We loved this piece from Heather Robinson about common traps that businesses fall into when deciding what content to include on their website home page. It really resonated with us and reminded us why we always enjoy working with her at Skitti.sh when our clients need extra help with SEO and digital marketing strategy.
If your website is your online shop, your home page (or ‘homepage’) is your shop window, so it’s the last place you’ll want to be making mistakes when it comes to attracting new customers.
As with a brick and mortar store there’s a right way and a wrong way to set up your shop window to entice people off the street and into your shop. You want to make sure that what’s on display resonates with passersby and that it’s easy for them to identify a product that’s relevant to their needs. You then need to make sure you’re not blocking the door way with other stuff they don’t need and thus making a clear way for them to come on in and purchase something.
It’s the same principles for your website’s home page. You need to make sure you clearly display what they need and make it easy for them to buy. Sadly, not all home pages are created with this in mind and there are a few mistakes we see being made on a regular basis, so let’s look at just some of the mistakes you could well be making with your home page and how to avoid them.
Mistake #1: Trying to cram everything about your business onto one page
It’s tempting to want to tell visitors everything about that you do on your home page, but by doing so it’s very easy to create a cluttered and confusing experience for the user. Think back to your bricks and mortar store – you know it wouldn’t make sense to place every item in your shop in the shop window. You would usually pick out key products to showcase what you can offer. Just enough to make it clear the types of products you stock, what they expect from your shop and entice them in to view more.
Mistake #2: Not signposting visitors to the appropriate pages
When designing your home page, it’s important to think about the next steps you expect visitors to take and guide them through that process with clear CTAs (Calls-To-Action) throughout. If you don’t, you risk leaving them to wander aimlessly around your website and hope they serendipitously stumble across the information they were looking for. The problem with this is, people are impatient. If they don’t see what they’re looking for right away, they’ll look elsewhere.
Think back to your bricks and mortar store. Having clear signage in the shop for different departments makes finding the right products easier and quicker for the store visitors and avoids them having to ask for help, or worse still, leaving empty handed.
Mistake #3: Opening with your credentials
Sorry to break this to you, but your home page isn’t about you. If you open with your credentials, latest award wins or other industry accolades, you risk alienating your users and leaving them with a feeling of “So what? What does that mean for me, the customer?”.
Your home page should be about what you can do for your potential customer, what problems you solve for them. It’s fine to brag about your award wins and achievements, but make them secondary to what you do for customers. They should act as reassurance that you’re the right company to work with, but they shouldn’t take centre stage.
Think back to your bricks and mortar store. Using your shop window to display your trophies, certificates and rosettes doesn’t really help the passerby understand what you do and what you’re selling. They’ll know you’re good at it, but that’s about it!
Mistake #4: Not providing a clear call-to-action for visitors who are ready to buy
We’re often focused on convincing our audience to buy from us, providing lots of information from features and benefits lists, testimonials, sales videos and fancy graphics, but not all your website visitors will need convincing. They may be further down the decision making process and are ready to hit buy. So we need to have a clear ‘next step’ for these very valuable visitors.
Think back to your bricks and mortar store. There will be buyers that come into your store knowing exactly what they want. They don’t want to browse and admire your displays, they just want what they came for. For these customers, you need to make sure the products are easy to locate and you have a shop assistant on hand to process the transaction swiftly. Making those who are ready to buy browse the shop or wait around to make their purchase will likely send them to your competitors.
Mistake #5: Sending all your PPC traffic to your home page
If you’re paying for traffic from search engines or social media and then sending all that traffic to your home page it can be like abandoning your potential customers at the door of your bricks and mortar store with no clue how to find the product or service they had searched for. Traffic is more likely to bounce if they’re not shown something relevant to their search, so be sure to drop them off on a page with relevant information about what they were looking for.
Mistake #6: Going to town on the design and forgetting about the content
Design is important, we understand that, but sometimes the design takes over and we forget to include content that our users need to see, or even sacrifice the user experience as a whole. Form should follow function, people!
Think back to your bricks and mortar store. You could have the most amazing display in your shop window, but if your shop is empty with no clear offering, it’s kinda wasted.
Mistake #7: Leaving your page title as “Home” or “Homepage”
As an SEO, this makes me sad. Every page deserves a unique, descriptive page title, especially your home page. Your page title is what’s going to tell Google what your site is about. It’s also what shows up in Google as the blue clickable link, so it’s your opportunity to include a few keywords and make it relevant to what people would search for. By leaving your page title as “Home”, you’re essentially optimising your site for the word “Home”. Unless that’s the name of your business, that’s probably not what you want to do.
Think back to your bricks and mortar store. Naming your home page “home” is like naming your shop “shop”. It’s doesn’t really help people understand what you do, what you sell and for whom, so be more creative!
In conclusion…
There are so many tweaks you can make to your home page to better improve the experience for users. And don’t feel like you can’t change the design once in a while. Bricks and mortar stores will change up their displays to showcase new products all the time, so why not take inspiration from them and experiment with a new layout?
For more from Heather and Skittish, visit www.skitt.sh