So your SEO is through the roof, you’re consistently hitting near the top (if not the top spot itself) on search engines, if not actually at the top. Your PPC is working overdrive and bringing tons of visitors to your site…yet your conversion rates are in the bucket. A quick examination of your analytics data reveals why – despite enormously high numbers of unique visitors you’ve got a homepage bounce rate that would put a rubber ball to shame. So what are you doing wrong?

Putting aside all the arguments about deep linking to pages in your site other than the homepage, and dozens of other recognised techniques to get customers landing closer to the key calls to action to avoid losing them, it might well be time to re-examine how you built the homepage itself. Good old index.html is more than just a placeholder saying hello which people click through quickly to get to the meat of the site. It is also a powerful advertisement which should hook visitors and draw them into the site, making it an immensely important and valuable page in its own right.

Think of casual browsers as window shoppers. When you walk down a high street, there is a good chance that you won’t walk into every shop you pass and spend ten minutes browsing its shelves and racks to see what is on offer. Instead, you look at the windows to see what the shop sells, how it is presented and priced and if they have any special or unique offers currently available. Only if you see something of interest will you actually enter the shop.

Of course some big, well known brands can get away with pulling customers in on name alone but that isn’t always a possibility, especially for smaller companies, so treat your homepage or other site landing pages as shop windows. Dress them up a bit and use them as a showcase to convince customers not just that they want to buy product x or service y, but that they want to buy it from you. Yes, you! Of all the millions of websites selling their desired product or service, why should they choose to spend their hard-earned cash at yours?

The key to this is USPs, or Unique Selling Points. Don’t just tell people what you’re selling, tell them why they want it and why they want it from you as opposed to any of your competitors. Are you cheaper? Do you guarantee free postage or next day delivery? Does your service plan give free lollipops to everyone who signs up for the monthly billing option? That’s the information that will grip passing visitors and turn them from idly curious window-shoppers into genuinely interested potential customers, driving them out of the bounce rate statistics and into the sales conversion funnel where you want them.

How you present this information is of course an entire library in and of itself, but the most critical thing is to get it on there. It is truly shocking how many homepages we see every day which consist or just basic image splash (that most heinous of crimes against both content and SEO!) or a boring intro blurb along the lines of “We sell product x, and product x does this.” Don’t fall victim to the bounce rate blues, and make sure your pages are as attractive to real people as they are to search engines.