The homepage of your business website is an important player in your marketing strategy. It is a snapshot of the most important aspects of your business. It is the compass that directs visitors to the information they are looking for and the action you want them to take. While your homepage should be clean, simple, and concise, the steps you take to get there tend to be the opposite. It can be challenging to generate, prioritize, and convey information in the most efficient and effective way. This important page impacts your entire business website, so here are some tips to help you write successful content for your homepage.
Coming Up With Homepage Content
This tips will help you if you’re having trouble figuring out what to write in your homepage.
Put Yourself in Your Visitors’ Shoes
To come up with the best content for your homepage, you must first get in the right mindset. Rather than thinking about what you want to convey to your visitors, think more about what your visitors want out of your website. Some questions to help you get in the shoes of your visitors include:
- What are they looking to accomplish? What do they want to know?
Think about this with respect to the various channels by which they might arrive at your homepage. They may have just finished reading a blog post and want to know more about your business. Or they may have found your website because your business showed up first on Google Maps.
- What are their problems and pain points?
How urgent are those needs? For example, if you are a heating/cooling or repair service, you may have visitors who need fast service and might even be a bit on edge. Therefore the tone of your homepage content may be urgent but reassuring. If you are a hair salon, visitors may not be looking to schedule an appointment asap and may be primarily attentive to styles and pricing. In this case, your homepage content might be more colorful and visually based.
- What kinds of questions do they have? How would they ask those questions?
Think about the information that your visitors need immediately in order to continue engaging with your site. Then think about what words they’d use to ask those questions. This will help you to identify the essential content for your homepage.
Conveying Homepage Content
You may know what you want to write, but may not be sure how to write it. Here are some guidelines for getting the proper message across.
Everything in Moderation
Your homepage content should have an element of enthusiasm to facilitate a positive user experience and show that you are passionate about your business. However, you don’t want to overdo it. Too much excitement can be overwhelming and even come off as ingenuine. Don’t beg visitors for their attention; earn it and direct it to a select few highlights of your business.
Write to Individuals
While your business website is up for the entire internet using population to see, you don’t need to write content that appeals to the masses. In fact, this will wash out and weaken it. Your homepage content should resonate with your target audience. Furthermore, remember that regardless of how large your target audience is or how high your traffic is, the vast majority of sessions on your website are individual experiences. Therefore you should write the content on your homepage as if you are writing to or conversing with an individual, not a large audience.
Focus More on Benefits than Features
Your homepage content should present the most important information and attractive aspects of your business. However, remember the mindset you should be in: customer first, then business. With this mindset, your content should primarily focus on benefits rather than features.
Features are the highlights of your products and services that make your business stand out. Benefits, however, refer to what the customer gets as a result of those features. For example, if a cleaning company’s feature is the use of nontoxic cleaning products, they may present it on their homepage in a benefit first way, such as “Enjoy the comfort of a clean, toxin-free home, thanks to our nontoxic cleaning products.”
Presenting Homepage Content
Above the Fold
The term “above the fold” originates with newspapers, as this is the first information a person sees before opening it up. The digital version of “above the fold” is the view of your web page that visitors see before scrolling down. Make sure your most important and attractive information is above the fold of your homepage. This includes contact information, calls to action, and even important benefits.
Diversify
Your homepage is meant to inform, but in an appealing way to users. It is best to break up text with high quality images and other “blocks,” such as headings, text boxes and other call-outs. This creates more of an experience for the user and sets a nice pace for consuming and digesting information
Your homepage content dictates the way your target audience perceives your business and interacts with the rest of your site. Follow these tips to create the best experience for your visitors and outcomes for your business.
