What Makes a Website Truly Trustworthy?

Most online blogs talk about how you can make your website more stunning, but hardly any speak about making your website appear more credible. Presently, most websites already look fairly decent as people tend to use professionally designed themes to create their website, so rather than focusing on layout, we’re discussing a different approach—building trust with your visitors.

Unless your visitors feel comfortable on your website and trust your offerings, you’ll struggle to turn them into customers. A trusted website can generate more profit, and clients will feel more secure when submitting their details, including their email address, banking credentials, and social proof. Trust matters more than stunning designs, especially when visitors consider your website hosting charges before committing.

Research indicates that approximately 55% of buyers come back to purchase from a well-known platform. This figure demonstrates that the only way of getting visitors to invest money with you repeatedly is by offering a trustworthy website. Fortunately, there are plenty of low cost hosting options available that offer reliable and secure performance. In this blog, we will discuss how to enhance the credibility of your website so that it will look like a reliable platform on the internet.

Why Clients Trust Matters?

Trust is crucial in online marketing because it immensely affects user experience. In Google’s view, trust stands at the core of E-E-A-T—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Websites would lose their users’ trust if they were to generate unproductive and irrelevant content. Users would no longer trust it and would redirect their searches elsewhere.

With so much focus on trust for their business, it is logical that search engines expect that same standard from websites on their search results pages. To learn how to make a website more trustworthy, it is extremely important to review Google Search Essentials and determine which factors contribute to building credibility.

1. External Links

Among the most critical points in determining a website as trustworthy is the inclusion of external links. As per Google, external links can be used to enhance the credibility of a website. By doing so, you build credibility and gain the trust of your clients, resulting in improved traffic and conversions.

Besides mentioning sources, authoritative backlinks also qualify as confidence votes that inform Google your website is an authentic and credible source of data. Backlinks from reliable resources can enhance your website’s credibility and visibility in SERP, generating more traffic and rankings.

To include external links in your content properly, make sure to:

• Utilise descriptive anchor text.
• Link to websites that are related to your website.
• Do not stuff the keywords excessively.

By ensuring the use of external links and quality backlinks, you can make your website a reliable source of data and unlock greater opportunities for success.

2. Security

It is strongly advisable to use HTTPS to encrypt communication between your website and clients. In 2017, Google enforced HTTPS for websites that gather confidential data.

HTTPS secures confidential data like usernames, passwords, and credit card information, and also makes your website look trustworthy. Having an SSL certificate from a trusted web hosting provider like MilesWeb assists in building a solid SEO base, a goal all websites aim for to perform well within the search rankings.

Google considers safer websites as more trustworthy, thus HTTPS can enhance your website’s ranking. This indicates that a secure website is more likely to appear higher within search engine results.

3. High-Quality Content

Make sure that the information on your website is updated and verified. Fake information can diminish your trust, so it is crucial to keep updating your content to ensure its value.

Google’s content policies offer questions to help you evaluate your content to make sure that it is accurate and high-quality. Considering these important factors, you can build strong and long-term relationships with your customers.

4. Positive Reputation

Search Quality Raters evaluate credibility by reviewing the reputation of the website or its content author. A positive reputation may be shown in several ways:

• Social media
• Backlinks
• Testimonials and reviews

Social media posting and activities can indirectly impact search rankings by influencing the credibility of your website. Social signals might not be a direct ranking aspect; however, they can still play a significant role in establishing your website’s reliability.

Moreover, if possible, it should be made evident by highlighting the expertise and qualifications of the content writer to validate their authority. Google often looks at the author’s credibility to decide how reliable the content is.

5. Quality User Experience

To achieve a positive user experience, it is also essential to design a website that is intuitive and visually appealing. A quality UI creates trust, boosts user interaction, and ensures the overall success of the website.

Google announced Page Experience as a ranking aspect and offers guidance in evaluating your page’s experience:

• Do the pages meet Google’s Core Web Vitals?
• Does the content load nicely on mobile devices when it is accessed?
• Does the content have too many ads that distract or divert from the primary content?
• Do pages have intrusive interstitials?
• How quickly can clients find your website’s core content?
• Is the page created in a way that clients can quickly identify the main content from other content on your page?

Further, website owners willing to enhance their page experience should make the page mobile-friendly and refrain from using intrusive pop-ups.

Conclusion

Establishing trust with your users takes time, but it is worth it in many ways. By gaining their trust, you can potentially rank higher on the SERPs. Eventually, you’ll have a website that users trust and that ranks high on Google.

When visitors and potential clients feel that they can count on your business, that’s the beginning of a lucrative business. And with a reliable hosting provider like MilesWeb, building and maintaining trust is much more achievable.