7 Tips To Make a Highly Effective Homepage.

Today I want to talk to you about the elements of a home page. What goes into building a highly effective homepage? Your website can look terrible but if you have these elements, generally in the below order then you can outperform a lot of your competitors (trust me, I’ve seen some pretty terrible looking websites that killed it in generating leads).

Table of Contents

Your Unique Selling Proposition Should Be “Above The Fold” of Your Homepage.

So how do you create a home page that really speaks to your audience and actually converts users? There are some commonalities with the elements you should include on your home page. First off, you want your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) at the very top of the homepage on what’s referred to as “above the fold”. Above the fold is what users see without having to scroll down on the web site. This above the fold content should contain your “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP). So what do you put there? Think about this, what is it that makes you better than everybody else? Why should someone decide to work view instead of your competition? This is your opportunity to shine. So above the fold, you want to highlight what it is that makes you special and why people need to work with you.

Write an About Us, but Don’t Make It About You…

Next up, you should include an About Us almost immediately following the USP and Call to Action in the “Above The Fold”. This should be more geared towards your web traffic and not necessarily towards you. You could say along the lines of: “this is who we are and how we’ve helped people that are similar to you and experiencing the same problems.”

Another example is, “We’re rock stars because we solve this problem for our clients” So include things like that in your About Us section. Again, try to make it more geared towards your customer and solving their pain points and not yourself. You want to make your web traffic and potential client the main focal point of this picture that you’re painting for them.

Talk About 3 – 5 Specific Pain Points and How You Have Solved Them.

Identify three to five unique pain points that your customers may have. Then you want to talk about how you have uniquely solved those pain points. So for example, you can say: “are you tired of not having your agencies return your phone calls?” followed by “We are an agency that prioritizes our customer support with a same-day response”. You can start to see how we make them feel like we know them, we understand their problems and we have helped others overcome those problems. So you want to highlight three to five pain points that your customers are having and how you have solved them for other people.

Tell Them What You Do and How You Can Help.

Next is your product or service showcase. This is your chance to highlight what kinds of products and services that you have available that can help solve your customer’s pain points, right? Why is it that you can offer, especially if it’s something that nobody else offer, you want to highlight those in your products/services section. Remember, it should be no more than three to five headings and excerpts of your products or services. You definitely want to highlight some of your products or services with a little bit of a call to action that leads them down a “path” like another page to learn more.

Build Trust With Your Audience.

Now let’s talk about social proof. Social proof can be any, or all of these things. It can be testimonials that you’ve gathered online. It could be awards that you’ve won or special credentials that you acquired, accreditations, whatever you can give as social proof signals that eliminate that risk factor for your web traffic, right? Because you want them to trust you so they know you’re just not some fly by night provider or business. What is it that you have available? So for us, for example, this is our ninth year of business. We have probably 25 reviews right now, which isn’t a lot, but it shows that we’ve had some success with our customers and solving their pain points. It also shows our clients may not be the best at leaving reviews when we finish their work (understandable, they’re busy entrepreneurs, right?). We’ve also won some awards which would be an excellent thing to highlight and establish credibility. So you definitely highlight those things on your website. These are all great things to have in your social proof section, which generally immediately follows behind your products and services description.

What is Your Irresistible Offer?

The next step would be some sort of irresistible offer. What is something you can offer them right now that they can take advantage of, especially if it’s something that they can’t get anywhere else? You will want to include some sort of irresistible offer, to put that into an example, “we’re offering an in-depth full website analysis that teaches YOU how to improve your website”. Following the headline, maybe we’ll point out some of the pillars of the analysis like it covers: Speed & Performance, Conversion Optimization, SEO and Security, it’s 20 pages of an expert going through your website and recommending changes.

So that would be an example of an irresistible offer. Think of it as a secondary call to action. Definitely include that irresistible offer and I’m not talking about a general “Contact us for questions” (although that will follow).

Let Them Ask You Questions

Finally, you want to include a contact form for general inquiries. A tip regarding contact forms, the shorter you can have it, the more you should expect people to fill that out. In other words, name, email & message. Again, the more fields you start to add to a contact form, the less likely people are going to fill it out, try to keep it to a minimum.

To Summarize how to make a highly effective homepage:

the unique selling proposition at the top.
the about us section, which is mainly focused on your customers, not yourself.
three to five pain points and how you have uniquely solved them.
the services/products, descriptions with a little call to action, to view more on each one.
the social proof like testimonials, awards, certifications.
the irresistible offer that (hopefully) only you can provide.
the contact form for general questions.