Elements of a High Converting Website (Part 1)

‍Why the homepage is crucial

• Acts as the central living room in a house analogy
• Directs users to certain paths in the website

In a house analogy, almost every house has a central living room where you will enter or maybe receive visitors with welcome arms.

In this article, we will show you 7 important elements of a high-converting home page for a company’s marketing site.

Similar to a house, the central living room is the err, the centre of everything. Most of the doors to other rooms start in the living room.

Your home page should act accordingly. It should direct visitors to your website to certain paths in the website.

For example, when visitors land on your website, they want to know what your services are.

The home page should display snippets or previews of these services, and, if they want to discover more of these services, they will click “Know More” and be directed to a page dedicated to that particular service, where a whole plethora of information will open up.

Difference Between a Marketing Site Home Page and a Landing (Sales) Page

In our opinion, there are two types of websites that you will usually land to when visiting a site.

One is a marketing site, and the other is a landing page, also known as a “salespage.e”.

Marketing-focused website

A marketing site is a website designed to feature your services, products, and offers. It depends on the goal of the company or business, but most of the time, the end goal is to attract leads first and foremost. A secondary goal is for the website to act as a "brochure," to add credibility, or to showcase what you have to offer.

These types of websites typically has different types of pages to it. The most basic ones we usually create are the Home Page, About the Company, Services/Products Page, and Contact Us pages.

Landing or Sales Page

A landing page, or sometimes called “Sales” pages, are designed to convert the users into leads, subscribers, or customers of a product.

Usually, there is one main page that contains all of the information. And a call-to-action distributed across the said page.

The difference between this type of page and the marketing page is that it does not direct visitors into other pages of the site, well, because there are no other pages aside from the sale sequence.

Created with the main landing page is a sequence of other pages. Usually we have Conversion Page (probably a page with a form, the product checkout page, or the subscription page), and a Success Page (which would indicate the success of the transaction or conversion and instructions that the person needs to follow).

Now that we got that out of the way by pointing out the differences between these two types of websites, let's dive in to the elements of what makes a successful, highly-converting website.

The 7 Elements of a High-Converting Marketing Website

1) “Above the Fold”

This just means the area where visitors would first see on the website without scrolling down or doing any action.

This part is crucial and must answer questions about the doubts of your visitors.

• What is this company about?
• What do I do next?

Value Proposition Statement

To answer the first question, the visitor should see the Value proposition statement of your business.

This would be a 1-2 sentence description of what your business is about in the most direct and straightforward manner possible.

This statement could be supported by 1-3 sentences that support the value proposition.

The value proposition statement usually has a big, bold heading, and the description is in paragraph style font (smaller).

Early Call-to-Action

Below the Value proposition statement should be the call-to-action button, or known as the CTA.

These are buttons that either could direct visitors to contact you immediately, or to explore your services.

But, again, it really depends on your goals as a company.

Do you want them to sign-up for a newsletter for email marketing purposes? Display a form that would enable people to sign-up.

Or do you want them to contact you? Have a button that would take them to the Contact us page.

Tip: Have only 1-2 CTAs in the above the fold section. To many choices would lead them to not choose any.

A Good Supporting Image

As visual people, we tend to look at images and pictures to judge a certain entity.

In the same way, your above the fold section should give the impression that you are trustworthy, and what you need to communicate through words in the value proposition statement is supported by the image you will display.

More on images as we speak further about the other elements below.

Social Proof

As human beings, we tend to look for other’s take on things to make our decisions better.

This is true about our society, and in marketing, this is a crucial component.

I mean, how many times have you looked at other reviews or product unboxing videos when making a decision on buying something?

On a website, there are ways to communicate this.

Testimonials

These are surefire ways to get your visitors to trust you.

With the real statements of people about your product/service, you are most likely to persuade them to be part of these people who have bought or transacted before.

It is necessary to have some kind of system where, after people have bought your product/service, you either give them a form to fill out or ask permission from them to let others know about your service if they are satisfied with it.

Always ask them first if they are satisfied or ecstatic, because we don’t want reviews that tarnish your reputation in the market.

Badges and Trust Indicators

These are signs of trust that we often see on other websites.

Things such as review stars, percentages, and static numbers kickstart something in our minds that signals trust.

A testimonial statement without a 5-star review is more unlikely to be credible than with one that has.

Real/Not Cheesy Images

I cannot stress this enough, Invest in some good images on your website.

When you think of it, if you were most likely to visit a website with crappy images, would you trust your hard earned-money with them, if they themselves could not show or invest in good images?

For small businesses, it would be hard to get these going, especially in the early stages. However, there are stock photo sites that you could use for free or avail photos from.

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There are several techniques for choosing great images if you don’t want to hire a professional photographer. But if there is one rule that we could follow, it is to always choose natural looking images of people.

If you are to feature people, people working with each other in candid usually solve this case.

Always avoid photos that look like they were planned or fabricated.

This is Part 1 of the Elements of a High-Converting Website. Get ready for Part 2!