If you’re a B2B startup or work in marketing, you should be no stranger to website homepages and landing pages. After all, they had to have been crafted by your web developer, the copy and overall messaging was drafted by a content writer, and the visual elements were all sourced or created by graphic designers or some other visual specialist. All of this was done based upon website homepage best practices – or at least it should have been.
Essentially serving as your business’s virtual shop window, your homepage should be optimized for its main purpose: drawing in the majority of traffic to your website. Despite how critical a homepage and engaging landing pages are to a website’s overall quality and effectiveness in driving sales, many businesses still struggle to optimize these elements properly.
The quality of your homepage and landing pages can directly translate to the level of confidence potential prospects and clients can expect to have in you — or whether they choose to stick around on your website at all. If the critical information isn’t there for them on your site, why would they?
As such, it’s essential that you have your own marketing team or access to an outsourced one with the knowledge and capability to not only maintain your homepage and various landing pages, but improve them.
In this post, we’ll dive into our website homepage best practices and best practices for event landing pages so you can maintain these critical parts of your website. This will ensure that they are current and engaging, helping you improve your standing within your industry and increase awareness of your business among prospects to create new leads.
B2B Marketing Strategy Framework: The Ultimate Guide to Business Branding
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What Is A Website Homepage? What Is Its Purpose?
The homepage of your site is the first introduction each visitor will have to your business; its main focus should always be to build brand awareness. For the vast majority of companies, their homepage understandably receives the most traffic across their entire website. How well it conveys your brand, details the value of your offering, and captures the interest of prospects will determine its success. Think about it: before any visitor to your website shows even a hint of becoming a potential customer, they will likely assess your homepage in order to get a sense of your offering, why it should matter to them, and how their business can specifically benefit from it.
That said, we’re not going to tell you creating and continually updating a great homepage is easy –- quite the opposite, in fact. Your website homepage has to check a plethora of boxes and wear many hats.
Optimally, it should rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) for your specific business category, have consistent brand messaging, have favorable UX (fast page load, mobile-friendliness, accessibility), easily integrate with other platforms and the analytics you should be already running, be in compliance with all privacy laws, and –- for your own sanity –- be set up to facilitate updates for further optimization efforts.
However, it still remains probably the most difficult page to strategically create and maintain since you know next to nothing about the individuals who visit your homepage since they’ve yet to click a single link or button to a new page. Even with the help of a full marketing team, creating a great, well-optimized homepage and continuing to apply beneficial updates to it is easily one of the biggest challenges in digital marketing. It’s difficult but not impossible, and establishing your own best practices or looking at the best practices of others can go a long way.
Our Website Homepage Best Practices
To help your homepage be the best virtual storefront window it can be, we’ve provided a brief list of our website homepage best practices to get you started. Like with all best practices, they work well for us and aren’t intended to be unbreakable rules. That said, here are the critical elements we feel all homepages should include. If yours doesn’t, it’s time for an update:
- Logo: An overwhelming majority of companies typically place their logo at the top left or center of the homepage. It should also link back to the homepage so all site visitors can easily return to the homescreen.
- Descriptive Headline: Being clear is better than trying to be clever here. No matter how witty with wordplay you may be, your headline should focus on quickly telling visitors what your business has to offer in a clear, concise, and compelling way.
- Sub-headline or Brief Description: When it comes to your sub-headline, it should provide a brief description of the value proposition of your business. Remember: this is the short bit of text typically found right below your header. We also suggest focusing on a common pain point of your target audience and how you can address it.
- Primary Call-to-Action (CTA): The goal of your website homepage should always be to engage visitors and get them to dive further into your website -– hopefully to an eventual sale. To encourage engagement, you should have at least one (not no more than three) CTAs that drive visitors to specific pages of your site that correspond to various stages of your buyer’s journey. As a rule, your primary CTA should be in a place that is easily visible to visitors so that they don’t have to scroll to get to it –- also known as “above the fold”.
- Supporting Image: As humans, we’re naturally drawn to visual stimuli; images are just generally more compelling than text. As such, we recommend incorporating an image or short video (no one will watch if it’s too long) that clearly and simply captures what you offer.
- Benefits: This is where you really need to be able to speak the language of your target audience. Tell them why your solution should matter to them and what the unique benefits are of purchasing from you.
- Social Proof or Success Indicators: Think awards, recognitions, case studies, success stories, pull quotes etc. –- together they’re a strong indicator of authority and credibility.
- Navigation: Having intuitive navigation buttons and visual hierarchy that gets visitors where they want to go and get the information they’re seeking helps greatly with keeping them on your homepage and keeping them engaged.
- Secondary Call-to-Action: For site visitors who aren’t ready to commit to your full offering, providing them with secondary CTAs that create different, lower-commitment paths is a great way to keep them engaged and potentially interested in your primary offering in the future. As a rule, secondary CTAs should go below the fold so visitors can click on them as they scroll your homepage.
- Content Offer: For visitors who aren’t ready to buy, providing valuable content like a whitepaper, guide, or eBook for download will give those individuals more information. It’s a great way to keep people interested and potentially generate even more leads from your homepage.
- Features: By listing some key features, visitors will get an even better understanding of what you provide. Be sure to keep the copy succinct and easy to read here.
- Resources: Since most of your website visitors obviously won’t be ready to buy on their first visit to your homepage, it’s important to link to a resources section that has a trove of relevant information they can browse to learn more. Having a robust resources page to link to from your homepage also helps in establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
What Is A Landing Page? What Is Its Purpose?
To put it simply, landing pages are specifically designed to drive conversions that turn prospects into leads by compelling them to fill out a form for an event, a meeting, or some other offer.
While you may have many different landing pages across your website, the intent behind them will always be the same: to create more leads. As such, landing pages are pretty cut and dry and intentionally so. They include forms that request visitor contact information in exchange for something of value –- an exclusive offer, deal, event, etc.
A good landing page should also eliminate anything that could potentially distract from the prospect filling out the form and failing to convert to a lead because you need their full attention. That means no navigation, no competing links, no redirects, or alternative options to take. In this way, you can guide these visitors directly to your lead form to provide their information.
Additionally, with more landing pages come more conversion opportunities. There’s also a considerable SEO benefit to having more landing pages, as it means there are more pages that can potentially rank highly in SERP results, leading more individuals to your website.
Our Landing Page Best Practices
To help your landing pages be more effective in turning prospects into leads, we’ve provided some tips and best practices you can incorporate into your own efforts to design and update your landing pages to be even more effective. Critical things all landing pages should include:
- A well-crafted, benefit-focused headline: In a few words, your landing pages need a compelling headline that quickly explains the value of your solution. Think, “What’s in it for my target audience?” Without it, people will surely bounce. It’s the first thing anyone will read on your landing pages, so it should always be clear, direct, and engaging.
- An image of the offer: Again, humans are visually oriented. The image you choose for your landing pages should somehow convey how your prospects ought to feel or will feel once they receive the specific offer promised by the landing page. Some images may be more compelling to visitors than others, so you should always A/B test the images you go with to determine which is best.
- A lead form above the fold: To increase your chances for conversions on your landing pages, the lead forms you incorporate into them must be easily accessible to anyone who wants to convert. This means putting the form “above the fold” or in full view when someone navigates to the page –they shouldn’t have to scroll at all to find the form.
- Make sure your offer is relevant: Remember: you’re providing your offer in exchange for your lead’s personal information. If the offer doesn’t resonate with your lead, they will be far less likely to convert.
- Don’t get greedy: You should only ever ask for just what you need in landing pages – which is typically just a name and email is enough to begin nurturing a lead. If you ask for more information and they don’t trust you with it, they might choose not to convert.
- Unnecessary navigation: As we’ve stated many times by now, the explicit purpose of landing pages is to create leads. That means eliminating anything that could distract them or steer them away to another page.
- Page responsiveness: Just like every other page on your website, your landing pages should be able to accommodate multiple different viewing experiences and optimized to be mobile-friendly.
- Search optimization: While there may not be nearly as much copy on a landing page as your homepage, there is still plenty of opportunity to optimize them with keywords your target audience is searching for. As a rule, a page should be more than 300 words to avoid being considered “thin content”.
- Incorporate a ‘Thank You’ after form fill: Once leads have completed a form, they should be directed to a ‘thank you’ page. It’s not entirely necessary, but we think it provides benefits you won’t want to miss out on. It serves as a way to deliver your offering (usually via download), provides an opportunity to serve your lead additional content, and it just serves as a genuine thank you, which can go a long way. Additionally, Thank You page visits can be used for easier conversion tracking in Google Analytics and other analytics sites.
Website Homepage vs. Landing Page: Key Differences
While obviously driving more traffic to any page of your website can be a good thing, the functions and structures of your homepage and various landing pages are very different from one another. Put simply, your homepage should focus on building brand awareness, while your landing pages are meant to drive conversions. More differences to remember:
Homepage vs. Landing Page: Key Differences
| Homepage | Landing Page |
|---|---|
| Can have many Calls-to-Action (CTAs) | Only has one CTA |
| Can have many external links | Never has external links |
| Only one homepage should exist | Many landing pages can exist |
| Meant to draw from all site visitors | Meant to be more targeted |
Additional Considerations: Technical Audit, SEO, Content Optimization, and More
Now, before you go and ask your whole marketing team (you will need a whole team) to work on improving your homepage or existing landing pages, you should understand that it takes a considerable amount of research, strategy, and collaboration. This requires significant time and energy. While there are quick updates you can implement, there is no quick fix that will instantly increase the level of traffic your homepage and various landing pages receive or guarantee more homepage visitors will convert to a sale.
However, there are a variety of simple, straightforward things you can do to assess and improve your homepage and various landing pages. With a team of marketing experts and an agreed-upon strategy, you will start to see improvements.
Content Optimization (and Reoptimization)
One of the most common and most effective ways to keep your homepage and landing pages up to date, and, by extension, improve your chances of getting your homepage to rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) is through regularly updating them with high-quality, SEO-optimized content. It should always provide a clear value to your target audience and addresses their biggest needs, concerns, or pain points. In the case of your homepage, this means reoptimizing your existing on-page content that is becoming dated or is otherwise due for a refresh in order to rank more competitively in SERPs.
Obviously, you will be a bit more limited in the case of landing pages, and that’s to be expected. As we stated earlier, you shouldn’t be loading these pages up with a ton of content or anything else that can potentially distract the prospect from converting.
SEO Keyword Research
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) keyword research is a method of finding and determining what relevant keywords are best to target and incorporate into your content in order to drive more individuals to your website based on their own search queries. Effectively, it’s researching what your target audience is typing into the search bar when looking for a solution like yours.
As a result, it provides valuable insights into what your target audience is actually searching for on Google. Beyond the scope of your homepage, these insights can and should be put to use to inform your content strategy as well as your overall marketing strategy. If you’re not very familiar with SEO keyword research or just getting started, we recommend taking a look at EBQ’s How-To Guide on the subject.
The SEO Freshness Factor
You may be familiar with SEO, but are you familiar with the SEO freshness factor as it relates to your content? The SEO freshness factor is a function of search engine algorithms that consistently prioritizes newer, recently published, or more recently updated content in search queries.
It’s intended to keep outdated, high-ranking pages from always appearing at the top of the first results page when newer, more recently updated content exists and has higher relevance to the search query.
What to Avoid With SEO
As you begin your content optimization efforts. We recommend that you steer clear of black hat SEO tactics. Keyword stuffing is one of the most common forms of black hat SEO and one of the easiest methods to fall into on your homepage. Essentially, it’s the tactic of using keywords in an excessive, unnatural way in order to trick search engines into getting your homepage higher in search results. The real results aren’t great.
Google recognizes it as a manipulative practice and penalizes you – negatively impacting how your homepage ranks in search results.
Conduct A Technical Audit of Your Website
While your content marketing team works on updating homepage content for freshness and to make it more SEO-optimized, your web development team should conduct a technical website audit to reveal any issues that might be negatively affecting your homepage or various landing pages.
Identifying and rectifying issues like broken links, bad links, and 404 errors will greatly improve the optimization of your website and spare you some potential embarrassment. You wouldn’t want a prospect to click a link on your homepage, only to bounce when they discover it’s broken.
A technical site audit can also reveal issues with user experience (UX) like slow page load speed, poor mobile friendliness, or excessively large high-resolution images that also slow page load speed. Page speed and user accessibility issues can have a significant negative impact on how site visitors perceive your homepage.
B2B Marketing Strategy Framework: The Ultimate Guide to Business Branding
Get a more detailed view of the complete buyer’s journey with our downloadable guide.
An Ongoing Process: Regularly Monitor Your Homepage and Landing Pages
If it wasn’t already obvious, making updates and improvements to your website homepage and landing pages isn’t something you do once and never monitor or return to. If you let things sit as they are, you will begin to see the ill effects of the SEO content freshness factor as your homepage and LPs fall in search results. Links may become outdated or defunct, and your competitors might begin to take advantage of keyword phrases popular with your target audience that you have yet to discover.
We’re not saying you need to consider making drastic updates to your homepage and various other pages every month. What you should do is remain vigilant and regularly monitor the health of your homepage and landing pages so you can be aware of issues as they happen and identify new areas for improvement quickly. We recommend using tools like Semrush so you can regularly conduct technical website audits to identify and rectify any new errors that crop up and make changes and improvements to your website as needed.
Do you need help with updating and fully optimizing your homepage and creating compelling landing pages that generate renewed interest in your product or service, draw in new prospects, and convert leads? Our full-service marketing team is here to assist you in ensuring your homepage and various subpages generate visibility and interest to feed your sales efforts. Contact us today to start work on improving your homepage.
