One of the biggest factors when converting website visits to viable leads is building trust; without it, visitors will find another vendor that they can trust. To keep prospects from instantly navigating to a competitor’s website, consider re-evaluating your website to determine if it has these 5 essentials to building trust on your website:
1. Your company’s contact information
By sharing your company’s physical address, telephone number, and email address; you are showing your customers that your company is legitimate, and that they can contact your company with any questions or concerns that they might have in the future.
Ideally your contact information page can be accessed easily from the website’s navigation menu (like this); however, your company’s contact information does not need its own page. You can easily include it in your website’s header, footer, or sidebar; just make sure that customers have easy access to that information.
2. “About Us”/Company information
Your company’s “About Us” page is a fantastic opportunity for you to differentiate yourself from the competition. Rather than writing a couple of standard paragraphs that summarise the company’s mission statement, you could create several engaging pages that provide consumers with information about the company’s board of directors, careers, sponsorship, and philosophies to tell a story about the organisation.
Sharing information about your company and its employees gives customers a sense of authenticity; which helps to build trust. Your “About Us” page can also include charities that your company sponsors, awards, events, and testimonials.
3. What products and services your company offers
Prospects visiting your website want to know what your company has to offer. If your company’s purpose is hidden, prospects will question your company’s credibility and navigate to another vendor’s website that provides that information to them up front.
Obviously the most popular way to tell customers what your company has to offer is on the home page. By providing good, concise information about your offerings and Unique Selling Proposition you can quickly connect with potential customers, like the way Peaberry’s does here.
4. Testimonials and client lists
Testimonials and client lists build trust in ways that you cannot. Testimonials help build trust because another person is vouching for your reputation, and demonstrate that your company can offer the customer a solution. Client lists help build trust, especially if your clients are well-known, by association; if you are able to help those big-name clients, then you can be trusted to help the prospect.
Testimonials and client lists can be on a page by themselves, or on your website’s home page, just as long as they are easily found. Meg’s Good Bites does a good job here of sharing their customers.
5. Blogging
Blogging, in our opinion, is probably the most powerful way to build trust. But don’t just post information about yourself or your company, post information that is useful for your potential customers. It is best to focus on content that answers questions your customers might ask around your industry or offering. By providing useful information and solutions you can quickly become a trusted advisor and later win their business. It works even better when this content is optimised for search.
In short, when it comes to converting visitors to customers, don’t start by selling to them, start by building trust.