Your homepage is the face of your website, and it’s the first page most of your visitors see. And it has an important job when it comes to your SEO.
I like to think of a website’s homepage as a computerized salesperson that doesn’t need to eat, sleep, or use the bathroom.
24/7, your homepage is there to share your business’ marketing message with the world.
It answers questions, points people to relevant services and products, and shares your published content with visitors.
So, is it doing its job?
Is your homepage an effective salesperson for your website? How can you even tell?
And what steps can you take to improve your homepage and make it a more effective salesperson?
Tip #1: Read through your homepage out loud
Whenever I do a website teardown (https://kaidavis.com/services/teardown/), I start by reading through the homepage aloud. You can do that yourself and find a lot of copywriting issues:
- Open up your homepage and a notepad app
- Read through the content top to bottom out loud
- Write down and note the places where your copy sounds weird/off/out of date
- Then fix those issues
Seriously, it’s as simple as that.
Over the years, I’ve found that this is a super effective way to catch those little bits of copy that sound weird, have edit-induced typos, or or have errors that the brain and eye automatically gloss over.
The critical bit is reading the homepage out loud. That forces you to stop and process the homepage as you read and speak. That gets your brain going on the copy in more and different ways, so you can find those tricky bits that the eye alone will gloss over.
You can get more advance if you like. You can record yourself as you read your homepage’s text out loud. That way, you can scrub through your recording, get back to specific bits, and reference what you were saying.
Excelsior!
Kai
p.s., Looking for actionable ‘fix this now, fix this later’ marketing advice on your homepage and the rest of your site? You’re looking for a Website Teardown: kaidavis.com/services/teardown/.
