If your website is missing any or all of the following five traits, it can appear untrustworthy and suspect to those who visit it. Good luck making sales and/or conversions if that is the case.
1. About Us Information
A lack of details about your business and of those who run it and work for it looks suspicious. Are you trying to hide something? Is there a reason that you don’t want to give your staff some airtime? The ‘About Us’ section is a very human element found on websites. This becomes glaringly obvious when it is absent.
2. Staff Photography
While not necessarily relevant for every business and industry type, having photos of your staff carries with it many benefits. First and foremost it means that yours is not a faceless business – rather than a cold corporate entity, people can put a face to a name. Benefits after this are strongly felt in the service industry as potential clients can see the names and faces of those who will be looking after them.
3. Contact Details
A postal address and contact telephone number(s) should be quite clear and transparent on your website. If they are not (or fail to exist at all), one cannot help but wonder as to why you are making it difficult to contact you. This looks shady in the sense that should people need to make a return or air a complaint (or vice-versa should they seek to provide you with positive feedback); they are not able to. Why would a business want to present itself from this angle?
4. Customer Evidence + Testimonials
To actively promote yourself as a business, your customer and client interaction should be peppered around your website. Snippets of text such as “our most popular product with customers” or “our most in-demand and sought-after service” buttressed by real client testimonials elevate all of the statements and claims that you make on your business website. An absence of this can suggest that something is afoot. Why has not even a single client left even a snippet of positive feedback?
5. Social Stimuli
Neglecting to include a blog on your website nor engaging with social media channels raises the question as to why you do not want to interact with your customers and potential customers alike in a less formal manner. Are you not a nice company to deal with or do you not care about your customers? No blog or social media postings are indicative of a cold corporate entity that values profit over people. This is not a very trustworthy image when customer care should be at the forefront.
At Ireland Website Design, our online digital marketing experts can consult with you as to how to manage your brand image online. Working with our expert website developers and designers, we can come up with and implement creative and practical solutions to your website and online presence to ensure that you appear as a trusted and desirable business to do business with.
