When you create a website, you create a platform for collaborating with people throughout the world. At present, you need to work extra hard to win the confidence of those who visit your virtual place. No matter what you offer: products or services, you should speak the same language with those who come to your website. You’re helping people by offering them what they need, and you need to win their trust and, in doing this, beat the competitors that are out there online.
There are certain website elements that are called “trust signals”. They are cues that have the power to encourage people make transactions and that result in conversions. The ultimate goal of these signals is to establish the audience of loyal clients that prefer you over other providers of similar products.
In this post, I will explore the main trust signals that have the power to build the level of trust that turns your website into a high-converting one.
Show Your Face
First of all, people want to see real faces of those with whom they deal. Your face, your real face is a shortcut to establishing trust and building a lasting relationship.
Do not hesitate to tell a bit about yourself in simple words. For sure, you should tell about what you do and why you’re passionate about what you do. Go further and tell a bit more. Telling about your hobbies and likings is a great way to appeal to people, showing that you’re no less real then they.
Do not forget about your team, the people whose work went into the product. Show that you’re grateful to these great people for their investment. Here is an example of About Us page of one of the new Template Monster WordPress themes. Pay attention to details: these are the faces that entice trust, bios relate some information that goes beyond people’s career, below you find links to your team members’ profiles in social networks. Your team can’t be more real and close than this!
Reveal Your Social Proof
People often think in terms of safety in numbers. When people know that you have a large base of devoted clients, they tend to trust you way more than when they see you as a novice, whose services have not been tried and tested.
What are the tools that can help you in displaying a social proof of your popularity? These are widgets that display the number of your friends in social networks or your social feed in a specific network. Here is an example of Instagram Feed widget that displays your latest Instagram updates and shows the vivid life of your company.
What is also important is to keep the links to your pages in social networks above the fold. Then, your website guests can check out your social profiles right away and follow you there.
Sound Human
You need to sound human in your blog contents. If you want your readers to stick around, link to you, keep coming back and be converted into happy customers, you need your contents to be written the way you speak. People do not need hard-science encyclopedia stuff that they get bored reading right away. They want to read something that is simple-written, well-structured and easy to perceive.
Your website contents should be:
- Useful
- Informative
- Entertaining
- Educational
- Compelling
- Well-structured
- Transparent
Moreover, do not forget to power a live discussion in the comments section of your website. If people see that your blog posts make people think and share their thoughts, they are way more likely to spend their time on what you want to share with them in your blog articles.
Write Clean: Grammar and Spelling
Actually, the decision to read an article or not to read is done in mere seconds. What if the visitor spots a mistake in these seconds? Yeah, all is lost.
Maintaining decent editorial standards is a display of your self-respect and respect to the audience of your website. If you bring some information to people, it should be proofread and well-written, as you do not want your readers think about spelling or about the way to interpret the sentence, where a comma goes missing. You want them to get straight to the gist of what you write, and, for this purpose, make sure you writing standards are maintained in all the articles.
To brush up upon your literacy, check out this Compact Guide to Grammar for Busy People.
Include Your Contact Info
Another essential trust signal is the inclusion of your contact information. This should include your actual physical address (if you include a Google Map it’s even better), your contact phone, e-mail address and operating hours. This information should be in a place that is easily accessible, e.g. your website footer or your Contact Us page.
Revealing your contact information increases users’ trust, enhances search engines trust, is good for local SEO purposes and makes it simpler to get in touch with you or your representatives.
Encourage Reviews and Testimonials
To trust you, people want to hear what other people say about you and what you offer. If your website displays positive reviews/testimonials, this is a great way to show that people are actually satisfied with your product/service.
If you already have reviews on such websites as Google Plus, Yelp, Facebook, Trip Advisor, LinkedIn, do not hesitate to share these reviews on your website and this will be an immense trust-booster for you.
Conclusions
To make your website guests stick around and purchase the services or goods you offer, you need your website be trustworthy and speaking the same language people do. The trust signals on your website include revealing the faces and facts about your team, providing contact information, showing social proof of your popularity, sharing reviews and testimonials, etc. However, most importantly, you should sound human and talk to people the way they want to be talked to.
All the images in this article are kindly provided by TemplateMonster, one of the leading companies on the template market with more than 15 years of creating templates behind its back.
About Author
Eyden Haze
Eyden Haze is a digital marketer, a web designer and technology fanatic from Sydney, Australia. With over 7 years of experience in web industry, he has helped his clients to launch their marketing campaigns successfully. He also likes to explore various online tools and share that knowledge by writing useful blog posts.