Building trust with your customers
Tuesday, 15th August 2023
Google put their cards on the table when they published an article titled "Building trust with your customers" that describes how they want you to show that your website is a safe and trustworthy place.
It's aimed at merchant centre customers, so it focusses on websites that sell online, but seeing as when it comes to SEO Google holds all the cards, it's worth a look.
What customers value in building trust with your business
Business Identity
- Provide the official business name that you use across the web and avoid any mismatches in your registered business name and domain name.
- Include an “about us” page on your website to show your authenticity and tell customers your unique story.
- Let customers know that they can follow you on social media profiles and link to those pages from your website.
Transparency
- Be clear and provide detailed information about your policies including shipping, returns and privacy policies.
- Be transparent about your business model and how you operate.
Online reputation
- Help potential customers understand how to use your products or how other customers have used them. Show reviews and testimonials about your products and business.
- If you’ve received any badges or seals of approval from official third-party sources, make sure that you mention these.
- Clearly communicate how customers can interact with you by making sure they know how to get in touch with you and how your customer support is set-up.
- If you publish a blog post or if your business was mentioned in an article, make sure your customers know about this.
Professional design
- Install an SSL certificate so customers know that their sensitive data is retrieved and stored securely without being intercepted by hackers.
- Your website should be accessible for all customers, easy to navigate, and shouldn’t contain any unnecessary redirects or redirects to broken links.
- Avoid placeholders for text and images; this gives the feeling that the website is unfinished
Search engine optimisation is a high stakes game and Google used to play their cards close to their chest, so knowing what they are looking for can be the ace up your sleeve.
If you'd like to speak to us about creating a website that builds trust with your customers please get in touch.
Here's a link to the full article: Building trust with your customers
