Introduction to Website Content and SEO
00:00:00
Speaker
you want to make sure that you include enough content on your website so that people understand what you do, but then also search engines understand what you do as well. So for instance, if you are an elopement photographer, of course you want to include information like what kind of elopement photographer, there's different kinds, there's like adventure elopement photographers. In addition to that though, there's just questions that people are asking themselves in relation to whatever it is that you do. People are probably asking about things like cost, and it doesn't mean that you actually have to answer the question of cost,
00:00:28
Speaker
on your homepage, but even if you allude to it in a heading, Google's gonna pick that up. You're listening to The Brands That Book Show, a podcast for creative entrepreneurs who want practical tips and strategies to build engaging brands and craft high-converting websites. We're your hosts, Davey and Krista, co-founders of a brand and website design agency specializing in visual brand design and show it websites. You're listening to The Brands That Book Show.
Crafting a High-Converting Homepage
00:00:57
Speaker
So what goes into a high converting homepage? We try to answer that question in this episode of brand set book. If you're looking for more homepage content, be sure to check out our blog and our YouTube channels. We've actually released a lot of homepage related content lately and specifically a YouTube video and a blog post both published in the last few weeks. Plus at this point, you can pretty much find content about any website page that you're trying to design over on our YouTube channel or on our blog.
00:01:27
Speaker
As always, links and resources can be found in the show notes. Check them out at daveyandchrista.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts. Now onto the episode. All right, chat and home pages again.
00:01:43
Speaker
Well, you know, it's funny because as we're planning content for the year, somebody had said, hey, you know, we actually don't have a blog post or, you know, whatever about home pages in particular. I mean, we've talked about home pages in the context of other content that we've done for sure. Yeah. And we've done podcasts, episodes, a lot of content specific to the about page and the contact page and a services page.
00:02:06
Speaker
all the pages. All the pages except the homepage.
Common Homepage Mistakes
00:02:09
Speaker
Exactly. And so now in the span of a week, I think you've recorded a YouTube video on homepages, which should probably be live around the same time as this episode. Then, you know, we're recording this podcast and recently we released a blog post on the top homepage mistakes to avoid.
00:02:26
Speaker
Yeah, and it's kind of crazy how frequently we see these mistakes made. We see a lot of people who don't want to put any content on the homepage and they're like, I just want to go into the other pages. But it's an important way to make a first impression. And a lot of people do visit that page first on your site and they spend a good amount of time browsing it.
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. You know, so in this episode, I think what I'd love to do is chat with you about a few of the mistakes that you see people make and then talk a little bit about what sorts of things people should keep in mind as they develop their homepage. If you are interested in, you know, the top mistakes, right? Go in, read that blog post for sure. And that'll give you some boundary markers, you know, things that you should avoid as you're putting your homepage together. In this episode, maybe we can focus a little bit more on the things that we really like to see.
Location-Specific Content and Strategy
00:03:12
Speaker
I think at the outset, I'll say that there are a lot of different formulas out there that you can use for a homepage. There's a lot of different checklists, I think. And of course, this content and the 10 mistakes to avoid content, that's all good to see. But I'd say that there's no one right way to do a homepage.
00:03:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think that it's going to be different depending on the type of business that you are. If you're an e-commerce shop versus a service provider, a photographer versus we're working on a dentist website right now. And so that's going to be a little bit different than a wedding photographer.
00:03:43
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. There's just different elements that you'll want to include. If you're a local service-based business, you're going to want to make sure that you include a lot of location information, but even beyond that, contact information. If you're a dentist's office, I imagine that the phone number needs to be relatively prominent on the website.
00:04:00
Speaker
Wait, can we jump in? Cause that's actually my first tip. Yeah, let's start here. What do you think is the biggest mistake that you see people make on a website? People not saying what they do and who they do it for. Like it's kind of crazy how often I see this mistake made. So I'll go into a dentist website and they won't say that they're a dentist and where they actually serve their patients because a dentist can't serve everybody. And so if you're not seeing where you're located,
00:04:30
Speaker
People don't know where you're located and search engines also don't know where you're located. This is especially true for photographers. I see a lot of photographers who think, well, I want to serve everybody and I want to travel. But realistically, you can't travel everywhere. You can't optimize your site for everywhere or even for broad searches like destination. And so the more that you can spell out what kind of photographer you are, where you serve people, the more successful you're going to be.
00:04:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think just to build on that a little bit because you can travel anywhere. But I mean, if you're a photographer trying to do a destination wedding, right? But I'm saying that you can't search for everything. Exactly. You can't optimize for every location on your homepage. And I think that you're going to have more success traveling all the places if you can optimize for a local place and build up your credibility there.
00:05:17
Speaker
and then local people find you and then they realize like, oh, this person's amazing. I want to bring Davy to shoot my wedding in the Caribbean. Or maybe you're always in the Caribbean and so you can optimize for Caribbean searches. And so that's how you get found. You don't get found by people searching destination wedding photographer.
Homepage Strategies for Different Business Types
00:05:34
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. So the tactic there would be to optimize, like if you're an Apple's wedding photographer, optimize for an Apple's wedding photographer. And then if you also want to go shoot in a specific destination, you can create pages that target that destination. But it's not going to work if you're trying to optimize the exact same page, namely your homepage for an Apple's Maryland wedding photographer and Caribbean wedding photographer or something like that.
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like so often when I'm looking for a business, like we were looking for, you really wanted a massage because you've been having a lot of pain in your neck. And we would be searching for local massage therapists. And it's crazy how many of them don't actually say where they're located. And so I might find a website and that person is like two hours away. And it's not realistic for us to actually go there where if there were local people who said, we serve this area, I'm not gonna list our town on the podcast,
00:06:25
Speaker
But if they said that they'd serve this area, it would show up probably in our searches and you would know, yes, this person can help me. Yeah, no, I would agree. I think that one of the first things that you want to make sure that you include on your homepage is who you are, where you're located, and what it is that you do for people, especially if you're a local service-based business. And if you're not a service-based business, still who you are and what you do is important information to have in the hero spot.
00:06:53
Speaker
For us, we tell people that we sell show it website templates. And that's like right up there at the beginning. Yeah, exactly. You don't have to scroll far or really at all to see that we do brand and website design. And then you don't have to scroll much further than that to find out that we design specifically show it website templates and Elementor WordPress website templates. Right. Yeah,
Importance of Clear Calls to Action
00:07:13
Speaker
for sure. All right. So what is a common mistake that you see people make?
00:07:17
Speaker
Yes, I think that one of the things that I really like to see when I go to a website is that people take advantage of the hero spot. And so all the things that we just said, but that there's some clear call to action. Do you want to explain what the hero spot is? Yeah. So the hero spot is that area that's above the fold.
00:07:33
Speaker
Do you want to explain what above the fold is? Thank you. Above the fold, that term came from like a newspaper. So when you get a newspaper right, it's folded. And to expand the newspaper is to fold the bottom piece over so you can see the whole thing. And so newspapers were in a they always put the most important headlines, the most attention getting headlines right at the top so that you didn't have to flip over the paper to see it. And so that when it was sitting in the newsstand or on someone's porch, they could see what the content was about that day and they're more likely to read it or buy it.
00:08:03
Speaker
Exactly. Really taking advantage of that spot, so really having a clear value proposition statement or offering some sort of value in that spot there. For us, we've played around with a few different things. One of the things that we were just talking about before we started recording was any test results that we want to share. For this particular test, we tested sending people straight to the shop versus sending people to some sort of landing page
00:08:27
Speaker
where we could collect an email address. So for instance, like offering some sort of freebie that somebody could download or sign up for or subscribe to get on our mailing list. And when we're having a big sale, I normally change that out and put the sale notice there. Yeah, yeah. And ultimately what we've landed on is we send people straight to our shop from there, which seems like it might be too soon or too fast to do that. But we found that that's, again, like when people are coming to our site, typically they're looking for websites.
00:08:53
Speaker
and send them to a shop at least gets them browsing our website so you know of course when somebody visits a website for the first time they may not purchase but they're probably interested in what it is that you do which is why they landed there and so getting people in front of our website designs even if they're interested not in a template but in you know one on one custom work that way they get to see some of our work.
00:09:15
Speaker
Yeah, and our individual template pages are all their own sales pages. They really tell all the details that people need to know. I think this would probably be different if you're a service provider, especially someone who offers really high-end services like $10,000 wedding photography packages. You're not going to want to send people right to your contact page because it's pretty unlikely that they're just going to inquire right away.
00:09:37
Speaker
without getting to know you and getting to know your work and getting to know the value that you bring to their life. And so for that we normally recommend you taking people to your services page and then to use that service page as a sales page where you talk about the process, you talk about what makes you different, you have all of your social proof and your examples of your work or case studies
00:09:56
Speaker
and FAQs and maybe some basic pricing and then that's where you take them to the contact.
Guiding Visitor Experience and Social Proof
00:10:02
Speaker
So hopefully that page has done all of the work of selling your service for you before you take them to inquire. So maybe they already love you already. Yeah, that's a good call out. So the equivalent for a non
00:10:14
Speaker
Product based business would be sending somebody to like your services page where they can again see your work and that's kind of the point of sending people to our shop is that they get to see our work and they get the browser work and even if they're interested in one on one work, they've gotten to seeing some of the work that we've designed. So that's one of the things that I like to see is really taking advantage of that hero spot and not including too much text
00:10:50
Speaker
people who are familiar with you, they're going to go specifically to the page on your website that they need to go to. So if I've been investigating a service, maybe I've done sort of my initial research or whatnot, I've narrowed it down to a few different providers. When I go back to that provider's website, I'm going to a specific spot and I'm already generally aware of what they're about. So the homepage, great introduction for people. So a lot of times people are going to scroll that page before then clicking off to something else.
00:11:18
Speaker
And so the next thing that I really like to see is a little bit of social proof. One of the mistakes that we typically see people make is that they relegate all of their social proof to a single site. And I don't think really that you can include too much social proof on your website.
00:11:33
Speaker
That's also like a pet peeve of mine because I think it's pretty unlikely that people are going to a page that they know is just going to be everyone singing your praises because it kind of feels like, Oh, they're going to just put the best post on my nose here. Whereas if you pepper that social proof throughout the site, they have no choice but to read them as they're scrolling. And so I think it's a lot more likely that they read them and that those testimonials back up that you are good at what you say you do and that you can do it for people like them.
00:12:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. You're making claims or hopefully you're making claims about what you can do throughout your entire website. And so backing up those claims with some subtle social proof, like even if people are not reading the full testimonial, they're seeing those testimonials, they're seeing those features. And so sort of subconsciously along the way, those elements of social proof are backing up the claims that you're making on your website. Okay, can I add a partial pet peeve? Because
00:12:26
Speaker
because it drives me crazy when people just take huge long paragraphs of testimonials and put them on their site. A lot of times they're pulled straight from like a wedding wire or like a review site, but it's pretty unlikely that anybody is taking the time to read that novel of a testimonial. So my recommendation is normally pull out like the best sentence, the thing that they said that kind of really highlights what makes you good at what you do and what makes you unique and putting that really big so that it's impossible to
Website Performance and User Engagement
00:12:53
Speaker
And then if you want to elaborate a little bit more, you could do one or two sentences in the body copy, like in body copy size, like below it, and then put their name, always put their name because that helps establish that it's actually a real person who said this. And if you have an image of them or a headshot, that could be really good too. Cause again, it helps people understand that this isn't just some random testimonial that may be a bot made or that you made up. This is actually a real person that I can imagine that said this thing. So that's like a partial mistake.
00:13:24
Speaker
All right, so it's your turn. What's the next thing that you like to see on homepage? I like to see it load fast, especially on mobile. So this isn't so much an issue that I've noticed with show it sites like show it has really worked hard to show that their sites are optimized and they load really quickly. But I've been on websites before where they take so long to load that you just kind of wonder if they're even working.
00:13:47
Speaker
And so I feel like if it takes more than a few seconds, my attention span goes away and I'm going to open up more tabs or go to Instagram and maybe I forget to go back to that website. And then I've seen websites before where the image is never fully loaded. Like I'm working with a client right now and she told me that she didn't think anybody actually visited her client galleries on her site.
00:14:08
Speaker
And I was like, well, that's strange because that's the way that I recommend doing galleries. It really like shows off your work and what it's like in a more full picture kind of way. And I went to those galleries and I ran a page speed test. So you can run a page speed test from something like Google, Pingdom, GT metrics.
00:14:23
Speaker
Yeah. So Pingdom's different. So Pingdom, GT metrics, and then Google. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. The way you say Google Pingdom, Google and Pingdom. Yeah. And GT metrics was like the three that I use. It just timed out the images were so big on the website. And I think it was like a really old WordPress site that they never finished loading. And I was like, well, no wonder you're not getting any results on here. It never finishes loading. So you probably don't have any
00:14:47
Speaker
traffic that is showing in Google Analytics.
Simplifying Navigation and Content
00:14:50
Speaker
And so if your website is so slow, especially your homepage, you just run that risk of people not seeing that you're actually good at what you do. Yeah. And especially given that, as we were just saying, your homepage is for people who haven't met you before, right? So you want to make a good first impression. And so if you make that good first impression, I think people may be willing to hang around for longer load times, you know, for other pages of your website, you know, to a certain extent, but not when they're outrageously slow.
00:15:15
Speaker
And I think that these days we're probably seeing 60 plus percent of traffic coming from multiple devices. And if you think about that somebody is connecting on their cellular network, the service could be spotty at times. And so it's even more important that it loads quickly so that they don't click away. Yeah. 100%. Another reason why we like show it right is because you can create a mobile specific version of your website. Well, you have to, you have to create a mobile specific version of your website. Things aren't going to like automatically click into place.
00:15:44
Speaker
Do you have any other pet peeves?
00:15:46
Speaker
I haven't really been thinking about this in terms of pet peeves necessarily, just things that I like to see on a site. Another mistake that I think people make is that they have to put all their content on their homepage. They have to give people all the options. And so in the hero spot, we talked about having a good call out, sending people to a specific spot. But even if as you scroll down our homepage, we're not sending people to a million different places. Most of where we're trying to send people is to the shop.
00:16:16
Speaker
So if you look at the majority of our call to actions, we're actually sending people to the same spot throughout most of our homepage. The only difference is the different angles there, right? So in the hero spot, we're talking about just view the shop. If you're looking for a brand or website design, view the shop. But then as you scroll down, there's another headline, it says something like browse the shop, and then we have the different categories of our shop there.
00:16:42
Speaker
There's featured products, featured categories. Yeah, and even different types of products. Like we have the Canva social media templates as well that we feature. And then when we're not sending people to the shop, we do a little bit of lead gen as well. And we're trying to get people on our
Leveraging Lead Magnets and Email Marketing
00:16:58
Speaker
email list. Right. So we're not trying to send people to all the different spots. We're really trying to funnel people in a specific direction. And I think we typically think, or the mistake people typically make is that they have to give people a lot of different options.
00:17:11
Speaker
And I think what makes for a better experience is when you lead people through the site, you know, how you think they ought to consume the information. Well, yeah, or sites that they put their process on the homepage, they put their pricing on the homepage and it's like you give no one any reason to keep clicking or just like a one page site in general. I've found that one page sites really don't do enough work to sell your services, especially if you're at a higher price point and having multiple pages on your site helps Google know about the different
00:17:41
Speaker
content that's on your site and it's just more content for Google to scroll through. Yeah. I would say like about putting your process and things like that. Like if you're a service based business and you are sending people to let's say your services page from your homepage.
00:17:56
Speaker
Yes, which should be titled their specific service title and not services. Sure. That's another thing. You can find out more about that on our services podcast episode and on our services related blog posts. But point being is that one of the things that we talked about, right, is like in your hero spot and sending people to shops and so, you know, I'm a shop, you're a service based business, you might send them to services. You can still allude to your process
00:18:18
Speaker
on your homepage. You can start that conversation, so to speak, and then link off to your services page. And so that's exactly what I'm talking about here. Where we're sending people to our shop in a lot of different ways, you can send people to your services page in a lot of different ways. So you can allude to the content that you have on your services page.
00:18:37
Speaker
Another mistake that I see people make is not having a lead magnet on their homepage. So a lead magnet is usually a free guide, a free course, a free something that you give someone in exchange for their email address. And for most businesses,
00:18:53
Speaker
Email lists are the best way to stay in contact with your customers and sell things and let them know about new offers, especially if you're emailing your list regularly. I was talking to someone who, I guess a few weeks ago, she's a local business near us and we're helping her redo. It's their running shop. And she's like, I just don't want to email my list too regularly. And I was like, well, how often do you email them? And she's like, like four times a year. And I'm like, well, that's probably not serving you well.
00:19:17
Speaker
Like you should be emailing them weekly about new products and like running tips and all of the things because that reminds them that you're here, that you're an expert at what you do and that they can come to you when they need new running shoes. Cause I met a certain percentage of them at any time need new running shoes. I just haven't put it on their to-do list to actually go out to their running shop.
00:19:36
Speaker
So every business I think can benefit from having a mailing list on their site. And if you're just asking people to join your mailing list, you're probably going to see really low conversion rates, like probably next to nothing because nobody wants more email. But if you let them know what kind of value you're going to add to their life by getting on their mailing list, especially if you do this on your homepage where everyone's going to see it, I think that you're going to find a lot more success in your sales.
00:20:02
Speaker
Yeah, and the irony there, especially with that, you know, I think just in that exact example, I run. I'm not a runner, but I like running. I always make that distinction.
00:20:10
Speaker
You run like 10 miles, you've run half marathons. Yeah, no, I run regularly, but I'm not a runner. Like I am not a runner. Yeah, but there's runners and then there's people who like to run. Anyways, not the point. The point is that, you know, this running shop, for instance, I would love to hear from them regularly, right? I mean, first of all, running shoes is something that you have to get every few hundred miles that you run, right? So it's something that you're definitely going to go back for.
00:20:32
Speaker
And I'm just a big fan of finding a local running shop because they're always going to help you in ways that, you know, going and buying your shoes on Amazon or whatever can't. And so there's just things like training tips. There's new gear that I would love to hear about. And so they'd actually be serving us better by emailing us more regularly. But I totally get that fear of like, well, you don't want to annoy people, right?
00:20:54
Speaker
And I told her, I looked up our specific email list and I'm like, I just want you to know that we have this many people on our list and every time that we email them, this many people unsubscribe. And that's okay because you're losing people who maybe have duplicate email addresses. They're never going to buy from you anyways. People who move.
00:21:10
Speaker
people who move. And so you don't want to have a list of people that's not actually opening your emails. Like that's not healthy for your data and for the algorithms. And you don't want to be paying for those subscribers, especially if you're on a plan, like our specific plan, I think we have to pay for our subscriber count, right? Yeah. So we don't want to be paying for people who are on Flowdesk.
00:21:29
Speaker
unless you're in full desk. So you don't want to be paying for those people. And I use this specific example with her and I was like, when we first moved here, Davey got running shoes and he was not used to running on these mountain back roads and his shoes were picking up rocks. And so he came back to you guys and he like, you helped him find shoes that would not pick up the rocks. And that's not something that an Amazon is going to do. And so you're able to bring that expertise and they could be regularly emailing out those tips.
00:21:57
Speaker
And I know that I'm getting off of the point of like homepage specific, but I just want people to see like the power of a mailing list and the power of having like some specific thing that you give them for free on your homepage is to keep those people coming back. Yeah. Last word about that. And then let's move back to homepages, but it doesn't matter what kind of business you're running.
00:22:17
Speaker
interviewed Daniel Scheer of Seasons Yield, who runs a bakery in our area. Whatever you're thinking about a bakery, this is different. This is very experiential. They have people out to basically their farm for these things called Bread Days. It's really this awesome setup. But point being, that's a local business.
00:22:37
Speaker
And he'll say his email list is crucial. And they fortunately started their email list the day they started their business. So when they had the first two people show up that bought four loaves of bread on their first bread day, they had those people's email. And they built that email list over time. And so now they have up to 1,000 people that will show up for a given bread day. So it doesn't matter what kind of business you are.
00:23:01
Speaker
And they have an e-commerce aspect of their site where people are connected then to their mailing list. And so they can remind people that these events are happening. And I think they give them a discount code in exchange for signing up for their list. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of different ways to do it. And we've tested those things out right now. We're testing it using Sumo, soon to be rebranded, but Sumo will allow you to do AB tests on your website, you know, popups, things like that. Should we do like one more?
00:23:26
Speaker
Yeah, we should maybe talk about one more thing. The thing that I wanted to talk about was just content on your homepage. I think that people don't love writing. We talked about this in a lot of different copywriting episodes, so I don't want to really go down that rabbit hole. But I do want to say that it's important to include content on your website, especially
00:23:42
Speaker
when you are a local service-based business. And showing up in Google searches is really important to you. And that's not to suggest that that
Crafting Persuasive Website Content
00:23:49
Speaker
should be only important for people who are service-based businesses. But you want to make sure that you include enough content on your website so that people understand what you do, but then also search engines understand what you do as well. And you have more of a chance to rank for searches that are related to that primary search you're trying to rank for. So for instance, if you are an elopement photographer, of course, you want to include information like
00:24:10
Speaker
what kind of a lopeman photographer, there's different kinds, you know, there's like adventure lopeman photographers, where you serve, wherever it might be, all right, the different areas that you serve. In addition to that, though, there's just questions that people are asking themselves in relation to whatever it is that you do. So again, going back to an Apple's wedding photographer, just because that's
00:24:30
Speaker
what we did for a long time. Yeah, for a long time, like people are probably asking about things like cost. And it doesn't mean that you actually have to answer the question of cost on your homepage. But even if you allude to it in a heading, right, like Google's going to pick that up. And so your homepage has more an opportunity to rank for Annapolis, you know, Maryland wedding photographer.
00:24:52
Speaker
I'm going to add a layer to this by adding that you also want to make sure that the homepage actually all of the content on your site and when you're writing it that you're speaking to your ideal client and remembering that it's about them and not necessarily about you. That's a big mistake that I see a lot of people make. They start like writing their about section and they just make it about a list of their favorite things
00:25:14
Speaker
and you wanna remind people that you can help them get the results that they want. And so that's really what you should be thinking about through all of the copy on your website. Like what are my ideal clients or customers paying points? What are they worried about? What are they asking themselves? And how can I use my copy throughout the site to answer those questions?
00:25:32
Speaker
Yes. And you bring up customer avatars as well. And this is, I think, its own topic. But really understanding what your buyer motivations are, right? And you can do Google search and figure out, and you're going to get different lists, but you're going to have generally the same things. But really understanding your buyer motivation is important. And I think one of the most critical pieces to building a successful business, and I think to a lot of people, it sounds like something that's sort of abstract.
00:26:01
Speaker
but it really is critical as you craft your copy and as you decide on what kind of imagery you're going to include. I recorded a podcast episode on this with a copywriter. I can't remember which one it was off the top of my head. We'll have it in the show notes. Yeah, I think it was Sam.
00:26:17
Speaker
and he talked a little bit about buyer personas, but it really made like if you are a luxury service-based business or a luxury photography business, you could be serving a number of different types of clients. There's luxury clients who care mostly about reputation and it's about using the best and getting the best. But then there's also luxury clients who maybe they're not as driven by reputation and maybe they're driven more about like somebody who can capture like the sweet intimate moments
00:26:45
Speaker
with family, you know, exactly quality, things like that. And understanding those things will help you determine like what imagery do I want foremost on my website? What kind of language am I going to use on my homepage? What kind of testimonials am I going to include as well? Like what should people be speaking to in those testimonials?
Conclusion and Call for Reviews
00:27:04
Speaker
We actually did an Instagram post about this this week as we published this to go back to our February channel, about $50 boxes of cereal. Well, anything else to add before we sign off here? I don't think so. All right. Awesome. As always, if you have any questions, let us know. And if you like the podcast, please consider leaving us review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps spread the word. Yeah. Thanks guys.
00:27:29
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to the Brands of Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and sharing this episode with others. For show notes and other resources, head on over to DaveyandChrista.com.