5 Tips for Making Your Website Trustworthy

Sales 101: Not all prospect interactions are created equal:

The Crème de la Crème: In-Person Meetings: In these interactions, you can use the full arsenal of body language, tonality, eye contact, facial expressions, attire, etc. to establish a trusting relationship with your prospect. Doesn't get better than this!

The Crème: Video Meetings: Though not quite as natural or intimate as the in-person meeting, video calls allow you to deliver many of the same non-verbal tools to foster trust and build rapport.

The Sub-Crème: Voice Calls: Voice-only calls still allow for back-and-forth dialogue which helps you extract information and reduce misunderstandings. However, they are far less personal, eliminate non-verbal cues and makes trust-building much more difficult.

The Anti-Crème: Anything Written: Be it email or LinkedIn, these one-directional, text-heavy interactions make delivering a nuanced message and establishing rapport nearly impossible. We’ve all asked our sales manager for advice on an email response, only to hear, “you should just get them on the phone instead”. 

Though a variety of factors make written communication inferior, the chief of these is trust (or lack thereof). Developing enough trust and rapport to invoke a desired behaviour is extremely difficult without the use of verbal communication or body language. After all, we’re humans, and humans are social animals. Online, we are limited to a highly impersonal medium which eliminates the vast majority of these social cues.

“Well that sucks” - said every digital marketer, web designer or entrepreneur. 

And they’re right! It does ‘suck’. However, neuroscientists, psychologists and marketers have been hard at work finding ways we can build trust online. Whether you’re selling a product, service or your services as a professional, their insights can be massively useful. Without further ado, here are 5 Tips for Making Your Website Trustworthy, based on Dr BJ Fogg’s (Stanford University) research on Digital Credibility Factors. 

5 Tips for Making Your Website Trustworthy 

#1 Appropriate Design

We covered this principle in my article on optimizing personal websites, but in review; your website visitors are expecting a certain look based on the industry you are in. Deviating from that expectation too much can confuse them, leading to fear, which is often followed by a swift click of the “back” button. Avoid this by keeping your creativity in check. Pepper in your personality, but don’t go overboard with the layout and design. An e-commerce platform should look like, well, Amazon (or Kijiji), and not like the landing page of a creative arts studio. Start the ‘trust’ journey smoothly by not overwhelming your visitors. 

#2 Easy Verification

Your website is the elevator pitch of your business. As such, it’s definitely fair-game to show off a little! You were featured on MSNBC last month? Let me know! Your product is based on well-established medical research? Tell me more! Sounds easy, right?

As outlined in the introduction, trust is the biggest barrier for online persuasion. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance I won’t trust any of your claims because I just got here, and I don’t know you. To avoid this issue, always back-up your claims with easy verification! When you tell me about MSNBC, hyperlink the article in which they featured you. If you’re flexing the research behind the medical claims of your product, hyperlink the studies themselves! By affording me the ability to easily verify your claims, you provide a sense of comfort and trust in both your claims and your brand as a whole. Think of this as, “google it if you don’t believe me”, for website visitors. I might never use the links, but I trust you because you offered them!

#3 Prove Expertise 

Proving expertise ties closely with the principles of Easy Verification. The idea is to show your value, as an individual, business or product, in the most trustworthy way possible. When it comes to expertise, the best way to do this is through institutions your audience recognize and already find credible.

For example, you can tell me all about the philosophy, care and attention-to-detail behind your restaurant’s dishes. I may, or may not believe you. After all, what restaurant wouldn’t make such claims? Instead, if you tell me you have a Michelin Star, I can immediately trust that I'll see a certain standard of quality. Essentially, you’ve piggy-backed my trust in Michelin Stars to establish your credibility. 

Pro Tip: Use visuals to show these certifications / achievements. Our brain responds more quickly to imagery than text. Particularly, if the image is familiar to your visitor (like a well-known accreditation in your field), you can build the aforementioned trust instantly and increase the chance that the visitor will read your text copy. Remember, in conversion optimization, milliseconds count! Don't hesitate to use that Michelin Star logo.

#4  Show You Are Real

It doesn’t matter what you’re selling. If I’m going to give you my money, much less my personal information, I first have to trust you. As we discussed in the introduction, building this trust is difficult without any personal connection: so create one!

As a web consumer, I want to know that the website I'm surfing is run by real people, a real company, and not some hacker in a basement somewhere. Show me you’re real!

If you’re a small business, share a story about your founder (with images, of course). Particularly if you’re a service company (i.e. air conditioning services), show me your crew, your trucks, your equipment. All of this gives me the comfort that you are a real business, with real people and real assets, and that I can count on you if my AC breaks in the middle of the night.

Pro Tip #1: When telling your founder’s story, or highlighting any employees; be real people. It’s always better to show an imperfect, relatable individual than a perfectly proper businessperson. After all, we trust those we can relate to, and most people relate better to Michael who “loves dogs and is scared of heights” than Michael who is wearing a thousand-dollar suit and has a hundred credentials but no personality. Keep it real!

Pro Tip #2: A very easy credibility tool is your contact information. If you have an office address that is listed on Google, share it! An address, business phone number, even a professional email domain, all reassure your visitors that you are indeed a real, functioning organization. 

#5 Limit Promotion / Ads

Ads are tempting. A third party offering to pay you just for renting some real estate on your website? For small and medium-sized businesses (who are often cash-poor), this type of boost can be very appealing. Unfortunately, it’s very unappealing to your audience. 

Of course, ads are annoying: banners, pop-ups, they drive us nuts. However, the issue is much deeper than that. By filling your website with ads, you are fostering distrust from your prospects. They might ask, "is this a scam page? Even if it’s not, does this business do so poorly that they have to rely on ad revenue from third parties? Or worse, are they doing well but are willing to sacrifice my experience for a few extra bucks?" All of these questions combine to make the prospect distrust you. Since this is often a first impression, this distrust might be permanent, or at best very difficult and costly to undo. 

Pro Tip: Fight the temptation! Show your visitors that you care about their experience. If you do include ads, make them scarce, make them relevant and make sure they don’t interfere with the comfortable navigation of your website. 

One thing salespeople and marketers can agree on, is that digital communication is difficult to get right. Without a personal connection, trust is very difficult to build. Luckily, neuromarketers have gone to great lengths to understand digital consumer behaviour and map out the best paths to your audience’s heart. Whether you’re a sales professional building your personal website, an entrepreneur looking to drive bookings online, or a marketer updating your company’s landing pages, the lesson is the same: never forget what’s missing online - trust. In every design decision, make sure to consider this fact and make your experience as personal and trustworthy as possible. To do so, you can lean on the insights of expert researchers like Dr. BJ Fogg, and others, to get it right. If you are looking for a deeper dive into these studies, I recommend the CXL Mini-degree in Digital Psychology & Persuasion. As I continue through this degree, I'm gaining valuable insights, many of which I am posting weekly in articles like this one. If you are interested in discussing any of the topics, or the mini-degree itself, don’t hesitate to contact me.

In the meantime, remember, credibility matters (trust me ??)!