Credibility and trust are both crucial for a successful site. Credibility and trust can be established on-site via various avenues, which even include website design, showcasing your experience, and testimonials from clients.
Each and every relation is structured on the foundation of trust & without this, a relation will be short-lived and fragile.
One of the basic goals of any site is to build a foundation for trust with numerous website visitors/consumers so that they become comfortable enough to remain on the website and easily engage with the business.
Challenges for business websites are that they get only a few seconds for conveying credibility and trust on a site.
Businesses can enhance the likelihood of engaging & converting visitors by simply integrating the listed trust symbols into website design & messaging.
Five ways to build credibility and trust on site are:
- Build an extremely visual trust via design
- Establish credibility by showing accomplishments
- Creating social trust via testimonials
- Developing transactional trust in the form of certification display on site
- Instilling longevity trust via experience
1. Build an extremely visual trust via design
Visual trust gets formed via nearly immediate and subconscious responses basis the website’s look and feel.
When a specific visitor initially lands on the website, they instantly react emotionally to the website.
Note that it happens subconsciously, which ultimately influences whether the visitor will remain or leave the website.
A website indicating high-quality web design can build good visual trust with web visitors.
On the other hand, an extremely backdated site can convey an incorrect impression.
Presently, there are a majority of individuals who visit the website of a business before connecting with them.
If your website does not accurately reflect your company & present services, then it might be time that you redesign your site.
The colors, imagery, and font of a web design play an integral part in creating an initial impression.
For example, cliche stock photos are mostly placed on spammy kinds of sites.
Owing to this, there are zero links with such an image. In case you put up a lot of cliche images on your website, you might instill distrust with the website visitors.
2. Establish credibility by showing accomplishments
Credibility gets built on the basis of the business accomplishments and affiliations in the designated industry.
An excellent way to simply demonstrate it on-site is to include logos of the company endorsements & affiliations on the home page.
Also, you can list/add badges for the accomplishments and awards that your company has received.
It is best that you have a separate section on the home page with such awards and affiliations.
Note that the majority of consumers first visit the home page and might not visit or go through other web pages.
If the business has not received recognition of any type, directory websites and research award opportunities.
Most of the industries have a directory website where they can list their company & where it can be ranked basis the company size, reviews, and other factors.
Such directory websites generally identify the top businesses on their list per year.
3. Create social trust via testimonials
Social trust is mostly referred to as social proof. The easiest way for building social trust on the website is to showcase testimonials from your previous and existing clients.
Testimonials and reviews assist to build social trust by exhibiting that others have completely used your services and trusted your business.
Also, you can add logos of the prominent clients in the rotating slider on the website. Like industry trust displays, it is even useful to put in some testimonials and reviews on websites and homepage.
While you would want to have some of the testimonials on site, it is crucial to request that the previous client cater reviews on online platforms like Google or Yelp.
Customers even tend to trust the reviews more if they get placed on the 3rd party websites as the reviews hold very few chances to be fake.
Online reviews are very crucial even if your web design is B2B type or you have a service-based business.
Current research by the Bright Local show reveals that 91% of the audience trust online reviews and even personal recommendations.
Moreover, consumers mostly read 10 online reviews about a local business before completely trusting it.
4. Build transactional credibility just by displaying the certifications
Note that transactional credibility & trust do not only refer to the sites where the audience is making actual buys on the website.
A simple transaction can be any communication that your website visitor has with the website like clicking links, figuring out ways, beginning with live chats, and filling up forms.
A transactional trust can also be formed based on a specific trust symbol, which assists a website visitor to feel that the website is safe.
Security of the site is one of the crucial factors for building transactional trust. In case a website visitor views a particular warning signal on a website, they may leave instantly.
Thus, it is crucial that your website has taken complete security measures & has SSL certification.
If the website lacks the SSL certification & the URLs begin with HTTP, the majority of the website browsers can label such URLs with ‘not secure’ status.
Privacy policy page & acknowledgment of data privacy are other 2 examples of building trust. The presently launched GDPR i.e. Global Data Protection Regulation has become a huge concern for data security and privacy.
As per the recently established law, new rights have been ascertained to the consumers in relation to data collection, and what the business does with the personal information collected from them.
In case your website has no privacy policy or terms and conditions page, this can subconsciously trigger a warning sign to the visitors.
5. Inculcate longevity trust via experience
Longevity trust gets built on the baseline on how long your company has been in the business & how many end users/audience/customers you have.
Based on the industry, longevity trust might be a crucial kind of trust. For example, in a website design industry, there are extreme levels of company turnover that come & go.
Those consumers who look for website design resources are completely aware of it and are mostly focused on how long the organization has been in the business.
Note that in various other industries where there involves extremely less turnover & market changes, audiences cannot judge or trust you depending on longevity.
The best way to build longevity trust for customers is by stating the number of customers till now you have served.
Also, ensure to socialize and place data/info on the site’s homepage. You can even expand about your organization’s history on the About Us section of the website.
Avoid the listed site missteps
While you might not require all five types of ways to build credibility, specific site missteps can lead to instant feelings of distrust.
For example, a slow-loading website and site of security problems can simply trigger a high level of distrust leading to web visitors leaving your site instantly.
Thus, always ensure to address such basic issues on your website first and then move ahead with the most nuanced kind of credibility or trust issues.
Sanjay Dey