How To Craft A Compelling Homepage That Converts

The global E-commerce industry has been booming over the past two decades, with a staggering rise in market value in the last couple of years brought on by the pandemic.

Even though the pandemic is now a distant memory, the industry continues to grow and expand in all verticals. This makes the Ecommerce sector more competitive than ever before, but it also means that there’s more to be gained by new online stores as well as established brands.

In other words, the proverbial cake is getting bigger, and everyone stands to get a bigger slice if they invest in marketing, branding, and tried-and-tested sales practices. This is where your website’s homepage comes in, as your digital storefront and a gateway to your entire brand experience.

Let’s talk about why your homepage is so important and then discuss the best practices for turning it into a powerful conversion machine.

Here’s what you need to know. 

Key Takeaways:

• Optimize for SEO: Prioritize organic search visibility to enhance brand trust and attract long-term customer engagement.
• Showcase Social Proof: Integrate reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content prominently to build credibility instantly.
• Highlight Flagship Products: Utilize carousels to display critical products and categories, making it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
• Mobile First: Ensure your homepage is fully optimized for mobile devices, facilitating a seamless shopping experience on any screen.
• Actionable CTAs: Employ clear and compelling calls-to-action throughout the homepage to guide visitors towards making a purchase.

Put your homepage at the top of the SERPs.

Ecommerce business leaders tend to focus primarily on paid advertising and sponsored posts to drive traffic quickly to their pages and convert from social media and search engines. But there’s only so much you can do with paid advertising before you start to notice that you’re not retaining customers in the long term. 

People are buying via ads, but they’re not returning. This is a problem; you need to position your website at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) organically. Why? Because focusing on SEO means bringing recognition, trust, and authority to your brand as a whole.

With that in mind, your first order of business is to optimize your homepage.

Start by analyzing your keyword strategy and by researching relevant keywords for your brand, products, niche, and audience. You can use a comprehensive tool like Rank Tracker to track keyword rankings without any limitations, including competitor keywords, local scales, and much more.

This will form the basis of your keyword strategy and will allow you to populate the content on the page not only with the most relevant search terms but also in an organized manner. This will be crucial for search engines to understand what the page is about, who it’s for, and what it’s ranking for. 

You can use a SERP checker tool as well to get an instant analysis of the top SERPs so that you can adapt quickly and leverage the best SEO terms to rank higher. 

With a mix of competitor keywords as well as keywords they haven’t discovered yet, you’ll be able to create homepage content that’s tailored to your customers. 

Prioritize social proof front and center.

Social proof is a behavioral phenomenon that’s crucial for growth-oriented Ecommerce brands to leverage nowadays. It’s when people copy and follow the actions of others (in this case, your existing buyers), putting trust in a brand because other customers have already had a positive shopping experience.

The way to build social proof for your company is to:

• Gather positive reviews and showcase them on your site and socials
• Build compelling testimonials to feature in prominent spots across your website
• Integrate a live shopping feed that shows when someone buys a product on your site
• Gather reviews and endorsements from prominent figures in your industry
• Gather user-generated photos, videos, and shout-outs
• Work with notable influencers

These are some of the best ways to add more social proof to your brand as a whole, but they’re also crucial elements of your homepage.

The moment a potential customer lands on the page, you want them to see as much social proof as possible to build brand credibility right away. With that in mind, consider adding some form of social proof into the above-the-fold content, meaning on the part of the page the visitor sees first without scrolling.

You can then sprinkle more social proof elements as they continue to scroll.

Showcase flagship products in your carousels

Homepage carousels, also known as sliders, can serve a myriad of purposes on a homepage, and they can appear multiple times throughout the page.

These carousels can showcase anything from your flagship products to different product categories so that visitors can quickly navigate to the products they’re looking for. A carousel can also switch between different CTA, promotions, and FOMO elements, showing discounts, sales, limited-stock offers, and more.

When it comes to design, some of the best homepage slider examples include showreels, split screens, cinematic images, isometric images, cube animations, and before and after pictures. You can then customize this visual content to fit your brand’s style guide and make the whole experience more memorable throughout the page. 

For example, you can put FOMO sliders at the top of the page to add a sense of urgency and get people to act quickly. Scrolling down, you can add a product category slider to make navigation more accessible, and then you can have a featured-products slider so that people can check out those bestsellers quickly.

Mobile optimization is non-negotiable.

In this day and age, you have to make sure that your entire store is easy to view, navigate, and shop in via mobile devices. Just take a look at your website analytics–how many people are visiting your website from a smartphone?

The answer is too many for you to turn a blind eye to this golden opportunity. With that in mind, make sure to:

• Include mobile-relevant search terms in the copy.
• Optimize and scale the design to fit all screens.
• Use accelerated mobile pages for quick loading.
• Use mobile-friendly fonts and optimize images.
• Make the page touch-friendly with larger buttons.
• Add accessibility features, which are essential for SEO in general.

Using these and other optimized mobile strategies is an excellent way to attract buyers and inspire them to buy from their mobile devices directly. If a person leaves the website, thinking they’ll revisit it once they get to their home computer, there’s a high chance they won’t come back at all. 

Don’t miss the opportunity to convert them on the spot.

Combine compelling copy with visual content.

Always remember that written and visual content are equally important–it’s all about striking a balance between the two to maximize their potential. 

Your visuals rely on compelling copy to stand out and showcase their best features, while the document needs good images and videos to add substance to the value proposition. The problem with Ecommerce content is that it can sound the same across brands in the same niche, so you can leverage AI tools for content writing and get some fresh ideas and perspectives on how you can enrich your copy.

This can work not only on your homepage, which needs to provide something unique right away but also on your product pages that need to stand out. More than simply listing the features of a product is required to make it stand out or to make your brand stand out with it.

Don’t forget that you can also feature high-quality images and videos of your categories, products, and brand elements directly on your homepage. Just make sure that your user-generated photos and videos are in their native quality, as you don’t want the visitor to get the impression that you doctored them to look better.

Leverage CTAs, popups, and exit messages

Lastly, try to incentivize a purchase one last time before letting a customer leave. 

While welcome popups are a good idea, you have to be strategic with your popups in general so as not to drive people away. Consider that they already need to deal with the cookie policy popup, so maybe a welcome popup doesn’t have to appear right away.

Instead, showcase a welcome popup with a nice newcomer discount after a couple of scrolls. Use compelling CTAs throughout the page to inspire people to click and guide them toward the products they’re after.

When they’re about to leave, display an exit popup–but consider your message carefully. One of the best ways to give them a compelling reason to stay is to offer them free interactive content, such as an engaging quiz.

Based on the recent quiz conversion rate report, over 40% of people who start a quiz become interested leads by the end, which makes this type of interactive content a powerful lead generation tool. You can tailor your quizzes to achieve many different goals aside from lead generation.

Quizzes on Ecommerce websites, for example, can work great in directly converting visitors by telling them precisely the kind of product they need. An examination is also superb for upselling and cross-selling returning customers. 

Of course, there are other types of exit pop-ups you can try. 

Do you want to make them buy something, or do you want to stay top of mind when they decide to come back? A popup with a discount might be enticing for a person who’s leaving a store, but you can also consider social popups, email sign-ups (so that you can send them discounts later), and lead magnets.

Lead magnets encompass any free materials they can download from your site to add value to the interaction. Ebooks, guides, expert tips, templates–these are the things they’ll gladly take and remember you for.

Over to you

Ready to start using your homepage as a tool for brand recognition, retention, and conversion? There is so much you can achieve just with your homepage if you ensure that it’s geared towards your target demographic and that it showcases the content and elements that will guide them towards a sale.

You shouldn’t have to rely solely on your product pages to convert your visitors. The conversion process needs to start the moment they land on your homepage. Follow these tips, include these design and content changes in your homepage, and make sure to optimize it for your mobile shoppers to maximize results in 2024 and beyond.