Four Easy Ways To Instantly Build Trust on Your Website
When it comes to your website, first impressions are everything. Because of this, your website needs to help you establish trust in your visitors. In today's post, I'd like to talk about four ways to build trust on your website and why building trust matters.
Why trust matters?
Let's take a step back and put ourselves in your visitors' shoes. Unless you're a big brand like Amazon or eBay, chances are your visitors don't really know who you are. From their point of view, you are a complete stranger and they don't know if you can deliver on your promises, let alone tell you apart from a scammy, spammy website 4 clicks away.
One of their first interactions with you will be through your website so you need to make damn sure that it inspires trust. The best to explain and illustrate why establishing trust matters is to take a look at the Nielsen Norman Group's pyramid of trust.
It's similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs and shows that you need to satisfy the basic needs of trust before your website visitors will start to interact with you.
To make the long story short, establishing trust with your website visitors will help you turn them into subscribers and then into paying clients and customers.
So with that out of the way, let's take a look at four ways to build trust on your website.
The number one way to build trust on your site is with testimonials.
There are numerous statistics online that show that people trust online reviews and testimonials as much as they do personal recommendations.
Not only that, but testimonials have the ability to create positive influence and positive image around your brand and they are one of the most effective ways to convert strangers into subscribers or clients. This means that testimonials are a must on your website. A few places that would be good for testimonials include:
Your homepage
Your services page
And an entire page on your website devoted to customer testimonials
The second way to build trust on your website is by including logos of places where you've been featured or where you've been published.
This adds another layer of credibility and shows that you know your stuff. Another benefit of doing this is when you associate yourself with the brand that's well-known, it also shows that if they trust you then your visitors should trust you so it creates a powerful domino effect and instantly builds your authority
Another way to build trust on your website is by including case studies.
According to the same statistic above, case studies are one of the most powerful content marketing methods for establishing your authority, building trust, and increasing the conversion rate on your website. They are an excellent way to showcase your expertise -- by explaining in depth your process and why you chose to do certain things. It also allows you to showcase the results that you got for your clients by sharing directly the before and after and the transformation that you got them during the time you spent working them.
Finally, you can boost credibility on your website is by adding a blog.
Now, I know what you're thinking: blogging is time consuming, blogging takes forever, but here's the thing: blogging helps you with SEO because Google and Bing and other search engines love web sites that are updated on a regular basis. Not only that but businesses who blog usually attract 67% more leads than businesses who don't, so if that's something you'd like to see in your business I would definitely recommend blogging as one of your content marketing strategies.
Now here's the thing -- if you're not a natural writer and you feel like writing takes forever, perhaps you can consider using podcasts or audio posts. If you don't like podcasting or recording just your voice and if you are great on camera, consider using videos as your primary blog content. Another way to introduce blogging to your website is to repurpose any Facebook Lives or Instagram lives and turn them into blog posts.
Or, if you have longer newsletters or social media posts, you can turn those into blog posts. In other words, you can repurpose a lot of content that you already have. If you're doing videos, keep in mind they don't have to be super polished -- nobody's expecting Hollywood-type effects in your videos. All you really need is good lighting, good camera, and good microphone and you should be good to go.
BONUS! Enable SSL on your website
One last thing before we wrap this up: a huge trust indicator for any website is whether or not you process your customer, client, and visitor data safely. The best way to ensure them that their data is safe is to enable the SSL on your website.
In essence, this shows them that when they visit your website, they are using a secure and encrypted connection which won't expose their sensitive information to the bad guys.
Enabling SSL in Squarespace is easy. Go to Settings > Advanced > SSL. Check the Secure and HSTS secure in Security Preference. Voila, you're done!
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