How focused home page design will increase conversions

6 Comments

I recently sat through a webinar by Marketing Experiments. They are a web marketing company that puts on free webinars all the time showing the results of testing different elements on a website and how it increase conversion.

The webinar I attended was on getting singular focus on your home page. Chances are that on your home page you are trying to cater to every single person that comes to your website. Unfortunately this is a backwards way of thinking.

The right strategy is to figure out exactly what your primary goal is for your visitors and make that as prominent and easy to find as possible.

For example, one of the websites I run is Lawn Care Directory. It is national (US based) directory of lawn care and landscaping companies. I really wanted to cater to people that were searching for a lawn professional and so I changed the design of my home page to cater to that group of people immediately when they came to the site.

Here is the OLD design:

Here is the NEW design:

Here is the crazy egg report on how the new design is doing. This is a heatmap that shows where on the page people are clicking:

As you can see the result of giving the visitors to the site one main option eliminates confusion for the visitor and drives them to do the thing I want them to do. So it is a Win Win.

The secondary goals that I have on the home page are still available and represented but I give the most weight and real estate to the thing that is my number 1 goal.

6 thoughts on “How focused home page design will increase conversions”

  1. jeff

    Thanks for the words of wisdom. That is a great looking home page. “Enter Your Zip Code” is such a simple, nonthreatening call to action.

  2. Woody

    Good use and nice example – it does show that your “Get a free estimate” box isn’t getting touched, perhaps though the visual complexity of that drives them to the simplicity of the zip code box – either way I might use crazy egg more!

  3. Petr Macek

    Good post, I like it but what if you have two or more typical personas that get to your site? By your new design you may discriminate other personas (e.g. those who want to register with you). How would you work around this? Imagine you cannot use a separate landing page for some reason.

  4. Rob

    This is the inspiration I needed to redesign the homepage of one of my leadgen sites. I agree, keep it simple and above the fold. Most homepages try to be all things to all people and end up not serving any target audience particularly well.

  5. Adam

    Petr, that has always been the struggle but I had to list out my priorities and focus on the most important one. I may lose out a little on the other audience but I should make up for it by going after the more profitable one. Kind of like designing a website for internet explorer users instead of chrome users.

  6. Phil Polson

    Great advice thanks Adam, I will follow your blog with interest. You have prompted us to make some changes to our site.

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