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How to build trust with your website visitors (9 tips)

Every business has its own goals from their website, but there’s one thing for sure all businesses need which is to increase sales, and customer loyalty to keep the website visitors coming over and over again. For users to come and stay on our website they need to trust it, this happens when we build a good reputation and make them feel secure on our website.
But what would make them insecure or make them not trust our website,
It needs a lot of hard work but we will summarize them in 9 tips
Sometimes you visit a website and from the first second you decide to close this site, other times you may take some time but then realize you are not comfortable and decide to close it, you may take this action without even knowing why you did this but one thing you understand is that you don’t TRUST it. I did a study about that and found that there are some reasons your website visitors may not trust your website.
and here we will talk about these reasons, here’s the summary:

  1. Improve your website design
  2. Include trust Badges
  3. Be Helpful rather than a seller
  4. Test everything
  5. Demonstrate your expertise
  6. Gather testimonials
  7. include contact information
  8. Build your social presence
  9. Slowly climb the pyramid of trust

1. Improve your website design

When a visitor reaches a new site, the first impression is taken in less than 5 seconds, if the website didn’t load fast they won’t wait the time needed even to take the first impression, once the website is loaded, visitors will vastly scan the page, it needs to be well designed, responsive for mobiles and tablet (they are taking almost more than half the internet traffic these days) because visitors will not zoom in to see the text and scroll right or left, they will close this site and look for another one. So whether you like it or not, visitors will take the first step in building trust when they see at least a beautiful, responsive, and clean website design.

2. Include trust Badges

Once visitors feel comfortable with your site and before fastly scanning your content they will look for the SSL certificate, it looks like this:

Website security is one of the highest priorities, especially when you ask your visitors to give you sensitive data, like creating an account with a password, or asking for credit card data to complete a purchase, I myself would never put my credit card on a site that doesn’t have an SSL certificate, it’s an essential trust factor.
Also, it’s not a secret that Google uses the SSL certificate as an important ranking factor, not having it will give you a big hit in the ranking.

3. Be Helpful rather than a seller

When you get the chance to impress your visitors, this is about 5 seconds after their first visit, you should now go for helping them and showing your expertise in your niche, rather than pushing for completing a sale.
If you show your visitors a message to buy your product or service on every page they will run away and probably never come back again, they must first understand you have the expertise and you used this expertise to solve problems for others before and that you can show people ways to do it themselves. And while doing this you can show visitors why your product/solution will help them get to the result they want. Writing helpful content and updating your website at least once per week will not only make your visitors trust you but also will make Google love your website, Google loves websites that regularly update their content, AND when visitors see posts with recent dates will understand that you are still in business, there’s a lot of talk in this area so we will write a separate post for it later.

4. Test everything

If you studied the process of marketing your website, you definitely know that your website will need some forms to capture your visitors’ data, a contact page to make it easy for people to reach you, and if you are an eCommerce website then you will probably have online payment. you will have to test every form on your website regularly to check if everything is working as supposed to be or not.
You will also have to check for the broken links and fix or eliminate them.
I will not forget a friend who built his website, wrote some content, and then created a paid campaign, one month later he had no leads and realized there was something wrong, he talked to me and the first thing I tried is to check the forms on the website. No need to describe the look on his face when he realized the forms are not working. So test every form well multiple times before you burn your cash.

5. Demonstrate your expertise

When it comes to demonstrating your expertise you should write original content because the internet is full of duplicates, I know this step is like an extension of writing a helpful content section. But there’s a huge difference, you can publish case studies about how you XYZ company to reach their goal or how you turned ABC performance from low to high, you can do it in many forms like videos, podcasts, blog posts.

6. Gather testimonials

testimonials are one of the most important factors in building trust with your website visitors. Especially the video testimonials.

People love to be the first on multiple occasions, like buying the new iPhone for example but when it comes to purchasing a product/service for the first time, they wouldn’t want to be the first, they want to see what people say about the product, and the seller, is there after-sale service? What is the best thing in this service or in the provider? A lot of questions to ask that you should let your current clients answer, not you.
So when completing any project reach out to your client and ask them for a testimonial and image to add to your website, and if you can get a recorded video that would be better.

7. include contact information

It’s a common thing to include your contact information on your website, yet some people still ignore this point which may result in not having trust in your website, you have to make it easy for people to reach out to you using email, mobile, WhatsApp, or a form on your website because if they have an issue and want to ask you about it before making a purchase and they couldn’t find a way to reach to you, then chances are they won’t complete the purchase because people need to know that you are a business that exists in a physical location, not a scam that will get their money and run away.

8. Build your social presence

Although most of the work in this step is not on your site still it’s important for building trust, it’s about your reputation, the way you interact with people online say’s a lot about your brand personality. your presence on social media adds a new channel to easily contact your visitors and audience. It may be underrated in B2B organizations. But still, if you show newcomers how you handle your customers’ objections and solve their problems, it will be a good indicator that they will be in safe hands if any bad thing happened.

9. Slowly climb the pyramid of trust

The Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) has developed a pyramid of trust, adapted from Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, highlighting the basic trust needs that need to be met before being able to progress a relationship.

Establishing trust with your new website visitors is something gradual, you must take it step by step. What makes some sites fail is that they try to skip some steps and ask for sensitive data or information.
If I jumped to a new website and they asked me to register to show the info I requested, the chances are I will close this tab immediately, that's not working these days, even if I know they have the info, because the internet is full of duplicate data these days.

I think you should first start with giving quality content, then ask for at least an email to send further content if they liked the content they just digested, then you can ask for more until there’s an ongoing relationship and your website is now trustworthy.

Summary

Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes, you got 5 seconds to make the first impression, and if you got their attention start following the steps and don’t ask for sensitive data unless there’s a strong relationship and trust built between you. Focus on their needs, and take step by step gradually, don’t skip any steps.
And Remember: Always give before you get.
If you think there are more steps that people should follow to build a trustworthy website, leave it in the comments below and tell us if you found this post helpful,
Thank you for reading and your time, hope it was worthing it.

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