Primary marketWhy Your Site Needs A Headline
Your site needs a headline.
If you don’t have one, you’re wasting money.
Do you think that all those little “here’s my content”
buttons on the left side of your site are gonna make a visitor stay in your
site. They won’t. Not when every OTHER agent out there has
virtually identical ones.
You want something that makes YOU appeal to your PRIMARY AUDIENCE. You don’t see Arnold Schwarzenegger
promoting his movies with titles like “The Happy Little Fairy of the
Meadow.” Why? Because young children and people with
G-Rated namby-pamby, non-violent movie tastes are NOT his audience.
No, Arnold’s movies are headlined with macho names like
The Terminator, Commando, and Predator.
Why? So that his main
razor-blade-chewing audience can recognize at a glance that he’s offering their
kind of “high-body-count” movie.
That’s why you need a big definitive headline on your site. To let your primary audience know at a
glance what you specialize in.
Yet, astonishingly, only a handful out of a hundred agents ever do
this.
Why use a specialty headline? Because studies show that visitors give
a site less than ten seconds to show that it’s got what they sought. If your site came up when someone
searched for “Cleveland horse property,” then a strong headline can immediately
assure them that they have indeed found an agent who specializes in horse
property. How about a headline
like:
“You’ve Found
Your Horse
Property Specialist for
Cleveland”
Or, perhaps you deal in condos? Then just change the headline
above to reflect that. Do
the same if you’re a luxury home specialist (see the “luxury home specialist”
headline at www.Dana-Point-Real-Estate.com), or specialize in residential,
commercial, IRC/1031, farms, oceanfront, lakefront, hillside, view, city lights,
or whatever.
You might fear that using a defining specialty headline will
exclude visitors who aren’t interested in that particular
specialty. Well, ask yourself how
well your site is doing right now when you try to be all things to all people
with no specialty headline.
The solution to this valid concern is to have your webmaster make you
several home pages, or even web sites, each with a different headline, meta tags
and specialty-related key words so the engines can match each one to specialty
key words that consumers use in searches.
Or, far easier, use a headline that boldly proclaims a
main specialty, but is followed immediately by a bulleted list of
sub-specialties.
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“You’ve Found
Your Horse
Property
Specialist for Cleveland”
*Ranches
*Farms
*Dairy Farms
*Poultry Farms
*Kennel Properties
*Retirement Property
*Mountain, River, Lake
Cabins
*More
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For an excellent example of a main headline, followed by subordinate
headlines, see the Horse and Ranch Properties site of Larry and Pat Carlson of
San Juan Capistrano, California (http://www.larandpat.com/default.asp?zGo=15&mlsemail=&ptype=ent).
By supporting your main headline with subheads, you still can appeal to a
primary target audience, but also to nearly everyone else. Just be sure that the rest of your site
includes lavish content to back up the claims you make in your specialty
headline and subheads. Doing less
is, in my opinion, fraud.
Remember, while your home page is loading down into someone’s browser,
they see the TEXT that appears at the top of the page first, before any graphics
appear. Thus, it’s the most
valuable real estate on your site.
Treat it that way. Give it a
headline (just like ads have) that positions you ideally to your target
audience!