5 EASILY OVERLOOKED ELEMENTS THAT CAN MAKE YOUR WEBSITE LESS CREDIBLE
Your business website is a great tool for optimizing your business operations. Besides, it lets potential customers interact with your business from the comfort of their convenience. With such features such as Live Chat, Call support, and feedback pages, your website qualifies as the first point of contact with your potential customers. It presents you with an opportunity to make the first impression. However, it is worth knowing that with the high competition online, the website that seems credible will win more business and clients. That makes it necessary to know the features that can increase the credibility of your website and help build a strong case for yourself seconds after a potential customer lands on your page. Below are five of the features.
SSL Certificate
A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate is a critical part of your website. First, its core purpose is to protect your server-client communication. It ensures that every bit of information is encrypted, to mean that no unauthorized third party can access it. That is why many potential clients will look to see if your website has a “lock” to confirm that their data will be safe.
Quite often, you will need customers to submit their details such as emails, passwords, or even credit card number to transact from your website. Before submitting such crucial data to your website, customers will check to confirm that no man-in-the-middle can access it. That is where the need to install an SSL Certificate comes in.
Besides, having an SSL Certificate for your website increases the chances of better search engine ranking on your website on such search engines like Google. It will also affirm the identity of your website and make it stand out from the predator sites that may copy your name or design. In a nutshell, SSL Certificate will increase your site’s credibility and enhance customer trust.
Reliable hyperlinks
It would help if you considered linking out your websites only to reliable and highly credible sites. This has been confirmed to be useful by a survey on search engine ranking. The data from the survey showed that external links are one of the most critical ways for attaining high ranking on search engines. This is supported by the idea that external links are one of the hardest metrics to manipulate. Hence, the search engine algorithms use the metrics to determine the popularity of your website. Linking your blog posts to external websites will, therefore, increase the popularity of your website.
In addition to that, external links will help increase the relevance of your site. This is because they provide relevance clues that are valuable for search engines. The anchor texts used in hyperlinks are highly reflective of the content of the website page that it is being linked to. These external links also tend to point towards such related content, and therefore, helps search engines to validate your content, increasing the credibility of your website.
Proper grammar
Nasty writing mistakes have the potential to damage your credibility. That makes proper grammar usage and correct spelling critical part of building your reputation with your site visitors. Why is that? If you are wondering, remember that unlike with mortar and brick business where customers can interact one-on-one with your team, your site visitors are welcomed by the written content on your site.
Simple grammatical mistakes such as writing “loose” in place of “lose” can create a misunderstanding of the message you intend to convey on your website. That is why, clear, coherent and focused writing that is easy to comprehend is a great way to retain customers. Therefore, when uploading blog posts on your website, you should make sure to check that they are free from grammatical errors.
Accessibility Declaration
A winning website is one that is accessible to all users. To make your site visitors aware, you should include a declaration on your website that defines the level of web accessibility your website aims to achieve. This is known as the Accessibility Statement.
The declaration should, ideally, take the form of a short information page which should be available through a link from each page of your website. The information on your website accessibility should be clear about the target level of web accessibility. It should indicate the methods that will be used to achieve the given targets.
For example, an Accessibility Statement should read something like, ” [Insert your website name] is committed to providing a platform that is accessible to all our audience regardless of technology or ability.” It should also include exemptions to the intended level of accessibility. This is in addition to reporting difficulties with the website.
The Accessibility Statement will go a long way to show the site visitors that you care about everyone. It will also help avoid the view that you discriminate people with such disabilities as blindness or deafness.
Too many ads
You could probably be wondering how many ads are too many ads on your website. Well, that thought could amount to a possible conflict of interest between you and your site visitors. This is because you need to avoid bombarding them with ads that clutter on the web page, while at the same time, you need to generate revenue from ads.
To avoid this catch-22 situation that could be a possible turn off for your potential customers, you should set your website with an option to “skip” ads. That is, your site visitors should view the ads at their own volition. This will avoid making it difficult for them to manoeuvre through your website.
Wrap up
A website is a powerful tool that links your potential customers to your business. Besides great design, you should note that other critical elements are required to increase your conversion rate. The above are some of them which you should consider.