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As a small business owner, it is challenging to gain traction and visibility for your website. Especially with the kind of competition that is available in the online world today, it is easy to get lost in the crowd.

One of the most prominent ways to stand out is to showcase your authenticity to your website visitors. If you build trust with your audience on the first go, it is highly likely for them to keep coming back to your site.

Not just that, being a reliable and authentic website will also help you to rank higher on Google. Google’s algorithm highly relies on the E-A-T score, which stands for Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness. This means, if you make your website look more reliable, you’ll rank higher and will get more website visitors.

I’m sure you are wondering about how you can make your small website look reliable, authentic, and trustworthy. In this guide, we’ll talk about some actionable strategies you can implement for the same. So, let’s find out all about it.

1. Add Abundant Social Proof

The kind of impact social proof has on the minds of your website visitors is like nothing else. Adding any kind of social proof will instantly make your website more trustworthy and will yield you great results in the long run.

You can add social proof in many forms. You can add testimonials, customer success stories, trust badges, reviews, ratings, social media follower counts, or anything similar that shows your visitors that you are indeed reliable.

You can add social proof on your website homepage to get the most out of it. A good tip here would be to place the social proof above the fold. When you add social proof above the fold, more website visitors are likely to see it, and this will reduce your website bounce rate.

2. Talk About Yourself

This is a common mistake made by many small websites. It is very important to understand that people do not connect with brands. They connect with real people and their stories. Hence, it is essential to showcase the face of your brand instead of just being a brand.

The best way to go about it is to talk about yourself on your homepage and on the about page. Talk about your experience, your interests, or anything that can help build a personal connection. Put up a picture of you and your team as well. People are more likely to trust a real person than just a brand logo.

You can go one step further by talking about your brand’s story. You can talk about how the idea of this website came into being, the struggles that you faced, and your wins. This will be super-effective in making your site look authentic.

3. Ensure your Website’s Accessibility

Did you know that one out of every four Americans has some kind of a disability? Such people would not be able to access your website unless you work on your website’s accessibility. Without web accessibility, your visitors will lose trust in you, and this will have a significant impact on your business.

To ensure the accessibility of your website, you should adhere to the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). By working on web accessibility, your website will look for trustworthy and welcoming users. This will also send positive signals to Google and lead to an increase in your search rankings. 

4. Get an SSL Certificate

Having an SSL certificate is an absolute must if you want to build trust with your visitors. An SSL certificate changes your site from an HTTP to an HTTPS. This will ensure that data exchange between your website and the users’ browser is encrypted and immune to cyber attacks.

Most browsers throw a warning when a user tries to access a website without an SSL certificate. Moreover, Google also considers SSL as an essential factor for ranking. So, it’s high time you get an SSL certificate if you don’t have one already.

5. Create High-Quality, Trustworthy Content

Most website visitors would initially land on your website, looking for content. When you are a small business, having trustworthy content on the top of your funnel will play a major role in bringing in visitors inside your funnel.

Therefore, ensuring the quality of your content is super-important, to say the least. Make sure that you put out only highly reliable content and do not spam your users with inaccurate information. Add external links to high-quality sources to add more credibility to your content.

You should also try to add an author bio to every piece of content on your website. This will help you sound more authentic to your audience. Try to add relevant industry experience to the author bio to make it even more trustworthy.

Final Thoughts

Building trust with your website visitors is of utmost importance in today’s day and age. Having a reliable and authentic website will help you get more traffic, generate more leads, and drive more conversions for your business. 

So, start working on these strategies ASAP and watch your profitability increase.