Your St. George Homepage Is Talking. Your Best Customers Aren’t Listening.
Your homepage should quickly answer three basic questions. What do you do? Who do you help? Why should someone call you?
If those answers aren’t obvious, visitors will go elsewhere.
One of the biggest mistakes on local business homepages is it tries targeting every possible customer. It becomes too broad and potential customers get lost.
That’s understandable. Business owners don’t want to turn away potential business. But it’s important you narrow it down.
Your Homepage Isn’t Really About Your Business
Your homepage should start with what your customers want, not who you are personally. It should tell them how you can help them. Give them reasons to trust you. It’s there to help potential customers solve something.
You can place the company’s history and mission statement in a link customers can click on to find out more about you.
Some Homepage Mistakes Start With One Word: “Everyone”
I’ve asked business owners 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 they’re homeowners in established neighborhoods with older plumbing. That narrows it down when someone is looking for a specific type of work done. That’s more useful than leaving it wide open.
Speak strongest to your best type of customer. Then you can include other areas of expertise.
Your Best Customer Has A Problem Right Now
When a customer visits a local business website it’s usually for a specific need. A particular problem occurred that needs to be taken care of.
They want to get to the specifics about their issue and whether you can help before reading more about you and your company.
A strong homepage recognizes potential problems that occur. It points visitors toward the service they need. You can let them know about the company after you address their issue.
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 the 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.
Too Many Services Can Make Your Homepage Confusing
Some businesses do a lot of things. The problem with that is when it mixes uncommon things in with the most common. And then customers have to weed through a long list
Your main services deserve to be in the forefront. Secondary services can appear after them.
I see this when doing website audits. You don’t want your most profitable service to be hidden.
You don’t want something rarely requested ahead of the more immediate ones.
Your Homepage Should Send Visitors Somewhere Useful
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.
Your Google Business Profile And Homepage Should Tell The Same Story
I work with both Websites and Google Business Profiles. And then I compare them.
They 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.
SEO Can’t Fix A Homepage Nobody Understands
Keywords matter. I use them myself. But we sometimes concentrate too much on them. This is one of the bigger problems with traditional SEO.
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? Is the next move obvious?
If not, fix that first. Then you can take care of other SEO related items.
Who Can Help With My Website In St. George?
That’s one of the questions I want my own website to answer.
I’m Don Glasgow. I run Out of the Box SEO here in St. George.
I help local businesses with SEO and GBP optimization. I also look for website problems hurting leads and visibility. That includes homepage mistakes.
Sometimes the problem isn’t complicated. Your homepage probably just needs to be adjusted.
