June 22, 2020
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3 min read
When we meet with customers about a website design, their first question is often, "what do you think our home page is worth?" It's a reasonable question. A website is an investment and the home page is the main gateway to everything else on the site. You'd think the home page is where all the action is.
Maybe not.
Depending on how people find you and the nature of your business, the home page might not be the first or most important page. In fact, your home page might account for very little actual goal-based conversion activity.
Consider a simple example: you're a B2B technology company selling logistics software to small businesses. Your target customer is a small business owner who has realized that keeping track of their inventory and their customer orders is getting way too complicated. They're going crazy trying to keep track of everything in disparate systems.
When the pain gets bad enough, they'll probably do a Google search for something like, "how to keep track of inventory in real time." That search will return relevant content that's indexed in Google. That could be a blog post, a resource page, a service page, or even a case study. How likely is that Google search to turn up your home page? Not very.
Once they're on your page and that content addressed their pain point well, they'll probably explore your site a bit more. What are the other solutions you offer? Are there case studies? What about service pages? And yes, they might eventually come to your home page. But by then, they've already formed an opinion about your company.
According to SiriusDecisions, a research and advisory firm, 70% of the B2B buying process is already done before they talk to a salesperson. Buyers are doing research—and that research is taking place on Google. Your prospects are going right to the content that addresses their pain point.
Every piece of content on your website is an opportunity to connect with a prospect at a specific stage in the buying process. Blog posts attract people who are in the awareness stage—they're feeling the pain and starting to research potential solutions. Service pages talk to people in the consideration and decision stages—they've done some research and are evaluating specific options.
Each piece of content on your site—and there should be a lot of it—can be crafted to attract and convert prospects at different stages of the funnel. In digital marketing parlance, conversion means an action was taken. A purchase, a sign-up for a newsletter, a content download, or a form submission are all conversions.
Every piece of content on your website should be designed with a conversion goal in mind. It should be crafted to answer the questions a prospect will have at that stage of the buying process, and then it should guide them deeper into the funnel by providing a logical next step in their research.
The home page has to speak to everyone. That's both its strength and its weakness. Unless your company has a narrow product or service line, the home page is going to be a general representation of who you are and what you offer. It's unlikely to address a specific pain point. So while a home page conversion might be a contact form submission or a phone call, the content on the home page is unlikely to be the thing that inspired that submission or that call.
We recently analyzed website data for a BlueByrd client, a mid-size B2B company that provides IT and technology staffing services. We looked at the last 90 days of Google Analytics data, particularly Goal Conversion data, which is a way to track important user actions (goals) taken on the site.
This company had set up Goal Conversion tracking for form submissions, phone calls, live chat, and email link clicks. If we look at all Goal Conversions across all pages, the top performing pages were:
The home page accounted for 6% of all Goal Conversions. In this case, it wasn't worthless—but it certainly wasn't the star. The career listing and job application pages made up 29% of all Goal Conversions together, and that makes sense for a staffing company. They're attracting and converting job seekers.
Two blog posts together accounted for 17% of all Goal Conversions. Blog posts were the second highest-converting content. That makes sense, too. Blog posts address pain points and questions. When a blog post answers the right question, conversion will follow.
So what is your home page worth? It depends. For a product company with a targeted prospect base, the home page might be the first thing people see from an ad or a branded search and goal conversions there could be high. For a service company with a diverse customer base, it might be much less.
If you want to know what your home page is really worth, you need analytics. If you're relying on page view data, that only tells you how many people visited, not what they did when they got there. If you want to understand the value of your home page, set up Goal Conversion tracking in Google Analytics. Then you'll know where your prospects are really converting, and that's where you should be investing your content dollars.
BlueByrd's analytics and reporting services can help you set up and understand the kind of conversion-based data you need to understand the full value of your website. Contact us if you'd like to learn more.
When businesses approach us for website design, their first question is usually: "What will our homepage look like?" While it’s important, the homepage isn’t the most critical part of your website.
Yes, it makes the first impression, but it’s not where most sales happen. Think of it as a friendly face that guides visitors to the pages that really drive results—your service, product, and content pages. Want to optimize your website strategy? Reach out to BlueByrd for expert insights!
Let's get your wings ready!
