"...increase your page rank and traffic, while making your pockets heavier."
A great homepage is clean, easy to navigate, has an effective call-to-action, and is integrated with social media. Working on improving these elements will not only please your visitors, but also increase your page rank and traffic, while making your pockets heavier
Effective Call-to-Actions
As competition between businesses and their competitors increases, it’s becoming increasingly vital to optimize your conversion rates. One method of achieving this is by improving your call-to-actions. Surprisingly there are still many websites with poor call-to-actions.
Many companies have pages dedicated to services they offer—which are great, but they often only talk about why people need the particular service and their solution. These type of pages have great, relevant content. However, they don’t focus on the call-to-action, and if you think of each of those pages as a salesperson, they probably wouldn’t meet quota.
Sticking to the salesperson analogy, it’s important to think of a page like a sales rep. Assume it’s the first page a visitor views, give them just enough information to satisfy their initial craving, then entice them to make the next step. Good sales reps know customers contact them in various stages of the buying cycle and therefore need to present and entice various options. A “Buy Now” button may entice a visitor who is ready to make a purchase, where a “Download Manual” button may satisfy a visitor who wants to ensure the product is easy to assemble before buying it.
Review your pages to ensure they contain these elements to drive all visitors further down the sales funnel. You may only have some small adjustments to make, which can improve your conversion rate.
Integrate Social Media
As a business professional, you’re probably aware that word-of-mouth is the best source of advertising. Yet so many websites are not integrated with social media. Two-thirds of North Americans are active on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Foursquare, so don’t wait any longer.
A few methods to integrate social media include the basics such as adding links on your homepage to deepen integration like adding share buttons to your blog or a Facebook Like box. A Facebook Like box can display images of the visitors’ friends if they’re connected with the company. This increases the trust factor and increases conversions.
Improving Your Message
Our ability to focus our attention seems to be a challenge these days—it’s quite possibly a product of our environment. Whatever the reason, attention spans are decreasing because technology is making it easier for people to get the information they’re looking for—instantly. According to multiple studies, the average attention span online is about 8 to 10 seconds. This makes it very important to deliver your intended message in a clear and concise manner. These messages should show the user where to go, quickly and easily.
- Use short messages
- Use short paragraphs
- Use large text and easy to read fonts
