It’s no secret that if you want to attract customers to your business, trust is vital. Potential clients want to be sure that their time, money, and interests will be safe in your business’s hands if they choose to work with you.
For businesses that are just starting out or looking for new clients, this can be a challenge: after all, trust is most commonly built over years—or, at the very least, months—of partnership.
So, since you can’t build relationships with potential clientele over lengthy periods of working together, how can you communicate to those who don’t know you that you’re trustworthy and would be a valuable asset?
Here are some ways you can impress upon your audience that you’re the real deal—and all they take are some simple updates to your website.
Improve Your Content
Quality
This is a given—no one’s going to trust you if you’re showing shoddy work. Typos and other errors are an immediate red flag to potential customers because they indicate that your business isn’t attentive to details.
If it makes sense for your type of business, showcase your past work. Show off the projects you’re most proud of, but keep them relatively recent—not having regularly-updated content gives customers the opportunity to wonder why you haven’t been working lately.
Quantity
Not only is it reassuring for potential customers to see a fleshed-out website, it’s good to have plenty of content for Google’s crawlers to pick up on for SEO purposes. Plus, the longer someone spends on your site taking in all the wonderful things you’ve written and created, the better your chance of impressing them.
Of course, you don’t want too much content on your site—doing so can create a cramped feeling, turning off potential customers (no one likes to read huge walls of text online). And if your content isn’t varied enough—for example, if you copy and paste content to make it look like you have more of it, or if you have multiple pages basically repeating the same information—Google could read it as spam and reduce your ranking in searches.
Perfect Your Design
UX
User experience (UX) on your website should be a breeze. Every poorly-mapped image link and nonresponsive drop-down menu is a chance for someone to leave your site feeling unsatisfied. Lazy UX design communicates to customers that you don’t care about them and their experience on your site.
While you’re thinking about user experience, don’t forget about mobile or tablet users: is your website reactive (meaning it will scale to fit smaller screens), or are users directed to a mobile version of it when they’re browsing on their smartphone? Are your pages as easy to navigate with a fingertip or stylus as they are with a mouse? If you have an app, make sure that it’s as user-friendly as possible, too.
Consistency
You wouldn’t change your brand’s defining font from place to place, so you shouldn’t drastically change your design from webpage to webpage. Everything doesn’t have to look exactly the same (you certainly don’t want visitors to be bored!), but having cohesion across your site gives a sense of organization and keeps viewers from being jarred out of their experience.
Add These Extras
Reviews & Testimonials
Positive reviews of your business and stories from happy customers show potential clients exactly why they should choose you. To people visiting your site, that’s an instant boost of trust.
You can showcase your favorite reviews on rotating carousels or emphasize them as insets, for example. Or, install a Yelp widget on your site to show just how great people think your business is. A review widget adds another level of trust to your brand because it proves that your reviews are from real customers who took the time to inform others of their experience with you.
Third-Party Logos
When you show off the brands that have already placed their trust in you, potential customers are more likely to follow suit—and the bigger/more respected the brand, the more impressive you seem by proxy.
However, it’s important not to let other companies’ logos overshadow the design of your site. Instead, try fading them a bit so they don’t dominate your layout. Or, display them all in a uniform color, like black (or another easy-to-read neutral that coordinates with your brand’s aesthetic).
To sum up, your website is often the first impression a customer gets of your business, so it’s important that it looks and functions the best it possibly can. Keep these tips in mind when developing or redesigning your website to prevent missing out on potential clients.
Looking for more ways to attract new customers? Contact Kirkpatrick Creative today to schedule a consultation.