I’ve been spending a lot of time looking over websites not ranking in Google I see a mistake fairly often that is easily corrected.
When meeting in person, one of the simplest indicators of trust is “the handshake.” Historically the handshake originated as a gesture of trust indicating you did not have a weapon and came in peace.
With technology we can avoid doing business in person, but this comes with a cost. Implementing a clear set of trust indicators into your website will help you bridge this gap and quickly put your website visitors at ease.
Trust is the single most important factor that will determine whether or not a customer will complete an online transaction or hit the back button. Trust is the reason for large scale political changes and enterprise level business mergers.
Search Engines won’t rank you as well if you are missing the following pages.
Important Pages You Must Have
- A contact us page
- A privacy policy page
- An about us page
It’s true. If you don’t have those pages on your site then you are letting your competitors take your rankings.
The reason that this is so important for search engine optimization is because Google only wants to rank quality websites that have real businesses backing them.
If a search engine spider is trying to identify a thin affiliate site or auto generated website, it looks for signals indicating authenticity and quality. When you are trying to hide your identity or conceal company details this does not send a signal that your website should be presented to potential searchers.
Other SEO signals you can use to show search engines that you are a quality business and should have a high ranking are leaving WHOIS data unprotected and use real company information. It is common for scammers to hide the WHOIS domain name registration contact details so people cannot complain to them. Make your site trustworthy and present as much company information as you can by being open, honest and forthcoming with company details and product information.
Providing a detailed customer service page, a real address, comprehensive instructions on how to get product information or return products are new social signals that Google and the other search engines are using to rank websites.
Online Trust Indicators
- Reviews
- Trust Logos (BBB, Yelp, Industry Associations)
- Physical Address
- Real Names and Photos of Employees
- Social Media Profiles
- Secure Icons
- Website Encryption (SSL)
SEO is based on trust, authenticity, relevance, validity and authority. You need to say who you are and represent yourself accurately.
By working with a reputable web design company, you can implement a clear set of trust indicators into your website, which will help you bridge this gap online and put your website’s visitors at ease as they browse your site.
View online marketing directories find a web designer in your city that can update your website into a conversion focused online tool. Use Design Rush to find a web design company rated by trusted peers.
9 Responses
Does a blog need to have a contact and payment page? I’m having trouble with my SEO, I’d like to send you an e-mail.
This is helpful for our link development strategies as we have a lot of thin content that needs to be curated.
This is a fine article about creating deep media rich pages to get nice traffic from Google.
the penultimate thoughts to better landing pages are openly mooted here will bring us to discount the main focus should be on traditional SEO.
There are some fascinating marketing concepts mentioned in this article but I don’t know if I can modify my website to take advantage of all of them. There may be some design changes we could do to improve lead conversions.
Where is the best place to start an SEO blog meant to teach people about online marketing? Should I start my blog using wordpress to get maximum SEO value out of all our content writers?
I found your blog on Google and as an SEO specialist I have a much respect for your killer rankings.
Just getting into social media, thanks for the good read. How deep should we promote our social bookmarks online, we want to reach as wide an audience as possible.
this article raises a good point, what should international sites do – we have different customs for sharing information.