How To Build Trust And Authority Through Your Website

A website owned by a business has numerous functions. If you sell from your website then you might use it in order to make profit. If you’re collecting e-mail addresses then you might use it as a means to generate leads. All in all, it will probably help you to increase your brand’s visibility and it will certainly help give prospective customers a place to learn more about you.

But one of the most crucial roles of a website is to build trust and authority. By creating and managing your website in a certain way, you can aim to build an image for your business that tells your visitors you know what you’re talking about and you can be trusted. Once you do this, yours will then be the first name that pops into their head when they need a particular product or service.

However, the challenge is how you go about developing this kind of trust and authority. Read on and we’ll look at how you can do that.

Building Authority

In order to build authority, the first thing you should do is to give lots of information away for free. In other words, you should be sharing your wisdom on a regular basis through your blog or in free eBooks and video courses, so that you provide real value. As you do this, your visitors will keep coming back and they will generally learn what you stand for and how much expertise you have.

If you can impress them enough, you’ll find that opportunities start to arise as more and more people start to consider you an expert in the field. And when you offer some information that isn’t free, they will assume it is of the highest quality. Every business should give away free tasters of some sort and that goes a long way in attracting your potential customer market.

Going in-depth is also important. If you are going to write an article on a topic, then try to ensure that you either provide an angle that’s completely fresh and unique, or just go into the subject in unprecedented depth with links to external resources, boxes with side subjects and plenty of images, infographics and other extras. If you do this well, you may be able to get featured as one of Google’s ‘In-Depth Articles‘, which is great for your SEO and for your perceived authority in the eyes of the visitors.

Building Trust

You’ve built the authority, now you need to build the trust. The authority is what ensures people know you know what you’re doing, but the trust is the crucial element that will reassure them that you will do the right thing with that knowledge.

One of the very best ways to build trust is to be as transparent as possible. This means honest reflection on the industry, honest admittance of your mistakes and interesting insights into your processes and ethos. Things like photos of your team together in the office can do a lot to inspire confidence and to make your visitors feel like they ‘know’ you. Once you get them to feel this way and they also respect your knowledge and skill, you will have a customer just waiting for their opportunity to pay you!