When it comes to digital marketing, everyone at InSynch will say that the website is the cornerstone of the work. It’s the hub of information, it should say exactly what you do, quickly, and tell people what they can do to get that product/service.
The internet is so fast-paced now that people make judgement calls on your website within seconds and the average duration of time on websites is now actually about 1 minute. That’s not a lot of time to completely sell someone on your business, say what you do and get them to where they can convert easily. The website needs to be able to stand on its own and do so. You can create landing pages and work to make sure these sell you on a product or service and then convert, but the homepage needs to as well.
The homepage is most likely what google will show for your website in the search results and it’s where you will likely be linking to from your social media, any partner websites etc.
What is the test?
The test itself is simple! Find someone to help – the best option is if they don’t know the business at all, but even someone who doesn’t go on the website regularly would be good. It could be your friend, a family member, maybe a neighbour even!
Ask them to get in front of a computer or device where they can go onto the website and don’t tell them anything about the business, but just ask them to spend 10 seconds looking over the homepage.
Then, onto the results
The Results
Now that they’ve seen the homepage, ask the person helping some simple questions – What does this company do? What would you get from this company? What action do you want to take next on the website?
Make sure you write these down, and you’ll have incredibly valuable information from only 10 seconds of viewing the website.
Find out what’s wrong with the website – did your participant get the right impression straight away? Were they confused by what you offered or were so distracted by images that they didn’t even see what you do?
Did they know what to do next, and is that what you want? Would they have headed to the shop page of the website, or to the services page to find out what they need? Or were they ready to leave, confused by the terminology used?
What do you do next
Experiments like this work best with more data, so if you can get anyone else in to help and give just a small amount of time to give you that feedback, then you can see patterns emerge. If people are bored reading a massive chunk of text with no images that’s at the top of the page – consider a banner with a heading that sums up what you do before you go into the text to explain it.
If people were confused about what they had to do next, they understood that it was an eCommerce website but they didn’t know where the shop was – make it easy! You’ll find that small changes can come from this test and they’re actually invaluable.
A homepage’s purpose isn’t to fully sell someone on what you do – it can’t make sales for you. But, it can turn people away from looking at the rest of the website and lose sales if there are easy fixes that aren’t resolved.
If you’re still struggling on how to best update your website so it fits in with your digital marketing plan, let us know and we can go over a website review and digital marketing strategy in a free 121 session.