Five things you need to include on your website’s homepage
I have previously written a blog post about 5 things you need to include on your website which, if you haven’t read that yet, I highly recommend reading that first and then coming back here to learn about the 5 things you need on your homepage specifically.
Generally speaking your homepage is your first impression. Although not always the case as your audience might have stumbled upon your blog post first (like you now perhaps) but the majority of the time it’s where people searching on google for your services will find you and land on your site.
This is why it’s super important to ensure that your homepage has at least these 5 key things to allow your audience to instantly know who you are, what you do and what the next step in their journey with you is.
Table of Contents
1. Hero banner
The hero banner is what you see first when you land on a website’s homepage. Depending on the type of business this is for it can be anything from a welcome message with an image of the business owner or it could be a product image with a link to start shopping.
Considering that the average amount of time your audience will spend on your website is around 15 seconds you don’t have a lot of time to prove yourself. A hero banner acts as the “hello” from yourself to your customers, it’s where you make first contact with your audience so work out what it is you want them to be thinking when they arrive on site.
Ensure that your banner has a clear heading and a call to action as this immediately tells your audience, “hey, this is what offer and this is where you can get it”.
2. Your offering
Depending on the type of business you are whether you are strictly serviced based or product based or both you might want to use one or both of these options below.
Products
If you sell products you absolutely want to be showcasing at least a few of your featured products on your homepage. This gives a brief insight to the customer straight away after landing on your website, that this is what you sell. They might have bypassed the hero and started scrolling straight away but once they start to see your product listings they will stop and be able to tell whether this is something they’re interested in.
This is also why you want to make sure that you have beautiful product design or packaging design. Clearly this depends on the product you sell but don’t just create a candle in a jar and stick a label on it and take the photo yourself. Invest in having you branding designed first, your product and packaging design and then hire a product photographer to do a photo shoot of your products for your site. There’s nothing worse than badly lit, low quality imagery on a website, it looks unprofessional and that’s not what you want!
This also applies to online courses and digital products as well as tangible products. Have digital assets designed for your course or a digital book cover.
Don’t forget to include call to actions here too where the audience can quickly either add to basket or buy your product.
Services
For service based businesses ensure that you are talking about your services on your homepage. This doesn’t have to be super lengthy, just a couple paragraphs (which are optimised for SEO) that briefly explain what you bring to your clients and then a call to action which takes your audience to a separate page where they can find out more about these services.
Use imagery for your services too. Invest in a professional photographer to take photos of you or to solutions that you create. For example a hair salon should have a tonne of photos of the styles they’ve created or a therapist might want photos of them in their therapy suite appearing calm and friendly.
3. Portfolio
Again this really depends on the type of business you have but photos of your products or your hair salon or whatever it is that you do are what people want to see. They want to be shown that your solutions are worth the investment.
You wouldn’t hire a photographer without first having a look through their portfolio to see that they actually take decent photos. So have a think about that and what does your audience want to see from you?
This doesn’t need to be a massive full size slideshow gallery either for your homepage it can just be 3 to 6 smaller images and a link to your portfolio page or gallery.
4. SEO Consideration
I have touched on this briefly but SEO can’t be skipped when it comes to your website. For any page actually not just your homepage but for now I’m just going to aim this towards your homepage for a quick insight.
When you start thinking about what you need on your homepage with all of the other options I talk about in this post you need to start off by writing up your content and I would start by noting down a few headings to start with of the sections you are going to include on your homepage and then do a little keyword research. There are tools online where you dig deep into this but if you’re not heavy on the knowledge behind SEO just put yourself in your audience’s shoes and ask yourself what they are typing into google.
This could be something super simple too like “beauty salons Leeds”. If you already have a website you can always check this out in your analytics tool and Google search console to see what you’re currently ranking for and other keywords that you aren’t doing great with but would like to improve. Once you’ve figured out what these keywords are you want to write content around these.
For the purpose of this post I’m not going to go too heavy on this as it’s a huge subject to cover and there’s a lot of things that you want to avoid doing but I would always advise speaking your web designer first.
5. Calls to action
This is again something I have already touched on but it’s a super important one because if you don’t have calls to action how can anyone know where to buy from you or book with you?
Ensure that your calls to action are clear in where they will lead the customer, for example, “book now” allows the customer to understand they’re probably going to be led to a booking form. You also want these calls to action to be bold whether they’re in capital letters on a coloured background or bold text with a button that changes on hover, make sure that they stand out.
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