Contact Form On Homepage - Best Practices

[TheSEODR]

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.

[William.Lau]

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.

[KevinBudzynski]

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.

[anthonydnelson]

Derek- This isn't the easy answer, but what you need to do in this instance is test. Run a simple A/B test.

[ThompsonPaul]

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

[stevefidelity]

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.

[TheSEODR]

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!