How can you persuade visitors to your website that they can trust you with their requirements? Visitors will make a decision on your business within seconds of landing, so you have to be strategic on how you present yourself. Those first impressions are everything – the difference between getting a sale or a contact form sent through…or nothing.

All of your competitors have websites and most of those will have put the effort in to get visitors to choose them over you. So what can give you the edge? Here are 8 great ways that may help you do just that…

Choose professional web design

Visitors will know straight away if you have cut corners getting your website. An unprofessional website design causes alarm bells to ring and visitors will immediately question your credibility and professionalism too. Today, having a website created by web design company isn’t expensive and there are different solutions available. You can choose to keep your budget down but still have an awesome looking website done by using a website theme. To create a more exclusive look, choose the more expensive custom website design route and have something created to your exact specifications.

State clearly what you do

You have literally seconds to inform visitors what you do, so, make it crystal clear on your home page. An effective way is to use a statement in large font at the top of the page that lets visitors immediately know. Some examples our clients have used include…

Mobile water solutions, anytime, anywhere‘ –  NSI Mobile Water Solutions

For all your eyecare needs‘ – Bay Bloor Eyecare

Education Recruitment made simple‘ – YSA Education

Engineering Excellence‘ – Summit Engineering

Why not choose a powerful relevant image to back up your statement and further capture the attention of visitors.

Promote your Branding

Promote your branding identity across your website as visitors will appreciate consistency in the messages they are being shown. Strong branding reinforces your company’s values, enhancers your credibility and helps build trust with visitors. If your branding is outdated or doesn’t fit in with the message you are trying to convey on your website, this is a sure things to put visitors off.

Highlight your credibility

You can tell visitors that you’re best in the business, but nothing speaks louder than real customer reviews and testimonials. If you are lucky enough to have been awarded great Google reviews, or other reviews from platforms such as Trust Pilot, Tripadvisor etc. your website’s home page is the place to share this information. You’ve earned that great feedback from customers, so its time to put it to good use!

Make a connection

Visitors will only be able to decide whether to contact you using the information you provide on your website. Your website may portray you as an awesome company, but who actually are you, who are the actual people behind the website? Many websites often introduce their team members, with photographs and bios, which really does appeal to visitors. Why not take the bold move to use a team member’s face on your website’s home page with a brief message, or better still a video clip; this will be one of the first focal points for all visitors and a chance for you to shine.

Provide clear, digestible text content

There’s a fine balance in providing too much or too little text content on your website. The rule is to provide succinct, relevant and informative text, without being over-flowery and repetitive. Website content also needs to be pitched at the right level for the visitors you want to contact you or buy from you. These people will mostly just scan your text content quickly for keywords that are relevant to their requirements.

Use authentic, great quality images

Visitors to your website will expect to see great quality images that show what you do and who you are. Images can be just as effective in communicating messages, so choose them carefully to compliment the text. Grainy, unfocused, slow loading images are a turn-off, as are library stock images that are obviously too perfect and staged. Product images shown should be authentic and provide us much detail as possible.

Ensure security and privacy

Visitors contacting you via online forms, or purchasing products from you, will want to know that information they provide on your website is kept private and secure. Your website should have an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate which all data being communicated is encrypted between the browser and your website’s server. Any payments being taken on your website must be done via a reputable third party payment processing platform, to protect personal and payment card information.

Closing thoughts…

The above are just a selection of ways that can help you convince visitors that you are a credible business, make them trust you, and encourage them to make contact or buy from you. There are plenty of other ways to build on these, which we will look at in a forthcoming article.