Building trust is a tried and true method of drawing in new customers and keeping them. You want to create content for your site that helps build this trust – not simply pepper your copy with keywords to get the search engines’ attention.
Saying the same thing over and over again may work in politics but when you’re marketing your small business online, it appears fake to prospective customers. Most who come across content like this immediately leave a website as they are seeing right through the angle the site is trying to play…if not consciously realizing it, site visitors will feel something just doesn’t seem right about the site so they leave.
Besides helping build links and SEO rankings, good content builds trust with site visitors. Continue reading for four ways you can build trust with prospective customer with your site’s content.
1. Do not hype anything
Hype is still a favorite tactic of low-level marketers. We’ve all seen hype time and again – in commercials, on billboards and in magazines. We’ve become accustomed to it. But the Internet is still relatively new and useful for many things – research, business, shopping and more. People have a much lower tolerance for hype in the online world.
Substantiate all claims. Don’t say you’re “#1” or “the best” unless you can back that up through a third-party. Simply claiming you’re the best because you want it to be true isn’t enough…people find unsubstantiated claims very suspicious.
2. Be genuine, like a friend
Great copy that sells generally reads like a conversation between friends. Writing in a conversational tone that helps the reader solve their problem goes a long way toward building trust. Since online shoppers cannot meet the seller in the flesh, they get extremely suspicious and leave if your content is bland and boring.
Also, don’t spend much time telling outlandish stories or make claims that appear too good to be true…be able to backup claims with third-party verification.
3. Don’t use hidden text that’s hard to find
In the infancy of SEO, webmasters used to write content and make it the same color as their background to hide it from readers. The keyword-rich content got the attention of the search engines at first but no real person would spend much time on the site. You can still “hide” content like that but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.
It’s okay to employ hidden content to make your page more usable as long as the reader can easily find it with a simple click of a mouse. But hiding content to make it more difficult for readers to find is wrong.
Before using hidden text though, ask yourself is it valuable? If it is, then your visitors need to be able to read it. If not, then it probably shouldn’t go on the site anyway.
4. Include negative reviews
Another powerful way to gain trust in your site’s content is to include negative reviews of your products. Only including positive reviews will only serve to turn people off…you can lose credibility pretty quickly. Negative reviews help because they give the reader a better-rounded picture of what they’re purchasing. They also help readers determine how the positive attributes of your products outweigh the bad.
Your site’s content is where you make your impression on potential customers. Therefore, it needs to build trust if you want site visitors to purchase your products or use your services. Make sure you’re giving your site visitors a good first impression and not simply creating a jumbled mess of keyword optimized content.