Best website structure for product benefits and features.
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I'm in disagreement with my partner over how best to represent our products' benefits and features on the homepage of our website. I'm interested in this from primarily a SEO perspective but it obviously has an impact on conversions as well.
I believe that a homepage shouldn't contain too much information so as not to overwhelm the user, a brief sentence or two about each benefit with a link to another page with in depth info about the related feature. Each of these inner pages would be optimized and contain much more content that you could put on the homepage example below. Each Please see wireframe A
He believes in more information on the homepage. There is more content to index which he believes is important for the homepage. Also, by using tabs most of the content is hidden from initial view so its doesn't clutter the page and the user doesn't have to leave the page to decide whether he is interested in the software. Please see wireframe B below.
I'd really love to hear from other Moz'ers which they would choose and why?
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In that case, begin with option B and hide all the tabs. In essence, you will then have option A. Then as EGOL suggested, you can show an additional tab every week and measure differences.
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Thanks Egol, great reply. You're absolutely right, we need to A/B test this however since it changes quite a bit of the website structure I'd like to go with the most likely option first.
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I'm in disagreement with my partner over....
I love this type of question.
My homepage is huge... huge... something like the LATimes. EVERYONE tells me that it is waaaaaaaay too freeking big. What am I thinking?
My homepage wasn't always that way. It used to fit all above the fold and have a few links. However, as I added more content and more options, visitor engagement went up. Bounce rate went down, pageviews went up, time on site went up, income went up.
Making my homepage huge was one of the best things that I have ever done.
But I am not going to say that it will work the same way for you.
I will say that both you and your partner should shaddup and listen to your visitors. Put out a small homepage and see what visitors do... make it a little bigger and see what visitors do... bigger still and see what happens.
Test different approaches and base your decision upon visitor data. Use Google Analytics and Crazy Egg.
I am a 60-year-old white guy who has lived rural all of his life and spent most of his life working in institutions. It would be pretty darn arrogant of me to say that I know what a diversity of visitors from all parts of the world are looking for when they visit my website.
I've found that experimenting and watching the actions of my visitors is the most valuable way to improve a website..... because my intuition is usually waaaay wrong.
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