Business Credibility: How to Improve it With Your Website

Let’s face it, building business credibility is essential for growing a small business. Unfortunately, many times small business owners miss easy opportunities to seize the moment.

Here are a few simple tricks to improve your business credibility through your website.

Content is king

When potential clients have questions, most likely they are going to turn to search engines to help them find the answers. If your website comes up first in the search rankings it gives you an opportunity to engage that person and prove to them you’re a credible source.

Just the fact that your site came up first will likely improve your business credibility.

Of course, reaching the top of search engines isn’t always the easiest things to do. But before you start trying to drive traffic via off-page SEO practices, you need to make sure your content is worthy of driving traffic to in the first place.

Here are a few simple content suggestions to help improve your business credibility:

1. Useful – if your content doesn’t add value, people won’t read it. To know what your readers value, you need to continually interact and engage with them. This is done by having a solid understanding of your marketing and sales process.
2. Backed by data – people trust data. A quick way to boost your business credibility is to simply back your content by data. Once you build a content portfolio of data-driven content, you can simply reference your own content when appropriate. This technique re-enforces your business credibility.
3. Optimized for readability – when writing content for your website, you need to organize it in a way that makes it enjoyable for people to read. Chunking information together and using bullet points to give people information are typically preferred by readers. Be sure to test different methods to see what your readers prefer the most.
4. Updated often – when Google updated it indexing system in early June, it made search results “fresher”. Meaning that, in order to have that opportunity to get in front of potential customers, you’re going to have to create useful content on a regular basis.
5. Include excellent visuals – in most cases, people really don’t like to read about studies and data. The funny thing is, however, that people absolutely love to look at charts and visualizations of data. One of the easiest ways to build business credibility is to take your data and make visuals from it in word or excel.
6. Minimize errors –  nothing screams unprofessional more than errors. Always make sure you take the time to look for typographical errors. Use a plugin like “broken link checker” to continually scan your website for broken links. When you do come across errors, correct them immediately.
7. Always be human – people are much more responsive to humans than they are to corporations. When appropriate, putting a human face behind your content will improve your business credibility.

Design is queen

Content is king only because it is what drives traffic to your site. A research report by Stanford’s BJ Fogg (et al), however, explains that the first thing many visitors will judge is actually NOT your content but rather the design of your website. As illustrated in the chart below, this varies slightly depending on your category and who is viewing your website.

Here are a few suggestions for improving business credibility through the design of your website:

1. Have a professional logo – a really easy way to boost business credibility is to have a professional logo. If you’re not good with design, use a site like logotournament.com and pay a couple hundred dollars to have designers submit entries.
2. Use quality images – images are a powerful tool for boosting business credibility. Always make it a goal to only use quality images on your website. If you can, consider purchasing a quality SLR camera and honing in on your photoshop skills.
3. Always be testing – the more you can improve your website, the more you’ll improve your business credibility. Those of you who’ve read The Poised before may have noticed that I switched out my profile image. I thought the initial photo looked cool but it turns out that people connect with the current photo more. I never would have known that without testing.

Improve business credibility by making your website more social

Every time someone interacts with your website, it provides an opportunity for you to improve your business. Assuming you go about it correctly, the more people interact and engage with you, the more likely they are to trust you. Using your website to force your message on customers is the wrong approach. A better approach is to consider your website a tool for interacting and learning about your customers.

Here are a few simple social elements that can help improve your business credibility: