If you have a website, it’s likely that you created it to market your products or services and to essentially make money. But how do you get potential customers to actually come back to your site time and time again? Building a trusted website is the first step in that process.

Here are some tips that will not only entice your prospective customers to return for more but will also give them a reason to buy from you.

Website Security

I’m always surprised by the number of websites I land on that are not 100 percent secure.

You may have come across a message like this one below. If you have, you’ll no doubt quickly click away or close the window to avoid any potential harm to your computer or phone.

Since 2018, Google has included such messages on websites that haven’t complied with the “HTTPS” protocol.

The reason this happens is that the site is missing an updated SSL Certificate, a problem that can easily be fixed by your web hosting company.

If you store credit card information or any other sort of customer payment details, it’s imperative that your SSL Certificate is up to date.

If not, trust with your potential customers could go out the door.

Promote Yourself

This is especially important if you are trying to sell a product. You’ll immediately garner more trust if you include testimonials and in some cases pictures of those giving the testimonials on your website.

You’ll often see this on specific landing pages.

For those in the B2B environment, you could include case studies on your website as they are validation that you have and will deliver on the promises you make.

Don’t Oversell

While it’s hard not to “sell” your products – for obvious reasons – your urge to oversell when you think you are just selling is tempting.

At first, you should attempt to educate your potential customer before bringing on the sales pitch. If you follow this formula, you will naturally build huge trust with your visitors.

What you want to do is to create engaging, educational content that pulls them in rather than constantly pushing out promotional wording.

Create Targeted Content

If your content is not geared toward your ideal customer, then your visitors won’t return. To build trust, you should include that target audience in the content itself.

But it’s not enough to know your audience in order to create content specifically for them, you should also have a good idea of the problems they are experiencing when they land on your site.

How do you know what those problems might be?

The easiest way to do that is to put yourself in the shoes of those customers. What are the things you love about a product or service, what aspects of that product would you like to know more about and what do you struggle with when trying to find an appropriate solution?

Use Proper Grammar & High-Quality Images

There’s nothing more that will turn off a potential customer than sloppily-written content. If you’re not confident about your writing capabilities, then hire a writer to do it for you.

Tools to help with the writing process include Grammarly and Thesaurus.com.

The same goes for images. Try to use high-quality images that are appropriate for the content you are highlighting on your website.

Pay attention to image size as that can slow a website down.

The ideal image size for most WordPress themes is 1200 X 628 pixels. You can also use a plugin like TinyPNG to further compress images and thereby save on website bandwidth.

Limit Ads on Your Website

While some ads are ok, too many are annoying and to be honest, won’t engender any trust with your prospective customers. In addition, they really slow up the speed of a website, so I don’t encourage the overuse of ads, if possible.

Publicize Your Team

Having an About Us page is critical to gaining the trust of potential customers. A website without it might seem suspect to some visitors.

Adding images of yourself and each employee, as well as pertinent biographical information is important because customers want to know who they are going to potentially do business with.

It’s also wise to include awards that your company has received in the past that will add credibility to your website’s reputation and increase trust in your brand.

In essence, it’s crucial that visitors to your site see and like the people behind the brand.

Keep Your Website Current

Be sure to regularly update your site so that visitors are getting current information. If the content is evergreen, you won’t have to worry about this as much. But if you own a restaurant, for example, you’ll need to update menus and other pertinent information frequently.

Abandoned news pages and blog posts, out-of-date business information, and expired offers won’t send the right message to potential customers.

In addition to updating the content on your site, be sure to check for broken links. There’s nothing worse than clicking on a URL and discovering that the information is no longer there.

If you want a tool that checks for broken links and other SEO-related issues, Screaming Frog is one I recommend.

Website Speed

First impressions are really important when it comes to websites and perhaps the most important factor to consider when it comes to that is website speed.

If your website loads slowly, visitors will simply get impatient and move away.

According to statistics from Kissmetrics (now neilpatel.com), 47 percent of website users expect sites to load in less than 2 seconds, while 40 percent will abandon a site completely if it takes longer than 3 seconds.

Mobile visitors are equally as impatient. The Kissmetrics data says that 85 percent of Internet users expect a site to load even faster than the times mentioned above.

To ensure that your site loads quickly, you should first check its speed.

There are a number of tools to help with this. They include Google Pagespeed Insights, the Pingdom Speed Test, and GTMetrix, to name a few.

Have you implemented any of the above tips when building a trusted website to enhance the relationship between you and your customers? If you have, let me know in the comments below.