You may have heard that a site’s home page is its face. It’s even more important than that. While people may be willing to look beyond the face and into the personality of a person, very few people are willing to look beyond a boring home page. No, the home page of a site is more like a first date, frozen and consolidated into one moment and pasted on a computer screen.

Internet users will judge a home page within seconds. Many, many companies experience great traffic rates with little real site usage. This is because users click on the high ranking, land on the site, and do a swift u-turn back to the safety of the search engine. If your home page doesn’t immediately convey everything your user is looking for, you will have lost them before your relationship has even begun. Great search engine optimisation won’t mean much if your users are clicking through on your competitors next in line in the results pages.

Repeat traffic is, of course, a different story. Even if a site user was put off on the first try, a repeat visit might take them through to your interesting content and outgoing personality. Repeat traffic has a way of developing user loyalty so that looks are slightly less important. Getting that repeat traffic is even harder than getting it the first time, however, and your site should make use of first-time traffic to the best advantage it possibly can.

Before you can improve your home page, you need to know whether it’s gone wrong. This requires a quick look at your site stats. It’s fairly easy to spot that users don’t like you when they’re bouncing off your home page instead of going through to your informational page. If your home page is rich in content, it can be less easy to spot exactly when people are turning away. Consulting a professional can be of help when analysing your home page statistics and you can talk to our experts at SEO Consult if you need more information.

There are some things you can look out for when assessing your home page’s attractiveness. The first is general appearance. If your home page looks cluttered, or has very basic design in comparison to your competitors, users might assess you as unprofessional. Many spammy webpages have these traits and users won’t spend too much time finding out whether you’re safe or not. The next thing to watch for is the amount of information on your business that is clearly visible on the home page. A short tag line is a good idea beneath your logo. This not only gives you a further opportunity for search engine optimisation of your home page, it also provides in one neat hit a summary of your business.

Your home page can also get you into trouble if it looks just like everyone else’s. Your users will come to you because you offer an individual solution to their needs. If you look like a clone site of everyone else in your industry, users cannot see what extra benefit they would be getting.

There are many things that can make a home page go wrong, and it can sometimes be helpful to get professional advice. Talk to your SEO consultant about your site’s approachability.

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