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Welcome to podcast #80! This week we explore why your killer homepage could be costing you a lot of money. This has come up recently a lot so we want to clear the air and help you understand why you need to make sure traffic is directed to the right spot on your website.
What did Andrew and Heather learn this week?
Andrew – Yelp has launched a video option for leaving a review. You can film your review and upload it directly to Yelp. Could this be the start of video review options on other sites too?
Heather – Google will be giving search result precedence to websites that begin with https – the sites which have encrypted or protected data. Don’t worry about it too much if you are a small business. If you are wanting to upgrade your site, you will need to buy and install an SSL certificate on your site for which you will probably need help from a web developer. It’s more important for sites with a shopping cart that sits within the site (as opposed to something like Paypal).
Killer homepage – Is your homepage damaging you?
Where are your ads sending people to?
If ads are going straight to your homepage, you are probably confusing people with all the information available on your homepage. A confused person is not likely to become a customer! What’s the reason for the ad? You should be sending people somewhere where it is clear what their next step is. Think of your website as a conversation rather than just a brochure. You can control how much navigation or information is available on each page.
Types of Pages we use:
- Different domains for different page types – e.g. AYB Chat (this is a landing page for live events). Useful for running ads directly to our sign up.
- Landing pages – designed to convert people. e.g. AYB Guide. The advantage of this is that it’s easy to remember and it gives people easily digestible information. (Notice that this is a redirect URL to our main website, you don’t need to build a whole lot of websites).
- Getting to know more about you – we use a URL on our cards, AYBSocial.com.
- AYBPodcast.com – opt-in environment for free giveaway.
- AYBHelp.com – goes straight to our helpdesk
You will notice on these pages that a common feature is that they are free of distractions. It is very clear what people need to do and there is limited navigation available. For more information on landing pages, check out some of our past podcasts on landing pages…
One of the key things to remember when running any ads is that the page people land on should clearly require them to take some kind of action. Directing to your homepage will confuse people and needlessly cost you money!