Five ways to build trust with people who visit your website

As with anything good in life, trust is something that is generally built over time, but there are a few things that you can put in place today to start helping your cause and building relationships that you can benefit from down the line.

So what steps can you take to start building trust with people who visit your website.

1) Testimonials

Your first port of call is to make sure that you have third party testimonials from past clients featured in a prominent position on your homepage.

You can optimise the effectiveness of your testimonials, through making them well designed, easy to read, including high quality imagery or video and using proper titles and company names.

Tips for optimising testimonials 

• Aim to have 3/4 testimonials on your website homepage.
• Make sure that your testimonials are well designed, clean and easy to read.
• Try and show good quality images and logos of your clients alongside your testimonials to increase credibility.
• Try to include the title and company of the person who wrote the testimonial. 
• Better still, see if you can get a video testimonial from a client.

2) Use third party review websites

Ask your clients to submit reviews on third party review sites to increase the credibility of your testimonials.

This is more beneficial than a standard testimonial, as it will improve your credibility, SEO and once the review is submitted, you can then copy and repurpose it to match the style and design of your own website.

Depending on your industry or customer base I recommend using the below review sites.   

Google My Business

Facebook Reviews

Trustpilot 

Which rated 

Houzz

Tripadvisor

Top Tips for using Review Sites to build Trust

• I recommend using Google My Business as your first choice to improve your local SEO, and then choosing a secondary industry platform which relates to your industry or field.
• Make it a habit to ask your clients for reviews.
• Make it as easy as possible for clients to submit reviews by sending them links and instructions about how to submit reviews. 
• Consider using a review plugin to increase the prominence of your reviews. 

https://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-google-reviews/

3) Add logos of companies you’ve worked with to your home page.

Let people know the company you keep. If you work B2B consider featuring logos of companies, publications and institutions that you’ve worked with. This approach is a common practice by large companies and online publications, but there’s no reason why you can’t start utilizing this as a small business.

4) Business Directories

This doesn’t have as much trust as the above solutions, but it’s well worth listing on as many free and possibly some paid Business directories related your services industry. Not only does it give you more touch points with your users, but it will also improve your SEO by providing solid backlinks to your website. Here are five that you can get started with.  

https://www.yell.com

https://www.yelp.co.uk

https://www.hotfrog.co.uk/

https://www.bingplaces.com/

http://freeindex.co.uk/

5) Posting regularly on a Blog or Social Media

This is not as easy as the other ones, and is actually one I need to work on myself :-), it’s difficult to maintain if your a solo act, and in an ideal world you should have a dedicated person in your business handling content production, for blogs and social Media. 

It takes ongoing commitment and consistency but has the massive  potential upside for building trust and ongoing relationships and building a tribe around your product, service or brand. 

You should be regularly posting on a blog and then repurposing that content and posting it on the major social networks. Below are the benefits of undertaking a content strategy.

Shows your expertise and insights in a  particular subjects

No one knows that you have expertise in a certain area, unless you talk about, by providing helpful content focused on solving a problem, you are not only helping a stranger, but you are demonstrating that you are experienced and knowledgeable in a certain subject.

Makes you look busy 

People want to work with other people who are busy, by talking about what your working on, you are showing people that you are in demand and that other people are currently working with you and value your product or service.

Keeps you in the prospects mind

By constantly popping up in people’s social media, inbox and RSS feeds, you will be at the forefront of their mind when they are considering hiring for your product or service.

Summary 

I hope this post was useful and brings you value and insights you might not have considered. If you can manage to combine as many of the above points as possible you’ll be well on your way to building trusted relationships with your users and followers.