ADVICE
HOW TO BUILD TRUST
Presenting your site to the public is only half the
battle, Paul Rigby looks at how you can retain
and build your audience
Y
our website and your
business will get nowhere
fast if your users, readers
and customers do not
trust you. Without trust, you shouldn’t
even in business. Trust is a basic. It’s a
bedrock. With trust secured, you can
plan ahead and look towards the future.
In these circumstance, trust ‘has your
back’. So, how do you gain that trust?
Let’s start with your window onto
the business world itself, your website.
It has but one chance to make a first
impression. So make that design a good
one and that it fully represents you,
your aims and philosophies. If you ever
view your site with, “Well, it’ll do,” then
back off, clear your head and start again.
Never ‘make do’.
Next, use your About page to the full.
Reveal yourself - in the nicest possible
way of course - to the public. Tell themwho you are, where you are and how
you got here. Make it easy for people
to contact you with phone numbers,
email address, physical addresses and
social media locations. Without that
information? It looks like you’ve got
something to hide.
Make sure your website is always up
to date. When information and news
is months out of date, you look out of
date. You also look tired, disconnected,
unconcerned and out of touch.
Regularly update that website.SECURITY
I changed my website address from
‘http’ to ‘https’ as soon as I could. This
gives your site a security certificate
and indicates an encrypted website.
It apparently also acts as a website
ranking boost by Google - so it’s
attractive on two counts. Talk to yourserver about the upgrade. Also related
security logos liberally placed on your
website and used within the same, such
as anti-viral software, will help.
Related to this, for shopping, make
the transaction process as simple
as possible. The longer it takes for a
customer to pay for something, the
more frustrated they will become and
the quicker they will go elsewhere
instead. Look out for abandoned
shopping carts for indications that all
is not well.
Make sure you offer a solid returns
guarantee too. Take away any perceived
risk of shopping on your site. This helps
the customer to buy with confidence
and it gives a strong message to the
customer that they have nothing to fear.
Next, if you can honestly place logos
from paid or even unpaid Ads from
other reliable companies on your
homepage then you score in the trust
stakes by association. This effect will
also work if you have worked with other
respected clients.TESTIMONIALS
Customer’s written testimonials and/or
case studies are another array of useful
tools to enhance trust. Testimonials/
case studies allow different people to
explain how their unique requirements
(and everyone has different needs)
were served by you. This has the
additional benefit of allowing you to
look responsive, light on your feet,
adaptable and able to change to meet
customer’s needs.
To increase conversions, regularly
feature attractive giveaways. Of value,
though. Not rubbish. Allow the prizes
to reflect the quality of your site. Then
advertise the competitions using
notifications on social media. SomeMake sure that any and every website implementation you employ is thoroughly road-tested