Web Site Credibility – How Do You Rate?

The big challenge online is to build credibility. Trust is a key factor in the sales process, in many cases more important than price.

With a traditional store people judge your business by things they can touch, smell, see, heard and feel.

These include:

• location
• branding and signage
• fit and fixtures
• staff appearance
• staff knowldge, accent, tone of voice and speech patterns
• apparent popularity (think of a nightclub door)
• cleanliness

With a web site it’s a lot trickier. Here’s a list of things to could do to build trust:

• Showing a street address, contact telephone number and photo of your business
• Client or customer testimonials
• Showing memberships of appropriate trade associations
• A clear and concise service or product guarantee
• Photos or videos of key staff
• Photos or videos of products in use by real customers
• Recent and frequent activity in social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin
• Recent and frequent blog posts

the list goes on …

It’s the same with Google.

Google looks for factors like listed street addresses, testimonials and online activity when trying to work out which sites go to the top of the search engine results. In short, Google also looks for signs of credibility.