The trust homepage

In several hundred website projects over the past years, I have repeatedly experienced that we have thought about what content should actually be on the homepage. The ideas about this are diffuse, in part pseudo-scientifically explored, analyzed by tools and exposed to changing fashions.

I'm only talking about the content here. The biggest nonsense can look beautiful and the most brilliant functionalities can work poorly. So design and technology should be left out here. But what about the content? Sometimes the homepage should be short, sometimes endlessly long. At the beginning a picture or a stage with changing motives? Teasers to all sub-areas or is the main navigation enough for that? And what additional content actually makes sense?

High time, then, to develop a proposal for how the best possible homepage should be structured. The goal of the website must be in the foreground. For 90% of all entrepreneurs, freelancers and self-employed persons, this is to attract new customers. Especially as Agency for organic growth and SEO it is important to note that the homepage cannot be about self-congratulation in the form of large photo spreads. Instead, you need to think about how you can exude as much confidence as possible on your homepage, the most important page in all your digital activities. How does this work? With good content elements and a selected SEO Strategy.

First of all, the basic structure of the most important elements must be established. In my experience, it is very important to quickly make clear to the user what the website is good for. This requires 1-3 concise sentences that say what you do (Feature), what your customer can use it for (Benefit) and what it means to them (Meaning). This sounds so simple, but is by no means immediately recognizable on many websites. No wonder that the time spent on websites is often extremely short.

My recommendation is to present the great content in the following order:

1. Intro - concise information Feature-Benefit-Meaning
2. For ... - Here you show for whom you offer your services. In which industries you are active. Where you have special applications for specialist areas.
3. Now your products and services come in the overview with link to the subpage
4. References (if there is a corresponding subpage - which is always good
5. And only now: More about the company#
6. Last but not least: Call to action (should always exist if you want new customers) and footer

And between all these points, one trust brick each.

And this is what the whole thing looks like:

This brings us to the trust building blocks. Currently, I have defined 22 building blocks that are relevant for generating trust and communicating your trustworthiness. This can be the right image to transport your personality in the desired form or the awards that show that your results are exceptionally good. So it is important to choose which components are useful at which position on the homepage.

I have included some examples in the graphic.

ImportantThe importance of the individual components varies from industry to industry. Where awards are important for agencies, it is the global presence or the affiliation to "Made in Germany" for B2B companies. I have gone into this in more depth in the trust building blocks.

This structure has proven itself in many projects. Whether as content marketing or as SEO agency with projects in Munich and throughout the German-speaking world, we are always busy determining which content should sensibly appear at which point on the website. Of course, you can set individual accents at one point or another. The structure basically gives enough leeway for this and is thus the perfect basis for ensuring that the homepage appears trustworthy.