Contact Form On Homepage - Best Practices
-
How important is it to have a contact form on the homepage of a service-based business?
I am trying to decide if having a form on front page will increase the number of people filling it out.
-
Great info guys! I am going to try putting form on homepage on a few sites to see the response rates. Ill let post the data later. Thanks again!
-
Oftentimes what I'll do for small business clients of mine (service-based businesses) is have a few different types of contact forms through the site. You obviously want some type of form on the contact page itself. Depending on the type of business you may also have an actual page for a 'Request an Estimate'/'Request a Quote'/'Book an Appointment'. The latter type of form would typically be more detailed (i.e, more fields) than a basic contact form on a contact page, but what I've found effective on a homepage, or sometimes on every page of the site is some sort of 'Quick Contact Form', where you're asking for the bare minimum amount of information from the user in order that your client can proceed to the next step.
There's no silver bullet and what works for one site or one industry doesn't always work across the board. I'm a huge proponent of conversion tracking/goal setting and measuring the each form separately.
-
I'm with Anthony that this is a perfect example of where there's no reason to guess when testing can give you your visitors' answer instead of your own.
I suspect testing will show that a form on the homepage isn't going to get used much. Filling out a contact form is a fairly deep-funnel conversion. A visitor must already be pretty sure they're considering doing business with you to bother filling out the form. Or they've looked through the site and can't find the info they're looking for.
Are they likely to make this decision based on just having seen your homepage? Not likely. Better to use that space to give a new visitor more useful info.
But that's just my opinion. Test and let your visitors tell you whether they'll use it
Paul
-
Derek- This isn't the easy answer, but what you need to do in this instance is test. Run a simple A/B test.
-
I don't think heavily. As long as the prospect can find the form easily (via menu item or small graphic), I wouldn't include one as it will take up too much valuable real estate on the home page.
-
Not 100% important pertaining to the Contact Form.
BUT, I forgot where I read this statistic but customers are more highly subjected to inquire more of a business, if there are some trust signals. Signals like SSL certificates, payment acceptance and yes, contact information.
Contact forms are not fully needed, but doesn't hurt if it is purely service based like SEO consulting. But you should 100% put your business address, phone number, and email on the front page, probably on the sidebar or header.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What is the best tag to use for your Logo ?
Hi, I'm wondering what is the best tag to use on your logo. We're currently using h1 and i want to scrap that ASAP.
On-Page Optimization | | Alex.harvey.Cortex0 -
Bold & Italics Best Practice?
Hi All, Does anyone know the official best practice use of bold and italic fonts? If I have a long page of text- 800 words + I usually bold a few sentences to allow the user to be able to read only the bold on the page, and still make sense of the article. By reading all the bold it will kind of make sense and the user gets the point of the article. This wasn't really done for SEO purposes, but so the reader gets to the bottom of the page in a reasonable amount of time, and gets all the key points and facts of the article. I was advised not to do this and to just bold/italic the keyword/phrases the article was written to rank for. I would like to know anyone else's opinion/strategy on using bold/italics effectively and within best practices. What's the official word? Thank you for your help. Ian
On-Page Optimization | | cookie7770 -
Best SEO Extension/Plugin for NOPCommerce Site?
Hi I am working for a client who is using NOPCommerce. It doesn't look like they have a SEO Plugin in - although you can add meta descriptions to Products - which works fine, the Product categories have SEO components too but do not seem to work and all 'other' content /CMS pages have no SEO components whatsoever. Does anyone know of a plugin which would resolve this? (PS never used NOPCommerce before!)
On-Page Optimization | | AllieMc0 -
Using a keyword on homepage of a blog
I have a blog and the homepage has the 5 most recent posts. I ran a report card on my homepage for my main keyword. One of the problems is that the keyword only appears 1 time. I don't want to put it in the signature of every post because I found that causing problems with self-cannibalizing. I checked my competitor and they got a check mark for this but I looked at their homepage and I found the keyword NOWHERE! So where is my competitor hiding the keywords and how can I get the keywords on the homepage when the content is constantly changing? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
Removing text from Homepage - Bad idea?
Hi Mozzers, I've just read this great article: http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-build-a-great-online-fashion-brand-34-things-that-really-amazing-fashion-retailers-do I'm working with my wife on a small (hopefully, growing) fashion website www.vintageeheirloom.com One of the points was not to directly sell on the homepage, rather draw customers into different areas of the site. Seems good advice and it's followed by many big brands online. As a small company, doing fairly well for some targeted keywords, do you think it would be a good or bad idea for me to remove most, or all of the text on my homepage. The main emphasis of our site is vintage Chanel and using the tool nTopic I score 99% relevancy for 'Vintage Chanel'. Removing would certainly affect this. Obviously I could amend my Vintage Chanel shopping category to include all this. I'd be grateful if you have any thoughts / similar experience. Thanks ! Kevin
On-Page Optimization | | well-its-1-louder0 -
The best way to redirect to www
What is the best way to redirect non www to www. I saw a lot of the solution. is this one ok? RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.seomoz.org [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seomoz.org/$1 [L,R=301]
On-Page Optimization | | bruki0 -
How best to approach archiving badly optimised content
I signed up SEO Moz about a month ago as i'm currently rebuilding my site from scratch and wanted to learn from current mistakes. At present I use the forum software Invision Power Board to manage my site and one thing i've learnt is that it is terrible for SEO, there are so many thousands of errors listed by the crawler that it's not even worth trying to fix it. However because it has 5 or 6 years worth of content alot of which is on Google I don't want to totally remove it, rather I would prefer to archive it of with a big banner at the top letting anybody that visits it know that it's no longer in use and pointing them to the frontpage. I should note that it is in a subfolder already so the location of any of the links won't be changed. So the few questions I have are: The forum index has alot of link juice and I would like to redirect that to the new forum index, however for archive purposes the old index still needs to be accessible. Some topics are very popular and appear high in Google and have alot of backlinks. The important information in these forum topics will be available elsewhere on the new rebuilt site. Again I would like to redirect both link juice and users to the new page, however being a forum topic there are tens or hundreds of pages of old comments that need to still be accessible for reference. There are bound to be duplicate meta title and description issues with new similarly named categories appearing both on the new site and the old forum, is this going to be that much of a problem? So really what i'm asking is, how should I go about archiving this of without destroying content and rankings, but still making sure that the new stuff is getting the right exposure both to users and search engines alike?
On-Page Optimization | | freezedriedmedia0 -
What's the best strategy for reducing the number of links on a blog post?
I'd like to optimize my blog better for search. The first reccomendation I got from my SEOMoz Pro Campaign Crawl was that I needed to reduce the number of links per page on my site. I have lots of links from navigational items in the sidebar that people do click on. I'd really like to keep some or all of the tags and categories I list. Comments are another issue. Most of our posts get about 10 comments. However, our best posts get 50-100 comments. Those comments create a lot of links. I was planning on attempting to reduce the number of links using javascript but I guess Google understands javascript now. I may still do this b/c our pages are huge and some progressive rendering would likely help the user experience. Can you use javascript (ajax or otherwise) to limit the number of links on your page in a way that helps your SEO efforts? Any specific suggestions for reducing links that come from comments and navigational items? How much will reducing the number of links on a given page help with SEO? Any simple way to estimate or quantify this without diving in? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | TaitLarson0