Mar 14, 2023 | Business growth, Content, Marketing, Website, Writing
Are you looking for an effective way to convert more visitors into customers on your website? Writing a highly converting homepage is the first step. Your homepage is the face of your website, and it is the first page visitors see when they come to your site. It is essential to have an attractive and optimised homepage that quickly and effectively conveys your message and helps visitors to achieve their goals.
This step-by-step guide will help you to create a homepage that is both visually appealing and designed to drive conversions. You’ll learn how to identify the key elements of an effective homepage, create compelling content, and optimise your design for maximum conversion potential.
With these tips, you can craft a homepage that will engage visitors, and keep them coming back for more.
Identify the key elements of an effective homepage
There are several essential elements that make up an effective homepage. Each one of these elements helps to drive the desired action on your homepage. With an effective homepage, you can increase your conversion rate, win new customers, and increase your overall sales.
- Tagline: the tagline is one of the most important elements of a homepage. It is the first thing visitors will see on your homepage, and it should instantly catch their attention and compel them to read more. Make sure it has the right mix of benefits, product information, and calls to action.
- Visuals: visuals on your homepage can help to engage your visitors and make your content more memorable. They can also help to demonstrate the product and provide context around your offer. Make sure the visuals you choose are relevant to your product and help to clearly convey your message.
- Value proposition: your value proposition explains what your product does and why someone should buy it. It answers the question, “Why should I buy from you?” and makes visitors feel confident in their purchase decision.
Craft compelling content for your homepage
The content you create for your homepage plays a crucial role in converting visitors into customers. It needs to be engaging, easy to understand and written with a sales-focused mindset (not sleazy though).
Visitors need to trust you (without you saying ‘trust me’), understand your product and be convinced that it is the right choice for them. The best way to do this is by creating compelling content that focuses on helping visitors achieve their goals and solving their problems.
So it’s important to really understand:
- who you are targeting/selling to
- what problem they are facing and
- how you best solve it (better than anyone else).
The first step in crafting a compelling homepage is to identify the goals of your homepage. What is the purpose of your homepage? Once you know the goals of your homepage, you can then create content that is engaging, persuasive, and helps visitors to achieve their goals.
Homepage call to actions
Another effective way to increase conversions on your homepage is to set up compelling call to actions (CTAs). A CTA is a hyperlink or button on your homepage that prompts visitors to take the desired action e.g. go to a check out a service page, contact you, etc.
There are many different types of CTAs you can use on your homepage:
- product CTAs,
- service CTAs,
- free trial CTAs,
- subscription CTAs
- offer CTAs.
These will be based and linked to your website goals/objectives.
For each of these CTAs, you’ll want to make sure that your copy is compelling and emphasises the benefits of clicking. For example, if you are adding a product CTA, make sure you write copy that showcases the benefits of the product, such as reduced fatigue, increased productivity, and overall better health. You can also add social proof to your CTA by including customer testimonials and ratings.
Design for maximum conversion potential
The design of your homepage has a significant impact on your conversion rate. You want to make sure that your design is attractive and appealing to your audience. The design should also be consistent with the rest of your website, and it should accurately portray your brand.
One way to ensure that your brand and design is optimised for conversion is by creating a style guide and mood board. A mood board is a visual guide that includes pictures, colours, fonts, and other design elements that you want to incorporate into your homepage design.
By creating an effective mood board, you can ensure that your design elements are consistent and that they appeal to your target audience.
Optimise your homepage for mobile devices
With an increasing number of customers using mobile devices to browse online and make purchases, it is important to make sure that your homepage is easily accessible and optimized for mobile devices.
Visitors browsing on a smartphone or tablet will have a smaller screen size and shorter attention span, which means that you need to create compelling content that is easy to understand and quick to read.
Make sure that your homepage is easy to navigate, has short paragraphs and that each page of your website loads quickly. It is also important to make sure that your images are not too large and that your font is easy to read regardless of the device that visitors are using.
Visitors to your site on a mobile device might not have the time or patience to zoom in or click through to another page to find the information they are looking for.
Google can also crawl and rank your website if it is optimised for mobile devices.
Test and measure results
Even after the homepage design has been implemented, you should continue to test and experiment with different elements to see what results in the highest conversions.
It is important to test your headlines, visuals and call to actions to determine what produces the best results. When you test, make sure to use control groups. This means that you have a control group that does not see the element you are testing, as well as an experimental group that does see it. This will allow you to compare results and see the impact that your tests have had on your homepage design.
Adding a blog to your website can help showcase your knowledge, convert visitors and target keywords. Want to learn how to write blogs? Check out this article about A Step-by-Step Writing Template to Quality Content
Nov 28, 2022 | Marketing, Photography, Website
So you’ve nurtured and fostered this great idea and turned it into your business. Now you need to let people know about your GREAT business! Here’s why nailing you need a branding photoshoot and how to nail it for your business success.
Every business is unique. You are unique! There may be others out there offering something similar to you, but what makes your biz special is YOU! Your personal spin on your creation is what draws people in to your product or service. Humanising your brand draws your clients in. Evidence shows that people LOVE buying from people, and the more your audience gets to know you, the more likely they are going to convert.
Build a solid relationship with your audience
Here’s where business branding photography comes into the picture. By sharing your story with your audience, they’ll connect with you on a completely deeper level, build trust and your engagement will go through the roof. Creating visually impactful images will also stop people from scrolling on their socials and notice you. Your caption can showcase your passion, your personality, your quirks and even your pains. This is what will resonate with your people and build your community.
Not only is branding photography crucial to creating social media content, but your website is also another entry point for your customers too. Let me ask you one thing. When you go to a business’ website, what’s one of the first pages you head to? The About Me page! Firstly you want to have a sticky beak and learn more about them as a person. Do they align with you and your ethics/values? Then you may go and take a squiz at their socials to find more evidence, and think to yourself, ‘hey I resonate with this person/biz’.
Up-level your business
As well as your company logo, your face and your personality is also part of your brand, and having consistent imagery is the key to a professional visual brand. When you up-level to professional photography, your images can be used on anything to promote your business. Think – website, social media, email newsletters, printed material, editorials, magazine articles. You can keep reusing your images over and over again too. No one is going to remember what you posted months ago.
Choosing a photographer
When choosing a commercial branding photographer to work with, you need to;
- have a good chat and ask as many questions as possible about how they work,
- feel comfortable with them,
- know the photographer will bring out the best in you,
- see if they can customise their session to suit your needs,
- know that they have the expertise to make you look and feel great at your session
- feel confident they understand your vision and work with you to achieve it (no use in having photos taken and end up with a gallery of images that don’t align with you or even worse images that you won’t use!)
So by now you’ve come to realise the importance of professional photography, and how this powerful marketing tool can really make you stand out in the crowd. Authenticity showing up in your digital media is 1000% important and being consistent is the key.
About the Author
Vicky Palmieri is a commercial photographer and a fierce cheerleader for women in biz. Giving them the confidence to be the face of their business through genuine connection and her down to Earth approach. She’s worked with many female entrepreneurs and businesses to bing their vision to life.
Connect with Vicky
Web: https://vickypalmieri.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/vppics/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/vickypalmieriphotography
IN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vicky-palmieri-8b439037/
Feb 7, 2021 | Business growth, Marketing, SEO, Website
With so many website platforms in the market, choosing the right website platform for your business can be confusing and time-consuming. This article will help you get clear on what you need and what to look for when picking the right one for you.
I won’t be putting you to sleep by comparing the platforms (WordPress, Joomla, Shopify and Squarespace (just to name a few)) but rather looking at things to consider, working out your requirements and factoring in the cost.
1. What do you want from your website
Don’t just look at what you need right now (e.g. three pages of content). Take into consideration, where you want to be in five years’ time and what functionality you might need.
Think about whether you will need an online store, integration with your systems, how many products and pages you might need, if you want people to subscribe to your newsletter and whether you want to have different languages of content.
You don’t want to be moving from one platform to another in 12 months time because that can be costly, time consuming and may require some down time.
2. Email marketing
If you want to email your potential and current clients you need to consider which email marketing options are compatible with your website platform. You want them to be able to subscribe from your website and be piped through to your email marketing software so you can email them.
Some website platforms may limit you to one or two options, or it may be an extra cost to pipe them through or have email marketing. So check it out and factor in the cost. All the extras add up and if you are sticking to a budget you should factor these things in.
Email automation and nurturing your email list by sharing content, news and special offers are important for growing your business. It’ll also save you time.
3. Analytics tools
You need analytics tools, full stop. Analytics reports will show you how many people visit, what countries they visit from, how they found your website, what pages they visit and how long they spend on your website.
All this information is important when looking at who your potential and actual clients are and how they interact with your website. It tells you what interests them and if your content is working.
Google Analytics is a free, and great tool available for some platforms like WordPress. Shopify and Wix may have their own tools but check for fees and its capability.
4. SEO capability
Look at what SEO capabilities the platform has, or is this an add-on that costs extra too? All the add-ons can add up. With WordPress, you can add free plug-ins (like Yoast SEO & All In One SEO) and it can also connect to Google Search Console so you can track things.
You want to be able to add keywords in your website/plugin to boost your ranking for example in the:
- website description
- image descriptions (also known as Alt Text)
- page descriptions and much more…
And to submit a sitemap to Google. Some simple and effective SEO things to tick off the list but that can cost extra.
5. Hosting vs managed hosting
Shopify, Wix and Weebly look after your hosting for you, which some people love, but it comes at a cost. You don’t want to be moving your website from one platform to another, so chose wisely and do your research.
If you are considering using WordPress, you will need a web hosting company, like SiteGround and VentraIP, you can purchase your domain (web address) and host your website with them. Some web developers will set all this up for you and maintain it at a cost.
Tips when picking a web hosting provider:
– ensure your website has an SSL certificate (it’s a security certificate) – this can be an extra charge with some providers
– your website is backed up regularly (in case it crashes)
– you have free email (so you have a professional email address), for example, hello@yourdomain.com.au. Some domain and web hosting companies consider this an extra.
That’s all for now.
As you have guessed, to pick a website platform you have a few things to consider, and some costs to factor in. And if you don’t consider these things to being with then you might find you have to move your website from one platform to another which can cost you time, money and you will have some downtime.
If you have any questions about which platform suits your needs, feel free to contact me. I may not build websites but I have been involved with lots of website builds. manage my own websites and have experience in this area. It can feel daunting so reach out and we can talk about your options.
Vicky Palmieri is a commercial photographer and a fierce cheerleader for women in biz. Giving them the confidence to be the face of their business through genuine connection and her down to Earth approach. She’s worked with many female entrepreneurs and businesses to bing their vision to life.
