By Zachary Paruch
The internet is filled with anonymity, as anyone can start a website and post content or sell things. New websites and online stores pop up every single day, but there is no one that can verify their legitimacy or their claims.
Trust is a scarce—but extremely valuable—commodity. Your favorite brands are just that because they have earned your trust. No one really questions whether to provide personal or payment information to Google, Amazon, or Apple. You don’t even think twice. Of course, these are extreme examples, but they continue to be successful because they have your trust.
So how do you build this kind of trust in your website?
1. Make a good first impression
The old adage advises against judging a book by its cover, but that’s exactly what visitors to your website are doing. It’s said that you have seven seconds to make a first impression—that applies to your website, too. In those seven seconds, your visitors won’t have enough time to get into your content—however great it may be. They will see what you have above the fold:
Ads—One thing that absolutely kills trust in websites is the presence of big or excessive advertisements. If you must have ads on your website, keep them to a minimum. Small, tasteful ads in the sidebar, or generally away from the areas of focus are okay, but don’t get carried away.
Layout—Your website should look clean, with a logical, easy-to-navigate layout. Too many websites these days are overly reliant on aesthetics—they look great, but it’s hard to determine what they are actually about and users don’t know exactly where to go to get the information they want.
The website should also not divide attention. There should be a purposeful layout that directs visitors’ focus. If there is too much going on, users will be confused and thus, less trusting of your site.
Colors—Believe it or not, the colors of your website affect the level of trust users have in it. Stick with mostly neutral colors like black, gray, and blue, along with a white background. The color blue has been shown to elicit trust and security in websites.
RELATED: 10 of the Best-Kept Web Design Secrets
Media—Having media like images and videos on your site is great, as it looks professional and gives your site personality. However, having too much can be a problem as it affects the load time of your site. Users will become impatient and leave, without you ever having the chance to gain their support.
Stock images are often a problem as well. People don’t want to see the same stock photos on every site they visit. They can make a site feel very corporate, and thus, untrustworthy. Take your own photos and include employees from your company in them. This will show your visitors that you’re not hiding behind the anonymity of the internet, and that you’re willing to put your face behind your product.
Videos are another great tool you can use to draw in visitors and build trust. However, you can immediately destroy that trust by having those videos set to autoplay.
Certification—Certifications can go a long way toward securing the trust of your users. If people see a certification logo, they will feel assured that their information is secure.
- SSL. The first step is to get an SSL certificate. SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificates allow for the encryption of data, and are essential for securing HTTPS protocol on your site. Basically, once you have an SSL certificate, the URL bar will show a lock and say that the website secure. Users will see this and feel more confident about your site. An additional benefit of SSL certification is that Google will start using SSL certification as a ranking signal—so this certification will help you rank higher in the SERPs.
- Trust badges. The presence of well-known trust badges on your website can give the impression that your site is one that is secure and can be trusted with sensitive information. (For example, eBay proudly displays a Norton security badge in the footer of its website.) Displaying the badges of familiar brands like Visa, Mastercard, Google, Norton, and PayPal has been shown to increase customer trust in websites. Consider adding a few to your site—but be careful, as you don’t want to divide user attention with too many options.
2. Be transparent
It’s easy to put your trust in brick-and-mortar stores, as you can see the people working there, shake their hands, and know that if you have a problem, the store will still be there tomorrow. One of the biggest reasons people don’t trust some websites is that they seem faceless. New websites pop up every day, and many others shut down. Customers can’t see who they are doing business with, and have no guarantee that the website will still be there if there is a problem.
The best way to combat this problem is to be as transparent as possible on your website. You can achieve a strong level of transparency a number of ways:
Company pages—The company pages on your website are important for building customer trust. They are just about as close as a website can get to a real-life handshake.
Your About Us page is an opportunity to show visitors your human side with some humor, photos of yourself and your team, and some honest truths about who you are and why you do what you do. Show your face—and show your visitors that you are not hiding behind the anonymity of the internet.
Your Contact page is another opportunity to show that you are real, human, and trustworthy. Include a toll-free phone number and an email address that will reach a person—not an automated response—and isn’t something like “info@example.com.”
RELATED: 10 Small Business Website Errors That Drive Customers Away
It’s also important to be available. Don’t make your customers wait for days before they get a response. It’s a lot more difficult to trust and rely on someone who takes ages to get back to you. Some websites even implement live chat features, so that visitors are able to chat with a company representative whenever they need.
Company policies—The legal policies posted on your company’s website are essential for building trust, avoiding confusion, and keeping customers happy. Your site should include a comprehensive terms and conditions, privacy policy, and refund policy.
Posting these policies in a conspicuous place on your website will make visitors feel secure, knowing that no matter what situation arises, you have a plan for it. Their presence also elicits trust, as users can view your policies and understand the rules that you play by.
The numbers—People love transparency. We love when something is exactly what it seems. This is especially true when it comes to the companies we do business with. You can achieve a great level of transparency by posting company statistics on your website. These can include number of visitors to your site, your company’s revenues, and even your employees’ salaries—if you are brave. If you are comfortable enough to share your salary and company revenue, customers will have no trouble trusting you or providing you with sensitive information.
Successes and failures—Trust is ultimately the belief that someone or something is honest. Thus, to establish trust, you need to be honest—even when it comes to your mistakes. The ability to admit your mistakes, and make them right again, is an invaluable quality for online businesses and websites.
In the same vein, it’s important to admit your successes as well. If you’ve had some successes or reached some goals, share it on your site. Visitors will be impressed by your honesty and forthcomingness.
3. Leverage social proof
In this era of ubiquitous likes, tweets, reviews, hashtags, and shares, social proof has never been more vital. The idea is to gain more trust and conversions by showing that you are accepted and trusted by others.
Reviews—Reviews are the purest form of social proof, as they allow customers to voice their opinions about products and services. Allowing for reviews on your site will increase the trust of prospective customers, as they can see that other customers have used and approve of your business. It’s extremely important, however, that you don’t edit or delete reviews. In fact, it’s been shown that 68% of customers trust reviews more when there is a healthy mix of positive and negative reviews.
Testimonials—Testimonials are extremely powerful in developing customer trust. They exist in that middle ground between reviews and comments—and that is why they are so powerful. They are honest and given in the customer’s words, but also serve as a review of some aspect of the company.
Studies have shown that testimonials are trusted more than words from the company itself. This is especially true if a photo of the person who gave the review accompanies the testimonial. Adding testimonials to your site is a great idea that will almost certainly increase trust and conversions—just don’t create a dedicated testimonials page.
RELATED: In Strangers We Trust: The Power of Online Customer Reviews
Social media links—Social media is the present and the future, so it is necessary to have some sort of social media presence. In fact, simply having that presence will breed trust in your brand. Affixing social media links to your pages and articles is a great way to show visitors to your site that you have a social media presence, and they will be more inclined to share your content than if you had none at all.
Including these links can be great, but having too many can be a distraction; they can make your site look cluttered, spammy, and as a result, untrustworthy. There also is the issue of whether your content is getting shared. If, after a time, your content has few or no shares, it may be best to remove the links. One company found that conversions went up after it removed its social media links.
Accreditation—There are several accreditation bureaus that can help verify the legitimacy of your online business. The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is the most notable, but there are other alternatives like TrustArc, Verisign, and Angie’s List. Attaining accreditation from any of these bureaus and placing their seals on your website can increase customer trust and improve conversion rates, as customers will feel that your site has been inspected and found to be legitimate.
4. Stay current
Keeping your website up-to-date is integral for building and maintaining the trust of your visitors. Content, policies, and social media that are regularly updated give the impression that the company tries hard to satisfy its customers and will be available and willing to resolve any issues that arise. Compare a frequently updated site to one that hasn’t been noticeably updated in years, and the difference in perceived trustworthiness is clear.
Blog—A blog is an important tool for almost every business. If you don’t have one, you should start one. It is a way to reach more potential customers; feed them information about you, your products, and things related to your products; and demonstrate your value.
While simply having a blog will increase the level of trust visitors have in your company, keeping it current with relevant content is vital. Through this avenue, you can also demonstrate your status as an authority. Visitors will see that you know your stuff and can provide sound advice, products, and services.
Finally, a regularly updated blog has the added benefit of improving your website’s placement in the search engine results pages.
Social media presence—As a small business, you have to go where your customers want to meet you. In the past, this meant simply placing an ad in the Yellow Pages. Today, it has become a necessity to have a regularly updated social media presence. Users want to see and follow what the companies they buy from are up to online. They also view the lack of a social media presence as an effort to hide something.
Don’t get carried away, but a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a Google+ account will get you on the right track.
Policies—Keeping your legal policies up-to-date is not only important for building customer trust, but doing so will also keep you on the right side of current laws and regulations. Regularly updating your policies—especially your privacy policy—with new information will keep you ahead of any legal problems that may arise. By also updating the effective date on those policies, visitors will see that you are active in all aspects of your business, and that you are doing your best to ensure everything remains copacetic.
Staying current with frequently evolving laws and regulations is not always easy and can be time-consuming. Luckily there are services that will automatically update your legal policies so you don’t have to.
Links—If you strive to provide the best content, experience, and services for your visitors (and care about your SEO), you undoubtedly have some links on your site—both internal and external. To garner and maintain customer trust in your business, it is imperative that you regularly check these links for errors.
Reaching a “404 Not Found” page doesn’t do a lot for customer trust and satisfaction. Of course, it’s not your fault if a site to which one of your external links points to a 404s but it implies a negligence to keep your site maintained; it also implies that if some of the links on your site are broken, maybe other aspects of your site will be broken as well—this does not do a lot for building trust in your website.
Fortunately, there are services like Ahrefs and SEMrush that keep an eye on your links for you. However, these services only inform you of your link status. If they are broken, you will still need to fix them yourself.
RELATED: Do Customers Secretly Hate Your E-Commerce Site?
5. Exude confidence and selflessness
It is much easier to trust someone who is confident and selfless than it is to trust someone who is the opposite. It’s why used car salesmen have such a negative stigma. The stereotypical used car salesman (however inaccurate that may be) is a person who will lie, connive, and scheme just to sell you a vehicle.
You do not want to come across this way through your website. Yes, you want to sell your product or services. Yes, the reasons are most likely self-serving. And people are not stupid, they know that you want to make money and that you stand to make a profit from their business. The hard part is convincing them that you are confident in your products, and up front and open about the way you do business.
The saying goes, “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other gold.” In business, the same applies. It is five times more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain old ones. Thus, we must build customer trust, but also maintain that trust after the sale.
Warranties and guarantees—The best way to show confidence and gain trust in your products and your business is to offer comprehensive warranties and guarantees. Their conspicuous presence allows visitors to your site to feel at ease when making a purchase, knowing that the decision to purchase your products is ultimately risk-free.
You can court the visitors to your site all you want with attractive wording, content, and visuals, but in the end they will want to know that they can trust you and your company. A warranty and/or money-back guarantee will go a long way toward achieving that.
There are many different kinds of warranties and guarantees to choose from; each of which will help to promote trust in your business and increase conversion rates.
Return/refund policy—In the same vein as a guarantee, a return/refund policy will provide visitors to your site with a sense of confidence and trust. They will be more likely to purchase your products knowing that, in the event that they don’t get what they wanted, they can make a return hassle-free.
Not only should you have a thorough return/refund policy posted somewhere conspicuously on your website, you should also make mention of it on your product pages and at the checkout. Doing so will remind customers that they are in good hands and that the risk they are taking is minimal.
Many websites and small businesses today use online builders for their return/refund policies. The important thing is that they are thorough, airtight, and ultimately favor the customer.
Good, free content—Everyone wants to make money, but you can build customer trust and goodwill in your site by making helpful, thoughtful content that users can access for free. Doing so will make them more likely to buy from you, as opposed to a competitor.
Additionally, give visitors the option for a free trial. This not only demonstrates your own confidence in your product, but also allows customers the opportunity to try your products or services risk-free.
Further, do not gate your content. This means forcing visitors to sign up for something, provide personal information, or pay a small fee to access your content. This, needless to say, erodes any trust you may have built, and quite frankly, annoys visitors.
“We’re hiring!”—People trust companies that are successful. With success comes a degree of implied reliability and trustworthiness. You can imply your company’s success without actually stating it outright by advertising on your website that you are hiring. Provide a link to a page with your open positions listed.
Companies that are struggling financially will not be bringing new people on board. Visitors will see that you are hiring new people and are thus, achieving some success. They will be more likely to trust you and your company because of it.
Take the high road regarding competitors—How you address the issue of competition says a lot about you and your company. It will also go a long way toward developing trust in your customer base. Ultimately, it is best to conduct your business as if you have no competition—at least from the outside. Any attempt to remark on your competitors will come off as petty, and in the end begin to erode the trust you have built with your customers, as it will demonstrate that you aren’t serving them—only yourself.
Do what you have to do: be it price matching, some level of imitation, or similar product/ad designs, but stay above the pettiness of squabbling about your competitors. You never see Nike talk badly about Adidas, do you?
Trust: Your most powerful currency
Trust is the most powerful currency in business, and like anything worthwhile, it does not come easily. Luckily there are some things you can do to build that currency and make your website more successful in the long run.
Warren Buffet has said “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” Whatever you do, be consistent and try to put your customers first. This is ultimately the best way to develop and maintain their trust.
RELATED: Is Trust Dead? Here’s How to Build Authentic Customer Trust in a Digital World
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