Content Strategy 101: Essential Elements for an Effective Home Page

Purpose

‍Your home page does double-duty, while helping you to generate leads it must also play well with search engines so that visitors can find your business. It works to  explain what you do and your brand while also guiding visitors to the right pages of your site.

Approach

Typically you achieve this by understanding your audience's tasks and how they need to use your service. The home page is often the last thing you design after you have done the majority of your other content design.

Recommended structure

The recommended order for home page elements has to do with strategically introducing information to the audience in a way that persuades and converts.

More specifically:

• The navigation bar allows visitors to get oriented on the site first.
• The USP and benefits quickly establish relevance and interest.
• Social proof builds trust next before asking for a conversion.
• The CTA prompts the desired action while interest is peaked.
• Features and stats back up the claims already made.
• Additional info is provided last after the main sales pitch.

structure it with these key elements in this order: a navigation bar, unique selling proposition, top benefits, social proof, primary call-to-action, features, success metrics, and footer resources.

We've done a lot of research on this and found that this arrangement systematically builds interest, trust, desire, and finally prompts the action - rather than overwhelming them all at once. The psychology and persuasion principles behind the order are key. There are situations where it makes sense to abandon this order but you should be sure have good justification for doing so.