048: Essential Elements of a High-Converting Homepage

In this episode, Jules White discusses the most important elements your homepage needs to effectively engage visitors and convert them into customers.

Jules explains the critical role of the hero section—the area above the fold—where you have less than three seconds to grab a visitor's attention. She offers advice on crafting compelling headlines, selecting appropriate images, and ensuring your call-to-action is clear and prominent. She also delves into how to introduce the problem you solve, establish trust and authority, and guide visitors through clear steps to achieve the desired transformation for your customers.

Key Takeaways:

• The Hero Section: Learn how to optimise the crucial area above the fold with engaging headlines and effective imagery that doesn't obscure your message.
• Introducing the Problem: Discover strategies to immediately capture your audience's attention by addressing their pain points and showing empathy.
• Establishing Trust and Authority: Find out how to position yourself as a trusted guide by showcasing testimonials, client results, and leveraging social proof.
• Steps to Success: Understand how to outline clear, simple steps that guide visitors towards becoming customers, highlighting the transformation they can expect.
• Optimising Your Homepage: Get insights on structuring your homepage to match your business goals, keeping it clear, and evolving it over time for better results.

If you're looking to enhance your website's homepage for better engagement and conversions, this episode is a must-listen!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• AnswerThePublic: A tool for discovering the questions people are asking online.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Homepage Essentials
• 1:05 The Hero Section: Above the Fold
• 3:12 Identifying and Addressing Problems
• 4:28 Establishing Authority and Trust
• 5:36 Steps to Success
• 7:10 Additional Information and SEO
• 8:25 Frequently Asked Questions
• 9:01 Call to Action and Footer
• 11:53 Conclusion and Final Tips

Transcript

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT - MAY CONTAIN ERRORS

Hi, So today I wanted to talk about the most important things that you need on your homepage. It's one of those topics that I feel like is so important for your website.

Quite often when we look at website analytics, the homepage is the page that gets the majority of traffic, really. Other than maybe one or two blog posts, usually, it is the homepage that gets the most amount of traffic. So I'm just going to go through some sections you need to have on your homepage where you can just have a little check and see if you're missing some of this information.

Then that's quite a good place to start in terms of actually refining your website and making it better.

The Hero Section: Above the Fold

So the first one is the bit above the fold. This is the hero section and this is the part where we have less than three seconds to grab their attention and let them know what you do, how it's going to make their life better, and what they need to do to get it. Ideally, just having one call to action on that section, if you can.

I haven't talked about the navigation menu. I might do that in a separate recording. But yeah, this is the critical point on your homepage.

And quite often, if you're creating content around your pages, whatever page you're creating, it's good to create the rest of the page and then come back to the hero section. This is often the hardest part to create, especially if you're trying to create a compelling headline. It's going to keep people on that page. It's going to let them know exactly what you do, sum it up in all one perfect phrase. That can be really hard to do.

So I would say if you're building out your homepage or you're thinking how to structure it and how to make it better, then don't start with that section. I've only started with it because I'm going to just do a sort of good order for running down the page. So that's first.

And ideally, in this section, have your image and text next to each other, that's fine. But if you're going to have a full-width background image, don't have something too busy. So basically, you don't want your text to be obscured by whatever is in that image.

You can get around that by using a gradient over the top of the image or you can even just put that behind the text itself. And there's some ways of doing that that are a little bit more subtle so it doesn't look like slapped on top of the photo. But the most important part of this section is the text. That's the bit that people are going to look at and read.

Ideally, it's good if you can get a picture that does sort of tie in with what you're talking about. So either a picture of human faces are often the thing that we look for in websites. Our brains are wired to look for human faces.

So if you can show a picture of somebody looking happy or some happy client result, those kinds of things. Or if you're selling products, if you have some pictures there of your products, then that's a really good way to sort of approach it, really.

Identifying and Addressing Problems

Then the next section down, is an introduction to the problem. Just something that's going to grab people's attention and that can be something like icons with this is how you're feeling, or a bullet list. Anything where you can explain it easily, that you can sort of grab people's attention so that they know what the problem is that you help solve, basically.

Or that they can then self-identify with that, so they, they know that, okay, that's me. This is how I'm feeling. These are the problems. There are a couple of ways you could do this.

You can do that, or you could do, like, the transformation. You could immediately go into how they're going to feel after they've actually bought your product or your service or worked with you, but actually, something there to sort of capture their attention. So these are a little bit interchangeable.

Ideally, you do want it to follow that structure of this is how you're feeling. This is how you can feel better. This is the benefits of, of what you're actually, what you are delivering.

And remember at this point, while we're still quite high up on the page, you want it to be focused on the benefits rather than focusing on the features. And I think that's something that we often get caught up in, talking about what they're going to get rather than the benefit that them. Next section down, we're going to talk about us as the experts.

Establishing Authority and Trust

So this is where we're going to introduce ourselves. You can have that a little bit lower down the page if you want to as well. So if you prefer to introduce your solution, but because we're talking about the homepage here, ideally, we want that to then have that flow.

But thinking about when you're talking about yourself, thinking about how you can show yourself as that trusted guide. So the customer is the hero of the story, and you're that trusted guide to lead them along their journey into, help them to get to where they need to be.

Rather than making it about you, make it about how you can help them. And that can be how you, you've been where they were, or your clients have been where they were, and show that you're the person to lead them along that journey. This section is showing how you have empathy with what they're experiencing, how you're trustworthy, and you're an authority in this as well.

So that's where you can add things in like your testimonials, some client results you could add companies that you've worked with, put their logos here, you could put as featured in. So there's lots of different ways you can get a bit creative about how you actually show yourself as an authority.

Steps to Success

Underneath that, a really good section, a really important section for any sort of page where you're talking about your business as a whole, or especially on the sales pages where you're selling a very specific thing, is the steps to their success. Anytime that you're talking about steps to their success, step one needs to be the first action that they need to take to get this transformation with you.

So step one could be book a call, it could be, choose your, whatever it is that you're selling, you know, if it's a product where there's options, choose your option. Or with these, if you can have icons with the buttons, so literally step one, book your call or step one, get the course, buy the course now, something along those lines.

Step two is how they're going to get it, but not going into detail. So step two is the easy thing they need to do to actually get the results that they they want. So that's step two, is take this next step.

So step one is the initial thing from them getting from where they are right now to the first thing that they need to do. And whether that is like book a call, call or whatever. Step two is do the next easy thing so if you can break that down into one particular thing that will really help them. And then step, step three is the transformed state.

So step three is how they're going to feel or how their life is going to be better, the result that they're actually going to get and the benefit of that, really. So that's, it's like the baby steps essentially to doing business with you. After the steps to their success, then you can have then like a short paragraph statement there.

Additional Information and SEO

Something that you basically, if you've got a little bit more information that you need to add in, then you can add that in here. So if somebody is going to work with you and they need some more information about what you do and how your business helps, then you can pop that in here.

And you can do it as like maybe bullet points or something along those lines or icons. Or something like as a paragraph that's then got some text bolded or break it up into a few sentences, within a few paragraphs.

That is essentially going to help them to understand a bit more of the transformation that they're going to experience. It will help them identify who they want to become and what they want and define the problem again. So you can come back to a description about how they're feeling right now and how you understand it, and how working with you can then help.

And this is a section that can really help with your SEO. It's something where you can actually put those keywords or questions that people might be asking around working with you. You can put that in there. And like the problems that are setting them back and, and essentially what this is for is for people who feel like they need to do some more research before actually taking that next step with you.

So that's a, that's a sort of valuable part, really.

Frequently Asked Questions

And then you've got frequently asked questions. So if people are wanting to work with you, then having frequently asked questions on your homepage can be really helpful as well. This can be about in general, how people work with your business and the objections that people may have.

If you can address those here on your homepage in a frequently asked questions, this can also help with your SEO. But I would definitely say break these up and make them skimmable and easy to read. You can also use tools like Answer The Public or look at Google search results page and see if you can find some questions on there that people might, may ask around the type of thing that you do.

Call to Action and Footer

Then having a call to action, you can have a call to action section on your homepage that then is a bit more than just a button. So you could have something like if you've got a lead magnet or a freebie that people, you want people to get onto your email list, then you could have that here.

So you can have a picture of the freebie, a description of how that freebie is going to help make their lives better and then a call to action for how they get it. If you want to have, if you've got any kind of sales video or explainer video that tells people about your company and what you do and how you help people, definitely have that in, either in here or you could even have that at the top of the page.

Keep it to 30 seconds or less. Make sure that the file size is really small so it's not going to slow your website down. But that can be really powerful and valuable here as well. If you wanted to have packages and prices on your homepage, you could have that here.

Beneath that, it's optional, whether you want that or whether you would then take them to your services page. You can also have stuff here like your most important blog posts, those kinds of things. I'm giving you a basic structure for a homepage, but it doesn't have to be the same for every business. And different businesses will have different things that are important for the homepage.

I think it's important to think about what you want people to do from that homepage. So what action you want them to take, what information they need to understand about you from landing on this page. For some businesses that's taking people to further information, but I would just keep it quite clear and keep it in those specific sections.

So if the main thing that you want people to do is to get on your email list, think about what's going to encourage them to do that. And then beneath this, then you can have your footer. So you can just think of this as the junk drawer of your website.

So all of the links, all of the things that you don't want cluttering up your top navigation menu, all of the things that you don't really want anywhere else on the page, pop those into the footer. And you can also have an extra little call to action in there for your freebie.

If you want, you could have a snippet from your about page or something like that to make your footer more interesting. And anything else in here that, that needs to be there, but it's not necessarily something that you want elsewhere on the page. Social links as well.

That's another really good thing to put in the footer. Keep them in your footer. Don't have your social links up higher on the page because you want to keep people on the website. And if you've got your social links there, they'll think, oh, I'll just go and follow this person on social. And then they're off on social and they're not on your website anymore.

So I definitely, one of the things you could link out to from your footer is your Google business profile, and you could also be linking to that in your reviews. So in your about me section, you could be linking to your Google profile from there as well, and showing that these are the genuine reviews that you've got over on your Google profile.

And that also will help your Google profile as well. If you're linking to your, between the two, between your website and your profile and back, then it will help Google to understand that you're trustworthy.

Conclusion and Final Tips

So I hope that's helpful. Just some of the basic things that you can put on your homepage. There are other things as well, and you probably will hear different people with different things that they would say to do that.

But I think if you cover these bases in terms of the general steps that you can put onto your homepage, it can be really helpful and then it will evolve over time. And, I always say, don't worry if you haven't got everything on there right now. It's something that you can add to over time and it will evolve.

And definitely don't be scared to make changes to your website with, you know, that in mind of, okay, it's all just about an evolution and it will get better over time. So I hope that's helpful. And I'll see you soon.