How to Make your Website More Trustworthy

Getting customers to trust you online can be a long journey of consistently providing high quality services and addressing your customers’ concerns. Building a relationship with a virtual person is hard considering the many online scams today. Whether you are selling a product or service, or are simply offering free advice, trust is a major factor if you are to achieve your business goals.

Here are some tips that will help to make your website more trustworthy

a) Full contact information

Your visitors will likely to want to know who you are, especially if you are selling them something. Therefore, include your company’s full contact information at the website. The phone number, physical address and emails should be there. If you are in industries where professional certification is important, such as the legal or medical industry, including your registration number will help to increase trust. Avoid using an answering machine during office hours. This is usually a sign that someone is trying to hide and it makes customers suspicious.

b) Secure your customers’ information

All online businesses should keep their customers’ information securely. If you are gathering your customers’ emails, have a clear policy with regards to exposing the data to third parties and sending emails. Only customers who sign up for your products should be emailed. If customers are shopping at your website, make sure the information they enter is encrypted. Use Secure Socket Layers to increase the security of your customers’ data.

c) Sufficient content

Provide sufficient information about your products, services and company on your website. Avoid summarizing what you do. The more your customers understand what your company is about, the greater the chances that they will trust you. If you can, post a video of your company’s offices or one of the representatives explaining what you do. A human face behind the content will increase your trust. Have a frequently asked questions section on your website where customers can easily get answers on the most commonly asked questions.

d) Professional website

Design your website in a professional manner. The colors you choose may depend on what you do, but can also affect a visitor’s perception about your company. If your business leans mostly on the corporate side, use colors sparingly. One to three colors are enough to bring a corporate look. Avoid fancy fonts and images unless you are targeting young people and are in a line of businesses where a corporate look will be out of place.

e) Include testimonials

Customers will not easily take your word regarding your services or products. However, their trust will increase when they see testimonials from other customers who have benefited from your services or products. Follow up on every customer you serve and request them for a testimonial. For the testimonials you publish, include a link to the customer’s website so that other potential customers can contact him or her if they want to verify the testimonial. Creating false testimonials or those that cannot be verified in any way will only increase suspicion among your prospects.

f) Have a privacy policy

One of the biggest concerns by Internet users is regarding their privacy. Some websites expose or sell information about their customers’ online behavior to marketing companies. In turn, many users end up receiving junk mail and email spam. Have a clear privacy policy on your website. On it, outline what kinds of customer data you collect, why you collect it and what it is used for. Also, include a terms and conditions page. This page should outline the obligations of both your company and the customer and what happens in case of breaches, purchases, accessing the website and so on.

The above are some of the things you should do to make your website more trustworthy. With trust, comes an increase in new leads and conversions. Having all the above will greatly enhance your website’s performance and increase your visitors’ confidence in your website