5 Ways to Optimize Your Website Credibility
In response to our “Ask the Experts” post, Nathan wanted to know how to test and optimize for Trust and Credibility online. It’s a great question and a huge issue, so forgive me if I link off to a lot of resources before getting down to practical “how to” information.
First of all, take a look at Dave Young’s screencast on “Building Trust and Credibility Online.” Dave does a fantastic job of breaking down specific techniques he used to build a website capable of inspiring confidence. Once you’ve taken a look at that, I humbly suggest you look at my series on Inspiring Online Credibility.
After reviewing those articles, I would recommend these five things to virtually everyone:
• Test your contact info. If you’re not already prominently displaying your contact number, test making your phone number larger and showing it clearly on the top-right corner or right-hand column.
• Test different images. Your images should actively help to evoke credibility. Let visitors “see for themselves.” (Dave’s screencast goes into specific ways in which a roofing company uses videos to inspire confidence.) Generally, stock images won’t help you in this regard.
• Test your Point of Action assurances. Do you have privacy policies, hacker safe icons, guarantees, etc? Are you placing these assurances next to the appropriate calls to action? (Bryan offers some ideas in this screencast.)
• Test your ‘About Us’ content. Do you recognize the power of the About Us page?Are you letting visitors see into your values, motivations, and history and track record? Are you making visitors aware that there are likable, committed, stand-up people behind your organization?
• Substantiate your claims. Visitors are rightly skeptical of unsubstantiated claims. If you make a claim (”best value,” “most reliable,” etc.), prove it. Proving what you say will build credibility. Determine your most important claims, then support it by avoiding the 7 deadly claims.
I hope this helps, Nathan. Best of luck to you. Let us know how it goes!
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[Editor’s Note: Got a question for FutureNow? All you have to do is “Ask the Experts“.]
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
Great post Jeff, I know there are some areas I need to work on. I am planning on adding a photo on the Contact Us page, I think in reading past posts that adding photos of real people, add to the creditability of the company.
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Dave’s screencast - what is the URL of that?
The the 7 deadly claims series is very good. Do you know rhetorics? I mean ave you ever learnt it?!
David,
I’ve been reading and thinking about Rhetoric for a few years now, and would recommend its study to anyone. If you’re interested, I’d recommend Jay Heinrichs’ book Thank You for Arguing”, along with his blog, figarospeech.com
Also check out the Wizard of Ads trilogy by Roy H. Williams and subscribe yourself to the Monday Morning Memo.
Thanks for the comment, and I hope this helps.
-Jeff
Jeff, this is a really good post. To be honest, I’ve never taken a hard look at what I can do to improve my contact page, even though it’s one of my most viewed pages. Adding photos to a testimonial page is something I suggest with most of my clients, but fail to do with my own.
Jeff,
Could you please give link to Dave’s Screencast which you mentioned in the post.
Also just a minor comment, not sure if worth implementing or not. If the visitor to GrokDotCom wants to search for some blog posts, he needs to go and click SEARCH ARCHIVES link. Might be better if a search box can be made on right hand side column of every post somewhere, like just below See More Posts. I am not sure if most of people struggle to find Search Archives Link in case they want to search. But this happened to me. So might be worth testing
Sorry I found the link to Dave’s screencast, I am not sure how I missed it when i read this post few days back.
5 Ways to Optimize Your Website Credibility…
Jeff Sexton offers five ways to increase your website’s credibility. Even more useful are the links to related articles and screencasts on the same topic. …