Two Strategies For Website Home Page Copy To Make Visitors Stick Around
Share:
A website's home page is the most important real estate of that website
. What copy you put on that home page may determine whether a visitor to the site will stick around - or instead immediately click away to a more "appealing" website home page.
What's a more "appealing" website home page? One that follows these two basic but oh so important strategies:
1. On the web, less is more. 2. Tell people what's in it for them, not what appeals to you.
Let's look more closely at both of these strategies:
Less is more: On the web many people tend to skim copy looking for the highlights of a new site. If we don't find something immediately that holds our attention it's just too easy to click away.
The basic elements of this step are: - Short - and I mean short - paragraphs with a line of white space between each paragraph - Font size large enough to be read easily - Boldface subheads that provide important information by themselves - And a reduction of what you say to the most essential - leave much of the related copy for interior pages
Tell people what's in it for them: Now this is for the actual text of your copy: You do not say how beautifully made are the hand-woven winter scarves you sell (even though this feature is something you really admire).
You do say that these scarves are especially woven to trap the cold air so that a person's neck stays warm even in very cold weather. This is what a person buying a winter scarf for protection from the cold wants to know: How well will this scarf keep out the cold?
Many business owners do not want to accept this concept; they want to list all the great features of their product. But their prospective customers don't care about the features - these prospective customers care about the benefits to them.
You must switch from talking about what interests you to talking about what interests the potential buyers.
Bonus tip: In order for people to get the important information easily use everyday language. You do not want to create a mental stumbling block by using "sophisticated" words that may interrupt a person's reading.
To recap, keep your website home page copy "simple" (brief, easy to read) and targeted to what your potential customers want to hear.