What is your homepage’s single, solitary, specific goal?
Did an answer come immediately to mind? No? Uh oh.
It’s so obvious but often overlooked, when people land on your homepage, you need to have a clearly defined action you want them to to take, such as click a button, even a lame one like this.
If you don’t have a clearly defined action you’d like visitors to take, you are, to put it lightly, doomed.
Okay, maybe you’re not doomed in the literal sense, but if you aren’t %100 clear on what you want your website visitors to do when they land on your homepage, how are they supposed to know? How are you supposed to get business from them? You are out to actually get business right? You’re not just another piece of junk on the web right? You want to succeed, yes?
It’s not a complex question to understand or even answer, but most people don’t ask it each time they launch or change their homepage. It’s something I don’t think about enough and was reminded about when reading up on my RSS feeds. I decided to go view some of my clients websites, online business peers, etc from this, “one goal” point of view and it’s pretty clear neither do most website owners each time they make an update, re-brand, or refresh their homepage. I struggled [and still do] with it for a long time despite thinking I knew better.
TRAINING – Go view competitors, friends, businesses websites with this question in mind, it becomes clear which websites you can quickly tell what to do on, and which you can’t.
So, stop mucking around, what is the one action you want people landing on your page to take? Answer in the comments, I’ll check out your webpage and respond.
Remember, it can’t be two actions, it shouldn’t be at the bottom of the page, it can’t be buried in paragraphs of text, we’re a fickle, short attention spanned, tired, busy and skeptical people, make it bold, first, and obvious.
Here’s mine for IT Arsenal…click on the orange button [and looking at it now, it should be BIGGER]…for many others it would be to get added to an e-mail list, or signup for a free trial, some baby step to introduce a potential user/customers/client to your business.
Make it happen…
Inspired by the first line of the first outlined metric of this post: 6 Online Marketing Metrics You Need to Know