “View SMS prices”, they saw an uplift in conversions. This change, along with minor added trust elements, resulted in an overall conversion rate improvement of 37.6%.
In another test, they achieved an 83.4% improvement after changing the wording of their button from “Play right now!” to “Instant demo!”
So test your call to action and make sure it is benefit-oriented and indicates what happens when they click. Avoid empty words like “submit”.
Web Copy
Copywriting is super important for website optimization and a huge topic on its own. Here’s one tip: most people on your website know what they are looking for in a product or service. If they find something that looks similar to what they want, they will stay longer.
It’s important to have relevant information on your website that uses the same language and phrases that your customers use. Talk to your customers and see what language they use when talking about your products. Use this language on your website.
For example, if I’m looking for a project management software that has features like task assigning, time tracking and client management built in, those are the keywords I’m after when browsing different sites.
Above The Fold And Below The Fold
The part of a webpage visible without scrolling is called “Above the fold”. This area should contain the most important elements of the page, such as:
- The value proposition
- Some visual content
- Call to action.
Answering the most important questions that a visitor has should be the priority for the content above the fold. The length of the content below the fold should be determined based on the needs of the business.
Make The Contact Information Visible
You want people to trust your website. And one way to build that trust is by making it easy for visitors to find your contact information. That way, they know they can reach out to you with any questions or concerns. So make sure your email, phone, and live chat options are prominently displayed on every page of your site.
So, visitors will always know how to get in touch with you. And that can go a long way in building trust and confidence in your business.
Leave Room For Text
If you’re not optimizing your home page for search engines, you’re missing out on a big opportunity. Your home page has the best chance among all the pages on your site to rank high in search engines.
But this won’t happen unless there is a substantial amount of text on the page (500+ words). Use the room below the fold also for SEO – write useful stuff about your products, and services and address questions your users have, but make sure the text is optimized.
Visuals
Adding a video to your homepage can have a big impact on your conversion rate. Studies have shown that video can provide a significant boost to conversions, and video thumbnails can make a huge difference.
For example, Dropbox saw a big increase in conversions after adding a video to its homepage. And Yobongo saw a 70.9% conversion uplift after changing their video thumbnail.
So if you’re looking to increase your conversion rate, consider adding a video to your homepage.
Trust And Security
Consumers are unlikely to purchase goods or services from businesses that they do not trust. In order to build trust with potential customers, it is important to prominently display contact information and use trust marks. Trust marks can help to reduce friction and build confidence in a business.
Don’t Ignore Load Speed
Slow sites are a major conversion killer. Google knows this, which is why site speed is now a ranking factor. If you want to improve your conversions, use Google’s Page Speed Online tool to get insights into how you can speed up your site.
You can also use Google Analytics’ Site Speed report to see which of your pages are underperforming, so you can address the issue and improve your conversion rate.
It’s Never Done
Your home page should always be changing and evolving. Test different hypotheses to see what makes a difference. Remember that testing is not just about converting more customers, but learning. Understand why a change made a difference and what you can learn from it to apply elsewhere in your business.
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