Your homepage is not the most important page on your site. Your customer’s landing page is the most important page on your site.

The first page someone enters your website through is called a landing page. When a visitor enters your site through your homepage, the homepage becomes their landing page. When a visitor enters through a blog post, the blog post becomes their landing page. Your homepage, blog post, product page, or any other page can be a landing page.

Your customers landing page is the most important page on your site because it will determine if they stay, share, read, buy, or call. With this in mind, how do you make a landing page that will drive customers?

Here are four principles to guide you:

  1. First, keep the landing page focused on the problem your customer is trying to solve. If you try to solve too many problems on your landing page you will confuse people or paralyze them with too many choices. Keep your landing page focused.
  2. Second, have a solid call to action that will drive the response you want to create. That response can be on online action like clicking the purchase button or an offline action like a phone call. Again, you need to show your customer how to take the next step and that next step is communicated through your call to action.
  3. Third, do not assume your landing page will work the way you think. Knowing the best path comes through A/B testing your landing page not assuming it will be perfect out of the gate. There have been numerous studies that have shown shocking results about landing pages. Many times the best-looking landing page is outperformed by an ugly landing page that focuses its words on the problem.
  4. Finally, use guiding principles. There is no shortcut to a great landing page. Making a great landing page requires understanding a multitude of factors. Photos, videos, text, buttons, and layout are factors of the page as well as a customer’s demographic, wants, emotions, and relationships. In short, making a great landing page can get complicated. This is why we have multiple principles to guide us through making decisions in complexity situation.

Here is the point. Think about those comedic chase scenes from the cartoon show Scooby-Doo. In the show, the gang is caught running from the villain in a hallway of doors. You never know what door someone or something will come from as they run from room to room. The same is true with your customers. You never know what page (door) they will enter through. You can not assume they will come through your homepage. They can enter through many different pages.

When you are working on your website give each of your top landing pages a look and see how you can turn them into result driving machines.