6 Ways To Make Your B2B Website More Trustworthy

Here are top ways to ensure that your site is trustworthy to a clientele that is used to personalized contact and close knit communications.

1. Design Your B2B Website With UX In Mind

As your first impression to the world, your website needs to have a strong aesthetic. Think of the way that you buy products: Do you buy a trinket from the vendor with the busted windows, or do you buy from the one with a great looking front door? You naturally trust the vendor with the foresight, competence and confidence to address the way it presents itself to you. This engenders trust. Apply this measuring stick to your website as well.

A well-designed site should naturally account for site load speed. Make sure that you are competitive when it comes to load time. Having a slow-loading website turns off users, leading to a higher bounce rate and of course, opportunity lost. Another incentive for making sure your site loads fast is Google's algorithm. Google places a premium on the amount of time that your site takes to load. The slower your site, the harder it is to climb up to the first 5 pages of Google's search engine results page.

To ensure that your site design is not just pretty but has a great user-experience, remember to test your designs.  A/B testing isolates important elements within your site and allows you to test the engagement level of changes within the site.

As you are testing functionality, keep in mind not to lose your brand identity for the sake of function but at the end of the day, remember that user-experience trumps aesthetics. The key is to have a cohesive and powerful brand identity across the site, and a pleasant user-experience strategically guiding users to the next steps of the buyer's journey.

2. Craft A Well-Written Web Copy

Your buyer personas should serve as the basis for the perspective that informs your copy. Make sure that your content can easily be read and understood by users in desktop or mobile. Break your text into short paragraphs with plenty of headers. Use images strategically to help convey the message at a moment's glance and emphasize your brand identity and value proposition. Don't complicate your sentence structures with esoteric wording. Instead, talk to your audience as a knowledgeable peer in a language they understand and appreciate.

A well-written copy means writing copy for the search engines as well as human visitors. Aside from being a direct lead generation tool, your content is also a map for search engine crawlers to be able to properly identify your entity and the relevance of every page in your site to different searches. That's why it's a must to strategize every component of your site copy -- from the sitemap, navigation, headers, internal links, alt tags, body, etc. Putting a proper keyword strategy in place helps search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to properly index your content and show it to relevant users. That being said, do not sprinkle your content with too much keywords to where it doesn't make sense, sounds redundant, or unnatural. 

Finally, do NOT plagiarize or produce duplicate content on your site. Apart from the ethical argument of that, your website can actually get penalized by Google which will come at a great cost. Your site will cease showing in results pages or drop heavily in rankings and you'll definitely be pretty much giving away your prospects to your competitors at this point.

3. Keep Your Content Updated

A client who visits your website for the first time has no reference of its existence. If a client shows up and your site is full of dead links, outdated information, ancient photos, and a website design that looks very 90s, then that's the first and only impression you will be embedding on that visitor.

Additionally, product or service descriptions should be up-to-date. Clients that comes to your website ready to buy will never come back if they run into a number of products or services that do not actually exist anymore or have since changed.

4. Utilize Social Proof

If you've won accolades,  gained certifications, or have been featured in other trustworthy outlets, don't be shy and show your users. Social proof such as client testimonials, case studies, shares, social interaction, downloads, and trust seals can greatly influence your business audience. Strategically placed in your website's home page, blog, and landing pages improves trust factor and therefore conversion rates.

5. Keep An Active Online Presence

Show your prospects that you are responsive, engaged, and are actively sharing value. Keep an active digital presence on your website by producing blogs and sharing your company happenings regularly. Share these on social media and encourage engagement by monitoring your channels and responding promptly to comments and user posts. Delegate a well-trained person to make sure you avoid social media faux pas that can hurt your brand. Having a poor or zero activity online dehumanizes your website and in turn damages your credibility. 

6. Use Authentic Pictures

A picture paints a thousand words. According to the Nielsen Group, a vast majority of website visitors decide if they want to stay and peruse your website within the first 10-20 seconds of viewing. This is why its vital to incorporate high-quality images that conveys authenticity, approachability, and trustworthiness.

Using real images accomplishes just that. They also humanize your website and creates a relationship between your brand and your audience. Real images make your website visitors feel that they are facing your brand, your people, your company, and not just your website. Just like every component of your website, images can also contribute to SEO. Be sure to choose relevant images and don't forget to include alt texts.