Moving forward with our recent blog posts surrounding the importance of building up your online trust Google recently rolled out a new initiative to help ecommerce sites build their trust in the eyes of their audience. Google has announced the Google Trusted Stores to help ecommerce sites capture the hearts and trust of their online shoppers.

Google designed this effort to help online shoppers identify shopping sources that can be trusted giving them the peace of mind to pull out their hard earned cash (or in this case their credit card) and continue with a purchase.

Here is how the program works

Google will allow certain merchants to participate in this new trust building program for free once they pass a certain criteria. Google will also offer a free purchase protection program to those who qualify for this program if there should be a situation where a customer is unhappy and the merchant is unresponsive to the shoppers requests. Each merchant will have a Google Trust Badge to display on their website letting their audience know that they are part of this Google program letting online shoppers know their reputation and as an eCommerce platoform .

Google Trusted Stores Video

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 The game has changed folks and having an outdated website with little to no social reach is something that is going to hurt you as a business when it comes to brand building and online influence.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.

We hear the word “trust” thrown around the online space quite a bit when referring to SEO and web marketing in general in the Google space but very few really understand what it actually means. Trust revolves around strength of linking and what types of online authority is linking directly to you but it also triggers other signals that are important for ranking and overall web visibility.

In this Google Webmaster Video video Matt Cutts discusses how trust works in conjunction with PageRank and other ranking signals.

Google Video About Trust