Your St. George Homepage Is Talking. Your Best Customers Aren’t Listening.

1. If your St. George homepage visitors don’t quickly know the answers to basic questions they have, they’ll leave.

One of the biggest mistakes I see with a local business homepage is that it tries to appeal  to every possible customer.

That’s understandable. Business owners don’t want to turn away potential business. But it is important you narrow it down.

Note: Images on this page may be AI created.

2. Your Homepage Should Focus on Your Customers First

Your homepage should start with what your customers want. Your homepage should tell them how you can help them. Give them reasons to trust you.

You can place the company’s history and mission statement in a link customers can click on to find out more about you.

3.  “Everyone” Is Not Your Best Customer

At BNI meetings I’ve heard business owners who were asked who their ideal customer is. A surprisingly common answer is, “Everyone.”

Let’s say you’re a St. George plumber. Your best customers might be homeowners needing residential repairs. Or maybe they’re homeowners in established neighborhoods with older plumbing. Now you’re talking to someone looking for a specific type of plumbing work.

That’s more useful than leaving it wide open.

4.  Your Potential Customer Has a Problem. Can Your Website Prove You Can Solve It?

When a customer visits a local business website it’s usually because of a specific need. Something happened that needs to be taken care of.

They want to get to the specifics about their issue on your website homepage.

They probably want to find out if you can help before reading more about you and your company. 

A good home page points that customer to the right page with only a couple of clicks.

4.  Your Homepage Should Send Visitors Somewhere Useful To Them

A homepage doesn’t have to explain everything. That’s what service pages are for.

Suppose you own a St. George cleaning company. Your homepage can introduce house cleaning, office cleaning, and vacation rental cleaning.

Give each service area a link that leads to useful information. Customers like reading specifics about the service they are looking for. Let them find it easily.

This also helps search engines understand your website structure. Clear internal links connect related pages. They also make your main services easier to find.

5.  St. George Customers Need To Know You’re Actually Local

I pay close attention to this during SEO work.

Some websites claim to serve St. George. Yet there’s nothing else on their homepage that supports that claim. No local projects appear. No nearby communities get mentioned. There’s no local knowledge anywhere.

There’s no way to know whether the company is really local.

Customers want evidence you’re local. Mention areas you actually serve. Talk about problems you encounter around Southern Utah.

You don’t have to go overboard with stuff about “St. George”. Just enough so Google can understand where you operate. Customers need to understand it too.

6.  Google Says One Thing. Your Homepage Says Another. That’s Not Good

Google and your home page should both have the same information describing your business and its services. The last thing you want to do is confuse potential customers. They want consistency. 

Your website and Google Business Profile should support each other. Your primary services should make sense across both.

It’s important your business name and contact information match.

The website and GBP don’t have to  identically match word-for-word. That’s unnecessary. But you want them to relay the same information.

7.  SEO Can Bring Visitors. Your Homepage (and the rest of your website) Has to Do the Rest

If you want your website ranking higher, read over your homepage. Pretend you’ve never seen the business before.

Can you quickly tell what the company does? Can you tell who it serves? Will the potential customer know what to do next?

If not, fix that first. Then you can take care of other SEO related items.

Don Glasgow, Out of the Box SEO, (435) 879-1239

Reddit: r/explainlikeimfive – ChaosOfOrder24

ELI5. Why does a webpage load slowly or sometimes not even at all even though the site itself loads perfectly fine?

This has bothered me for years. Sometimes I’ll be browsing through a website with little to no loading issues but then I’ll go to a particular page on the site and it’ll load ridiculously slow, sometimes it even load at all and it’ll instead give me 502 gateway error. I usually assume it’s a server error but find that the rest of the site runs buttery smooth. I sometimes then come back to the exact same webpage several hours later and it runs just as smooth as the rest of the site. What gives?

My explaination: This could relate to any webpage, including the homepage.

There are a number of different issues that could be happening. Here are a few:

1. The images on the page are too large. This becomes less of a problem as internet download speeds increase, but if a page has a large number of 1 mb images, that could be the issue.

2. The page has videos embedded in it. Embedded YouTube videos add about 1 mb to a page. This could slow things down.

3. The website is no longer maintained and is either dead or has been taken over by spam.

4. The webhost is down temporarily and/or the webhost is unreliable and is down.

5. There could be unresolved technical issues. There are a large number of potential issues with this but the most common is the webpage is not properly linked and leads to a 404 page.

Like I said, there are bunch of potential issues. Many more than these 5.

How to get 1000 visitors per day to your website?

Getting to 1000 visitors a day is a fairly big goal. There are many things that you can do on your website that many people visit. Here are six: 

1. Pick a topic that is wide enough. If your niche is too narrow, that reduces your audience. 
2. Pick something interesting to people like food or travel. 
3. Write content that talks about the subject. Make it well written and intriguing. Example: You could write a boring article about food. It wouldn’t attract much of an audience vs writing about an interesting food to make. 
4. Use good SEO and be careful when creating the actual page.
5. Create YouTube videos to go with your articles.
6. Do posts about the subject where appropriate, like Facebook.  

How to check website visitors for free? 

Google analytics has a number of different ways to give feedback on customers. So much data presented in so many ways it is difficult to take it all in.

What is your home page saying?

Bloated website and thin content