If you’ve ever been frustrated with the number of people who find your website but don’t take any action, today’s episode is for you. I’m going to be giving you five concrete ways you can spruce up your homepage so that people will stick around and take the next step once they find you in search results.
Welcome to the She Can SEO podcast. I’m your host, Emily Fontes, and I help female entrepreneurs get found on Google, Pinterest, YouTube, and Etsy so that they can rapidly grow their businesses. Don’t feel intimidated by all the techie bro marketing strategies that dominate this industry. There is a simpler, more intuitive way to do SEO branding and marketing. You just need me to show you how.
Let’s talk about some ways that we can improve your homepage so that the people who visit, stay and look around and get to know you better. There’s a few things that I usually will do when I jump in and start working on redesigning a client site or building one from scratch.
#1 – Use Clean, Professional Photography
The first and probably the most important, is that you need to double check that you’re using really good solid images and photos on your homepage. This is probably the most important thing because images create automatic subconscious reactions in people. When we don’t have good emotional imagery on a homepage, it can create blocks where people don’t find a reason to stay. The imagery that you use does a couple things.
Number one, it’s going to create a quick connection to the type of vibe that you represent in your business, your business personality, your brand personality. Whether the image is edgy or the photo is cheerful or the photo is dark or the photo is aspirational. All of these things are going to make an impact on how people feel when they hit your website and that is really what imagery is about. It’s about creating feelings. If you have a business where you are a service based female entrepreneur, if you also serve female service-based entrepreneurs, usually using a photo of yourself that is on-brand will be fantastic. Same thing if you are a speaker or a podcaster, usually personal brand photography will work great.
But if you work in an industry where, let’s say you help families, usually you want an image that’s more connected to the ideal client. So instead of having an image of you, maybe you would want to have a picture of a family, or a dad and a baby, or a sibling with their mom. That could be a better choice for that industry. If you have an eCommerce business, then having photos of your products in use, or really clear, crisp, clean photos of your product will probably be a good choice.
But the key is no matter what type of business you have, you need to have very high end looking clean professional images. Typically having them at a large scale will create a better emotional response with your potential clients. See what you can do to spruce up the photos on your homepage. You should probably have more than one, usually you’ll have one really big one towards the top of the page and then maybe two to four sprinkled down the pages you go. So double check those, how can they be improved, how can you punch it up and make sure those images are really speaking to the emotional state you want your ideal client to be in.
#2 – Add Some Testimonials
The next thing that you can work on is adding some testimonials to your homepage. Usually testimonials or client stories will get added other places in the site and that’s great, but you should definitely be including them on the homepage as well. Number one that’s going to get you really good word count and word count is something that’s important to ranking. Number two, it’s social proof. People like to see that as soon as they hit a website and if you could include the photo of the client and the client’s name as well, that will be really good. They don’t have to be all the way up at the top if you don’t want them to. They can be towards the bottom or sprinkled throughout, but definitely get some testimonials on there that will help get your page really looking great.
#3 – Use a Free Opt In
The third thing that you should include on your homepage is an opt in of some kind. Whether that is a quiz or a freebie or an email list or an upcoming class. Any of those things are fantastic. Give someone a clear next step for how they can continue being in touch with you or get something right away that would solidify the potential relationship with that ideal client right there on the homepage before they move any place else. Give them the opportunity to opt in in some way.
#4 Include a Miniature Bio
The fourth thing that I want you to do is to add some sort of a miniature bio to your homepage. This does not have to be complicated, but it is the perfect opportunity to make your homepage more personal. That’s one thing that sometimes I see as lacking is that we are a little bit afraid of being seen and that translates into not giving that personal connection right off the bat. So if you want to pull just a couple sentences out of your about page and put them on the homepage, that’s a really good idea, with a photo of you. Of course, one thing I would encourage you to do is to try and loop something about your ideal client into that miniature bio. So if you’re a copywriter and your specialty is really helping people unlock their words, then doing something like, “hi, I’m Angela, I am a copywriter and I love words. Most of the people I work with, they have a hard time describing what they do and why it’s important and that’s why I have decided to blah blah, blah, blah blah.” So you’ve framed your work in the terms of the needs and problems of your ideal client. So you’re writing a bio but it’s also about them. And that’s a really good way to do it and a good way to make that connection right off the bat because you’re hitting those potential pain points. Throw a little mini bio on that homepage, make sure it is not too big, just five to seven sentences is perfect. You could even do it bullet point style if you want.
#5 Do a Brand Consistency Check
And then the fifth thing that I think is really important for a home page touch-up is to go through and do a brand consistency check. And what that means is you are checking to make sure that your fonts and your colors are consistent all throughout that page. Really it should be all throughout your website, but if we’re only working on the homepage, I want you to be sure that you are using the same font for every single headline on the page and maybe you have a decorative font that you use for little accents here and there. That’s fine and you should probably have a consistent paragraph font that you use for blocks of text. And what it means to be consistent with those is that the font is always the same and that the sizing and the color is also always the same. If you always use new Nunito for the paragraph text in 14 pixel font size in black, that should be in every single place the same. If your headlines are always Raleway in a specific color of teal at 40 pixels size, then make sure all those headlines are exactly the same.
These are the types of things that someone may not specifically pick out and say, gosh, why is she using different sizes of fonts. That’s not likely to happen unless that person is a designer. But people have subconscious reactions they’re not even aware of, like they’ll be able to say, “this site’s kind of not that great”, or they could be judgy about it without being able to pinpoint exactly what’s wrong or it’ll just make them feel like it’s unprofessional or dated. Those are the types of things that you don’t want people to be having subconscious reactions to. So if you can keep your design nice and clean, making sure that all your fonts and colors are consistent, that’s going to be really important for making sure people will stay and find out more about you. If you don’t know for sure what your colors are, there’s a couple of resources I can drop in the show notes here that allow you to go pick the colors out of your logo. So you just upload your logo and you can pick the colors right out of it and it’s going to give you a six digit alphanumeric code, which we call a hex code for the color. Anytime you’re in your website builder and it allows you to define the color, you’re just going to drop that six digit code in and it will make sure that it’s the exact color match every single time. If you’ve never done that before, that’s the best way that you can make sure that your colors are always consistent. My recommendation is that you should really only have two to three fonts and two or three colors within a website unless you’ve had a professional designer sort that out for you. So if you’re doing this yourself, which is fantastic, just stick to those basics and it should be a lot easier to keep things consistent. When things get more complicated, then it’s easier for it to go off the rails.
All right. Those are my suggestions for you and if you can just set aside 10 to 15 minutes for each of those, whenever you can grab that time. Like, let’s say your kids are having lunch, that’s a perfect time to go just do a 10 to 15 minute snippet. It’s just a quick bite, quick changes, quick tweaks that you can make to your website, to your homepage that can make a big improvement. And sometimes people get caught up in, gosh, I need to sit down and redo this whole page and I can only do that if I give myself four hours to do it. And that’s a perfect recipe for not getting anything done. If you can just take the time to do 10 to 15 minute little snippets, whenever you find a little corner in your schedule, that is probably a better way to make progress. And it’s go and make a small little change today that you can get done and continue that for the rest of the week. By the end of the week, you should have a nice spruced up home page.
If you love the changes, I want to hear about it. Drop me a link on Instagram, show me your homepage. I would love to see it and let you know my thoughts. I promise to be encouraging and gentle and excited for you because I know how much work it is to do this and to be in charge of your own website. It is a big responsibility. I’m excited for you. I’m proud of you for making the effort and I can’t wait to see how it look