Beginner’s Guide to a Homepage That Converts

[00:00:00] So today we are talking about website homepages and what you can do to help yours convert better. And so I'm actually going to take a few minutes here to tear down one of my competitors. Now, one of my friends' websites who is also in the payroll industry and who's looking to make a transition away from a client-facing site and more into a business development site. So we're going to take a look at this and I'm going to apply the 10 specific things that we look at on every website we look at to make sure that they're set up to convert at a high level.

[00:00:30] Welcome to Payrollin'. And now, here's your host, Matt Vaadi. Let's go. Let's go ahead. I'm going to share my screen here and pull up this website. And I'm going to talk through a bunch of things just because this is how I am. We're going to get off on some rabbit trails here. But the first thing I did was I just searched for the website so I could look at a few things. So I searched for serendipity payroll.

[00:00:57] And when I did that, I see I have some decent search volume around this key phrase. So that means your customers are likely searching for your website to log into the portal, to access the portal. 210 a month, not bad, right? So what jumps out to me, though, knowing that you have a decent client base is that there's only four Google reviews. So we want to go ahead and send out a quick two-email drip to our client base as soon as possible with a direct link in that first email that says, Hey, will you do me a huge favor and please leave a five-star review.

[00:01:26] Click on this link right here. Leave five stars. Leave a couple words about what you enjoy about our service, our software, whatever you enjoy about it. And if for any reason you wouldn't leave us a five-star, shoot me back a note. And I want to make sure I address that. And then send them a second email a week later that replies to that, that just says, Hey, wanted to make sure you saw this. This is the last time I'm going to bother you about it. And I've got templates I can share with you when we get off if you don't have that. But we definitely want more Google reviews because if we're searching for any other payroll-related key term in our market,

[00:01:55] we want to show up at the top and Google wants to see us active there. The second thing, and this is unrelated to your website, but Google My Business also wants to see photos. They want to see activity on here. So if we're worried about SEO and showing up in search, we want to pop a couple pictures in there and maybe give yourself a reminder once a quarter to throw a couple photos in there just to keep Google happy. All right. So I'm on the landing page here. And the first thing I see, so the primary thing we always want to see on a website is a primary clear call to action.

[00:02:23] One clear thing that somebody should do when they hit this website. And Matt, I knew exactly what you were going to say because for me, it's sign up for payroll. So the percentage of people that are going to hit your website and sign up for payroll is incredibly small, right? Unless your website is just for people to sign up for payroll. Knowing that you get a ton of business from referrals, I understand there's probably a lot of people that you're just, Hey, great. Nice meeting you. This was a great meeting. Now go to my website and you can sign up there. And so they're not getting lost for that intent. It's beautiful from that perspective.

[00:02:52] Now, the other thing is I want to also be conscious of, you know, the grunt test here of like somebody who hits this website. There's a clear, you can, they can grunt back at us in five seconds. What we do bringing a personal level of attention to payroll is better than nothing, but it's still a little vague. Now, but the bigger thing for me here, that's a problem is this right here. And it kind of shows with the copy everywhere. Every business. If we're, if we're calling out to every business, we're calling out to no businesses, right?

[00:03:19] So before we go through and we rewrite our homepage and we rewrite our copy, you know, Mike's website's pulled up over here. It's, it's trucking payroll. He knows his ICP inside and out. We've got to narrow the lens on who we're talking to and know how we talk to them so that the website copy can be more transparent, speaking directly to them. And solutions for every business to me just screams like, okay, cool. They don't really probably know my niche, my industry, whatever. They're already calling that out.

[00:03:46] So we want to put something a little bit more specific there. But a good way to think about this in terms of, you know, we want either a hook here that tells them exactly what we do, or we want something here that is going to grab their attention. Think about, you know, again, we've used the copywriting line on here many times, lose 10 pounds in 30 days without giving up pizza. So, you know, transform your payroll process away from a national in less than two weeks without, you know, without losing support or whatever the case may be. So there's a bunch of different ways we can go with that hook.

[00:04:16] I will say, you know, this clear headline, clear call to action. We're sort of good there. Now, the next thing we want to do is call out the customer's pain points, what their problems are. So somewhere down here, we got to it. You know, the founder section gets kind of close. Like me, you've worked hard to create your dream. This website does a little bit of my favorite thing to talk about, and that's it wee-wees all over itself. So, you know, like me, you have, well, you know, they don't really care about you at the end of the day.

[00:04:44] They only care if you can solve their problem. So you want to make sure you're calling out their problems directly. One of the things we do, and I'll bring up some, you know, we've definitely got some stuff to fix on our website. I'm not bringing it up as the most beautiful website ever, but we're sort of, we're calling out immediately compliance, rising costs, and time. Like what are the problems that you're going to solve for them? And as a matter of fact, in our slide deck that we initially present to a new customer,

[00:05:08] we've got five pains in which we're going through and we're trying to drag them down the pain chain early on and make sure that we can solve a real pain. We're trying to be a painkiller, not a vitamin, right? Like it's not a nice to have to change your payroll services. It's got to be solving a clear problem. So we want to make sure we're naming the customer's problem. That's number three, clear headline above the fold, clear call to action, name the customer's problem. Now I'm not going to get into the design here. I mean, the design is terrible. I'm going to say that, but the, I'm not going to get into it as much.

[00:05:37] I would say like, if you're going to use an image in the header, try to use a real image. You know, and I had to, I had to actually, it's kind of ironic. I was laughing because I want to make sure I looked at our website before we did this. And we have a stock photo on our website too, even though we just had a photographer come in and take a bunch of photos on the team for the website. So I've got to get over to the web team and go, Hey, why do we still have a stock photo sitting out here? So I talked to founders in the payroll, HR and accounting industry every single day.

[00:06:04] They all tell me they need more of one thing. It's not more money. It's not more AI tools. It's more time. How do I get more time? Well, I hired a virtual assistant through outsourcescale.com that helps me manage my inbox, manage my calendar, handles administrative tasks for me, helps support my marketing efforts and much, much more.

[00:06:28] The cool thing about Outsource Scale is that they actually train the virtual assistants on the latest and greatest AI tools to make sure that they can't only do that administrative work for you that you need to get off your plate, but they're doing it in the most efficient and effective ways possible. I've been so happy with my assistant from Outsource Scale that I've actually added multiple other teammates to our other companies through them. Their pricing starts at only $7.99 a month and they make it super easy to get a new teammate onboarded and part of your team very quickly.

[00:06:58] Check them out today at outsourcescale.com. You know, the other big thing, number four, is we want to position, everybody's heard the StoryBrand stuff. We want to position the company as a guide, not the hero. You know, right now there's a little bit of hero in terms of our founder section and a lot about tarot, a lot about serendipity, 20 years of payroll and counting.

[00:07:23] I mean, as a matter of fact, like I would prefer, you know, I'm going to get to social proof here in a second. Like I want social proof right here. So as soon as they go from, okay, what do y'all do? What's the call to action? 75% of website visitors don't go below here. So if they do, I want them to immediately see some of our customer logos, testimonials. Like I would move up. I think there's testimonials down here.

[00:07:49] I would keep these here, but I would add a logo bar, some sort of proof points right here. And sort of an example being this right here. So here's a few of our customers. And we know like, Hey, these are directly in the ICP of the types of businesses we're trying to serve. And so we're trying to, we're trying to make sure every of our target industries, we're putting a couple of logos right there. So that when somebody sees it, they can quickly like see themselves using us because they see their competitors or their peers using us as well. So the testimonials are great.

[00:08:19] You've got six testimonials on there, but I would, you know, I, I want social proof sprinkled throughout. So I would definitely keep these down here. Um, and I would also see if you could get some photos associated with these, get a little bit more specific, like who's genie. What's the deal there. And that's a nice by-product to like one of the easy cheat codes here. And something every website builder has is once you go and get those Google reviews, you can put a feed in that throws your Google reviews sort of rotating right across here. And that kind of helps you to keep those up to date without having to do a lot.

[00:08:47] Now, another thing is we'd like to give people a simple three-step plan. Again, this is a story brand thing. We're not a story brand agency or anything, but I definitely subscribe to some of the things like, Hey, what is this going to look like? So if you click this button, let's say we transition this away from, I'm not going to sign up as soon as I hit this website. So what is my call to action? It's probably some form of meeting. Like, are we going to have a call? Are we going to have an online meeting? Are we, what are we going to do? You want them to reach out to you, but they need a definitive reason why.

[00:09:16] So from there, I want to make sure that I have the ability to capture their information and bring them into either a calendar or a form or something from there. And now the other thing is I want a secondary call to action. So not everybody is going to take this primary call to action and sign up with you immediately. I'm actually going to come over. This is one thing I would highlight that Mike's website does well here, even though I'm going to tear it apart here in a few minutes. But, you know, he's got let's talk is clearly it's bigger. It's a bolder color. It's not washing in with some of the other colors.

[00:09:46] And he's got a secondary call to action that has saved money with per diem. I would change the order of these personally, just in terms of putting one on the left and one of the primary on the left and the secondary on the right. Just that's where the eyes tend to trace. But that's a good use of a primary and secondary call to action. Good examples are often like we have a calculator's lead magnet. So we used to have one that we used for years was our 42 free HR templates. So you're not ready to sign up right now.

[00:10:11] Why don't you download these 42 free HR templates so we can provide you with some value and you can get into our email ecosystem and we can start to market to you from there. So we want a lead magnet or transitional call to action. I prefer to have something of value for somebody to grab there. Going back to the three step plan. I knew I was losing my footing there on one thing. So example of that would be we've got one on this website somewhere. So three simple steps get you started, you know, free assessment, custom proposal, seamless transition.

[00:10:38] So people want to know like, hey, this is going to be simple. There is a clear process. There is a one, two, three that when it occurs, my transition will be complete. And I understand that you're the guide. You're going to help me make this transition. And it's a very simple thing to do. You know, this can mean a lot of things. You know, one is your, you know, your initial meeting. Two is your, you know, payroll proposal. Three is sign up and transition. You can go a lot of different ways with that depending on what specific products you're selling.

[00:11:07] As the primary, I see payroll is kind of the thing, but I do see some other stuff on here as well. So we talked earlier about the social proof below. So I'd say you also want to name the stakes. So this goes into the pain thing. Like there's a dream come true paragraph here, gestures at stakes, like your employees are the heartbeat of your business. But it never names the consequences of what could go wrong if they don't work with you. Like we've got to paint the alternative of what could possibly happen if they don't work with us, right?

[00:11:35] So again, that's, you know, are they going to have compliance nightmares? Are they going to have their costs going to continue to rise? And I would even say here, we could expand on this more. Like just really digging into that pain of like every year you take an 8% renewal on your health insurance. You know, if you compound that over the next five years, here's how much that goes up per employee annually.

[00:11:55] And so really trying to make sure that we're sort of constantly naming and addressing and overcoming any pains that they're going to have prior to working with us and what that transition works like. Like again, if we're, if the best marketing that ever occurs is the, I'm going to go back to the lose 10 pounds in 30 days without stop, without giving up pizza. Like when you see the before and after photo, people need to see the before and after photo in their mind of like, Hey, this restaurant had a bunch of compliance issues. They got IRS notices there.

[00:12:25] We're always waiting on hold for 45 minutes with ADP. Now they have Tara's cell phone number and they can text her anytime and they get their payroll done on time. And they, anytime there's a notice, it's directly there. So like that's, this is also where your social proof can help come through and help to galvanize these points as well. Mobile looks like the site's pretty strong on mobile. I didn't actually check it on my mobile. I just ran it through my corrector here. And then, so the last thing is number 10 is just SEO content depth. So we want to make sure that we've got a lot of words on any page that we're trying to get ranked.

[00:12:55] I think this one, you know, it might, a little AI radar rated at high. There's only one, two, really two content sections in here. Like we're going to want to try to rank for our primary keywords, you know, pick a keyword for the homepage. It might not be your payroll services keyword. You might have that in a secondary page so you can really double and triple down on it, but we've got to have enough content here where Google can find something, at least 750 words to be able to rank the page.

[00:13:22] But overall in a good place, I mean, you already recognize like, hey, this is something where it's built more for clients today. I want to make sure it's built for prospects in the future. And to me, like we've got to have, you know, I like to think in terms of means does is. So, you know, if I'm going to go here, I've got my social proof, then what would it mean to partner with us? Well, it would mean less, you know, no penalties, easier support, all the different ways that you can help them to solve those pains. And then what do you actually do? And then what is it?

[00:13:49] And then more social proof and more calls to action sprinkled throughout. So last point I would make is so from here, there's not another call to action on the page. So we want to have calls to action sprinkled throughout the page. So make your point. Here's why you should work with us. Here's what you should do. Here's why you should work with us. Here's what you should do. Those calls to action should be sprinkled throughout the site. So one of the terms that you'll want to think about when you look at a website and if you're trying to look at your own website is CRO, conversion rate optimization.

[00:14:19] You know, one of the things that people always ask is how much traffic is enough traffic is good traffic for apparel services website. It doesn't matter how much traffic it matters about the right traffic. So if we're sending business owners who are in our ICP and we're calling out their problems by name and we're referencing their industry and their peers and they see that and they can get comfortable, they're much more likely to take action than if we do anything else. And we've used the analogy on here before.

[00:14:46] You know, if you're at a coffee shop and somebody yells mom from across the room, only the moms are looking. If somebody yells Tara from across the room, Tara is looking. So we want to yell Tara from across the room as much as humanly possible to the humans that visit our website. So that's a quick breakdown of the 10 points that we will look at on a website. And I will show we actually while I was geeking out getting ready for this, I built out a where to go somewhere on this web page. Well, I guess I didn't publish it yet, but I built out a little thing you can throw your domain into.

[00:15:16] I'll put a link to it in the comments below and you can add your website in there and get the 10 breakdown of how your site does for the 10 things we covered today. If you enjoyed that episode, please share it with someone else, you know, who might enjoy it and learn from this. And also please rate us five stars on your favorite podcast player. We really appreciate you taking the time to listen and also don't hesitate to reach out with other topics you'd like to hear more about. Thanks so much.