The Missing Trust Factors That Are Hurting Your Website – A Comprehensive List

The good news is you have a great website but the bad news is your website is not as famous as Apple or Microsoft. Being Microsoft or Apple has its own perks. People tend to trust these big brands blindly and unlike smaller brands, these big corporate honchos do not have to face any such credibility issues.

Since most of us are not that lucky, we have an uphill battle ahead when it comes to establishing credibility online that will eventually help us see a spike in the conversion rate. Believe it or not, establishing credibility online is not rocket science. All you need to do is to identify the trust factors that your website is missing out on. Here in this article, we are going to give a roundup of factors that can make or break fate of an organization:

Why Trust is so Important?

Since your website is the first point of contact, every attempt should be made to make your brand appear trustworthy. Unless and until your website looks and feel reliable, people are not going to spend their hard earned money on your website. Moreover, you simply cannot buy trust of your targeted audience by cutting down on the profit margin. It is a poor marketing tactic that rarely works. If the ‘Lady Luck’ is not on your side, the credibility of your brand may take a serious beating in some worst cases.

Do you know why this type of marketing effort fails? Simply because it lacks trust. People will treat it as an attempt to deceive them by offering something worthless for cheap. As your brand lacks both visibility and credibility, chances are that people might not fall prey to this type of marketing gimmick. So, rather than wasting your time with these types of marketing gimmicks, you need to get your gloves on to establish a strong presence and bolster credibility of your website. Here is how to do it:

Russian Brand Marytrufel.ru has a made it a point by featuring Contact Details right at the top of the website.

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Prominent Contact Details: You need to make sure that people can get in touch with your brand easily. Link to ‘Contact Us’ page should be placed prominently on the home page and preferably on all other pages too. It gives an immense boost to the credibility factor. Websites with no contact details are less likely to fare well as visitors unlikely to put their trust in them. If possible, try to feature address at the footer section and Contact no at the header section of the site. This will have a far reaching impact on the targeted audience.

Use Simple English: Do not make your website’s content too complex to understand. If your targeted readers fail to understand what they are reading, they are not going to stick around for long. Make your content easy to read and understandable. In short, try to write in the language of your targeted audience. No need to use technical jargons or complex sentence structure. Keep it short and simple.

Proofread Everything: If the body copy of your website is full of grammatical errors, spelling errors and other such crimes, you simply cannot expect your customers to believe in what you say. Nevertheless, I can understand that spelling mistakes and typos are quite common. Typos are acceptable in blog posts or even on inner pages but totally unacceptable and unpardonable on the home page. How come do you expect them to believe in you and your brand, if the home page of your website contains glaring grammatical errors?

SEOMoz home page showing testimonials from leading personalities.

Show External Sites that Mentioned Your Brand: People always want to know what other people are saying about you. Therefore, if your brand happens to be mentioned by some big brands like BBC or NY Times, do inform others about these outstanding accomplishments. Link to those stories and believe me this is going to give your brand’s trustworthiness a shot in the arm. Don’t fret if your website has not been mentioned by such big brands. You can always feature links of lesser-known brands that have written something about your company. What is most important is the mention and not the brand.

Design Still Matters: Books are judged by their cover and the same goes for websites. Human brains are trained to trust all things beautiful and that means, if your website lacks the charm and grace, you are losing out on opportunities galore. Beautiful website with great attention to user experience and simplicity is a big win for website owners as it helps them immensely to win the trust of the audience.

Seer Interactive is doing a fabolus job by showcasing childhood pictures of its Employees.

Show Who You Are: People are not going to take your proposal at face value. You need to show that you are a human being and surrounded by other human who are also doing awesome things. Don’t make your brand appear another faceless and emotionless hulk; try to add pictures of your team and a little bio about you all. This will go a long way to encourage people to have faith on your brand and website.

Google Showing images of its offices across the globe.

Show Images of Your Company: if you claim to be the owner of a real and ethical business, your business needs to have a physical address. Add real photos of your office on your website. Please do not use cheesy stock images. Be honest and use real images of your office.

Add a Career Page: If your business is ethical and not a fly-by-night company, you should have a career page where people can contact apply for a job.

Workplace Depot’s home pace is graced by list of top notch clients and their testimonials.

Clients List and Testimonial: You simply cannot expect that people will land on your website and get converted even after realizing the fact that he/she is the only person in this entire universe putting their trust on you. Well, nobody is that idiot. You need to feature list of clients whom you have served and their testimonials. Use real life images of these people and explain in details what you have done for them.

Avoid Grandiose: Just because you are saying that you are the best does not necessarily mean that people are going to buy that theory. Rather than making such hyperbolic statements, you should be focusing on your USPs.

Show How Much your Product Cost: Some companies believe that it is unwise to reveal the pricing of the products or services. That seems to me a legitimate practice, but if a significant number of your competitors have already revealed their prices, I do not see any reason, why you should be doing otherwise. Failure to act will result in losing your customers’ trust.

Clear Cancellations & Returns Policy of Flipkart.

Return and Refund Policy: What if you fail to deliver what you have promised earlier? Of course, people deserve to get refunded for that. Having a clear ‘refund and return’ policy on your website as it assures the website visitors that their money will be in safe hand.

Email Policy: People hate spam and for that reason, they feel uncomfortable whenever they are required to provide their email address. So, your website needs to have a clearly defined Email policy so that visitors have a clear idea what you are going to do with their email addresses.

Case Study: If you claim to be the proprietor of an establish business, I can safely assume that you have successfully helped a number of leading organizations. Now, all you need to do is to make people aware how your service has helped these organizations scaling new heights of success. These case studies will help people see how effective your products/services are and thereby, it will help you immensely win the confidence and loyalty of the targeted audience.

Trust Marks: You need to give your targeted audience the peace of mind that your business is a legitimate one and this can be done easily by using certain signs. For say, it is common for ecommerce websites to use 256-bit SSL encryption. By placing Verisign Seal, you can make people aware that you are no way harming their interest.

What Google Says about You: It is no way related to your website, but as a reputable organization, you have to make sure that whenever a Google search is made with your company’s brand name, it should not pop up anything unpleasant. If it does, all your efforts will go wasted.

Get A Blog: Blog refreshes your brand image. It makes people believe that you are active and you are trying to connect with people. Update the blog with relevant and related articles. People will definitely find it interesting. Post updates about the completion of latest projects as this will make people aware of the fact that you are active, your business is booming and there are good reasons to trust you and your organizations.

Do Not Stuff it With Too Many Ads: Ads are a good way to get some passive income but that does not mean that you should be focusing too much on it. Too many ads distract the visitors and sometimes, it may make them form bad impression about the brand. Moreover, you have little control over the ads and that means, you need to be a little picky about while deciding the number of ads to be displayed on your website. Just do not overdo this thing, otherwise the credibility of your website might take a beating.