Most business homepages fail for the same reason: they were written to impress, not to answer. A visitor lands, spends about four seconds deciding whether they're in the right place, and leaves if the page hasn't told them so.
This is the deep-dive on the second pillar of being found online: once someone clicks through from Google or a search on your name, what does your homepage need to say so they don't leave confused?
The four questions every visitor is silently asking
Nobody arrives on a homepage wanting to read about your business. They arrive wanting four questions answered, in roughly this order:
- What do you actually do?
- Do you do it where I am?
- Roughly what does it cost?
- How do I get in touch?
If a visitor has to scroll, click, or guess to find any of these, you've lost some proportion of them before they ever read your "About Us" section. The businesses that get found and chosen are usually not the most impressive ones. They're the ones that answered fastest.
1. Say what you do, in words a stranger would use
The single most common homepage fault is a headline that describes the business's ambition rather than its service. "Building the future of home comfort" tells a visitor nothing. "Boiler repairs and installations in Norwich" tells them everything they need in three seconds.
Write the headline as if a friend asked "what is this place, then?" and you had one sentence to answer honestly. Save the ambition and the values for further down the page, if anywhere at all.
2. Make the location impossible to miss
If you serve a specific area, that area needs to appear near the top of the page, not buried in a contact form at the bottom. Someone searching "electrician near me" or "plumber Norwich" is trying to rule businesses in or out by geography before anything else. A page that never mentions where you work makes them do that work themselves, and most won't bother.
This matters even if you think it's obvious from your business name. It usually isn't obvious to someone skimming a search results page at speed.
3. Give a real sense of cost, even a rough one
Exact pricing isn't always possible, and that's fine. But total silence on cost reads as either "we don't want to say" or "we haven't thought about it," and both put people off enquiring. A line as simple as "most jobs start from £120" or "free quotes, typical projects run two to four weeks" removes a huge amount of hesitation.
The businesses that publish even rough numbers get more enquiries, not fewer, because they've already filtered out the people who were never going to be a fit — and reassured the people who were.
4. Put the way to reach you in more than one place
A phone number in the footer isn't enough. Someone who has decided to contact you, right now, on their phone, wants that decision to require no further searching. Put a phone number, a WhatsApp link, or a simple contact form near the top of the page and repeat it near the bottom. Don't make the moment of intent compete with page layout.
If you offer more than one way to get in touch, say so plainly, and let people choose. Some will always prefer a call; a growing number will always prefer to text first.
What else earns its place
Once those four essentials are handled, a homepage can usefully include:
- A handful of recent reviews. Two or three specific, recent ones do more work than a badge claiming "500+ five-star reviews" with no examples attached.
- A photograph of the actual work or premises. Real photos, not stock ones, are one of the fastest ways to signal that a business is genuinely trading and genuinely local.
- One clear next step. Not five buttons offering five different actions — one obvious thing to do next, whether that's "Get a quote," "Book a call," or "Message us."
What to leave off
A surprisingly long list of homepage conventions earn their place through habit rather than usefulness. A slideshow of rotating banner images slows the page and rarely gets read past the first slide. A wall of client logos means little to a visitor who doesn't recognise any of them. A long mission statement above the fold pushes the four real answers further down the page, past the point most visitors will scroll.
If a section doesn't help answer what you do, where, roughly what it costs, or how to reach you, it can move further down the page, or off it entirely.
A useful test
Open your homepage on your phone, cover the screen after five seconds, and ask honestly: could you now say what the business does, where it operates, and how to contact it? If the answer is no, the page needs less clever writing and more plain answering. That single change — answering before impressing — tends to do more for enquiries than any redesign.
The order from the first article in this series still holds: the Google Business Profile brings the click, and the homepage is what turns that click into an enquiry. Get the four answers in place, and the rest of the page can simply support them.