Increasing traffic, i.e., the number of visits to your website, has a direct impact on your sales. There are several strategies you should follow to keep your customers interested, attract potential new customers to your site, and, best of all, win them over. We have put together our top 4 tips for optimizing your website here:
Homepage optimization tip 1: content marketing
Optimize your content and create new content. Content marketing is not the same as advertising your products. With the right approach, you can increase your findability in search engines through clever content marketing and, at the same time, offer the visitors of your homepage added value. You can generate this, for example, via posts on social media, blog posts, customer reviews, or newsletter offers. Both your customers and Google should like content that is regularly updated, appealing, and optimized for specific search terms.
Also, think about including visuals, informative graphics, or videos. By offering potential customers versatile and useful content, you can attract new audiences, improve your Google ranking, and generate more traffic on your homepage.
Homepage optimization Tip 2: Advertisements on Google and in social media
With Google Ads, you can point potential customers to your own homepage in a cheap and uncomplicated way. The advertisements consisting of a meaningful title and short text with a call to action appear in a Google search in the first rank above the other search results. If a user clicks on your advertisement, he will be forwarded to a landing page optimized for the respective search term—in your case, your homepage or one of your subpages. With this pay-per-click advertising measure, you only pay for the traffic that you actually get. Advertising can also be placed on social networks such as Facebook or Instagram. Here, you also have the opportunity to precisely outline your target group using demographic data or other targeting criteria. This enables a targeted approach to exactly the group of people you want to reach. For example, have you opened a small wedding dress boutique? Run Facebook ads targeted at marriageable women who are in a committed relationship and in your local area.
Homepage optimization Tip 3: Optimize your homepage for mobile devices
While waiting for friends, on the train, or in a café, many people use their smartphones or tablets to surf the internet when they are out and about. The majority of Google searches are now done on mobile devices. For this reason, you should offer your customers a responsive homepage optimized for smartphones and tablets, which ensures that your content is displayed appropriately and is easy to use.
Making your website mobile-friendly pays off. Not least because Google also analyses, evaluates, and ultimately ranks new websites based on the mobile version of the content with the so-called mobile-first indexing. The content of the mobile as well as the computer versions of your homepage should be identical and contain the same meaningful and clearly structured headings. When providing visual content such as images or videos, care must be taken to ensure that only supported formats of sufficiently good quality are used. Due to their file size, however, these should not affect the loading time of your website (see point 4) or reduce user friendliness by displacing the text. You can use various online tools to find out free of charge whether your website is “mobile-friendly”. Simply enter the URL of your website in the appropriate field and have it checked for responsiveness and user friendliness.
Homepage optimization Tip 4: Optimize the loading time of your homepage
As described in point 3, a significant part of Internet use takes place away from the broadband connection. The extreme speeds have not yet arrived, but users still expect comparable performance when surfing the Internet. When it comes to the loading time of your homepage, a second or two can hardly make a difference, right? But she can. Studies have shown that 40% of people abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. 47% even expect a loading time of 2 seconds or less. Since loading time directly affects your conversion, you should try to reduce it whenever possible. When crawling your website, Googlebot also pays attention to loading times and how quickly it can recognise and analyse relevant content. In our fast-moving times, seconds determine whether a potential customer stays on your website and the ranking of your homepage in Google search results. Free online tools are suitable for analysing your loading times and making suggestions for optimization.
Conclusion on homepage optimization
There are various ways and means to increase your search engine ranking and the user-friendliness of your homepage. At SaphirSolution, we help our customers successfully expand their businesses digitally. When it comes to bringing your homepage forward and optimizing it, we are there with know-how and passion. If our tips are not enough for you or you would prefer to rely on the experience of a specialised agency for implementation, we are at your disposal.
However, if you take one thing away from this blog post, it is this: the optimization of your homepage is essential, both for your position in the search results as well as for increasing user friendliness and, ultimately, for more sales.
