Trust is something that is very important in today’s online business world. People no longer make purchases on impulse like they once did years ago from random ranking web pages. The game has changed folks and having an outdated website with little to no social reach is something that is going to hurt you as a business when it comes to brand building and online influence.

Trust building is just as important today as is flat out web marketing for your website. If you don’t have trust you simply won’t have long term growth and that is a reality with today’s online landscape.

Here are 20 ways you can build trust to your website

• Great development: Nothing spells trouble like a broken website. Nobody wants to purchase from a site that does not work properly.
• Professional Images: If an image does not fit into a space don’t stretch it to make it fit.
• Spelling: Spelling is always important if you are serious about building trust with readers.
• Professional Design: I understand design is subjective but if you want your web traffic to take you seriously you have to have up to date design.
• Clean URL Structures: Depending on your website coding you URL structures should never trail off the end of the field.
• Testimonials: Whether you sell a service or a product client & customer testimonials will help you build trust.
• Social Links: Your audience wants to see social links pointing to your site. They want to see you active in the social space building your brand and communicating with your audience.
• Consistency: Consistency with your branding and your logo is really important. If you want trust your audience needs to see consistency coming from your brand communication.
• Stability: Search your company name in the search engines, do the results show stability? Do you have positive PR along with social profiles and other trust signals clearly visible?
• Great Content: If the content on your site is compelling and holds the attention of your audience they are going to give your business that much more weight.
• External Sources: Whether it is proactive or the community just likes you it is important to have information on your business in other locations online.
• Live Chat: A live chat feature can often times give your audience a warm fuzzy feeling knowing they can speak with someone if need be.
• Clean SEO: There is nothing worse than trying to read you’re about page and bumping into more links than content. Keep it clean and de-cluttered.
• Show your Face: If you have a team of employees show them off. Online consumers like to know there are some humans behind where they put their credit card info.
• Tell your Story: If your business has a cool story behind it show it off! People like stories especially when it comes to how a business was built.
• Clean Navigation: You want your web traffic to be able to find your internal pages efficiently without any confusion.
• Smooth Layout: The website layout should always lead a person down a path to where you want them to go.
• Remove Pointless Advertisements: If you are trying to sell a brand remove the pointless advertisements flashing and distracting your web audience.