How to Increase Website Conversions with Trust Signals

How do you make sure your website is the most credible and trustworthy site out there? Well thankfully in this digital era there are ways and means of doing just that. I’ve spoken to Filip Matous who is a Digital Strategist and author of ‘How To Get Your Website Noticed‘, to find out more.

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What are trust signals?

So think about whatever your site is, and think of it in four layers. And I’ll tell you how these trust signals tie into it. A good example of this is the Alec Baldwin scene in “Glengarry Glen Ross” when he’s got this seven-minute monologue, he’s got the chalkboard behind him, and it’s fantastic. Google it if you haven’t already seen it.

So at the top, he writes on the chalkboard “A-I-D-A.” And this is what it means:

• A, is attention.” So, if you’re thinking about your website, it’s how are you getting attention?  So things like are you getting it through PR, are you getting it through paid advertising? Are you getting it through search engines? Are you getting it through social media or are you getting it through direct marketing?
• I stands for interesting. And that’s when people come into it. It’s the first time they come to your website, and think is it interesting? And that’s actually quite a loaded question, is your website interesting enough?
• D, and that’s desire. So, that’s usually in a lot of sales situations, especially I would guess, and I’m not as well-versed in HR and recruitment, but it’s usually to get someone to trust a brand, you’ll notice that people have returned to the website multiple times. So, desire for me, the easiest way to understand desire, is are you getting multiple visits back to your website?
• And then, finally, A, and that’s the action. So, you might be trying to get more qualified candidates or you might be trying to get more clients. And if those, say, are your two main goals on your website, for the whole funnel of this A-I-D-A to work, you’re going to be measuring how long it takes you to get to the action.  What kind of actions are you getting? Are they the right kind of people? And if you haven’t figured out the layers one by one, it’s very hard to arrive at the action.

So, trust signals isn’t just saying “Oh, my site is trustworthy”, or when you’re looking at your site you’re like, “Hmm, is this trustworthy?” I want to pull apart the things that make people trust your website. And what I want to get away from is that gut reaction. When you’re looking at your own site it’s very hard to be objective, so what I want to pull apart in this podcast is to really tell you what is it that makes people say, “Hmm, this seems trustworthy.”

Are things like”As seen in the Times,” or “We have been awarded the best employer to work for,” trust signals?

So that’s an example of one tactic that can be quite effective for someone who wants to know “Hey, who is Jorgen? Who is this guy?” And I Google your name and let’s say I arrive at Link Humans. I can then arrive at some project that you’re involved in when I hit that first page. But when you get there, you’re thinking “You know what, is this for me?” Because, obviously, we live in a world where if they’re on a desktop and there’s probably like a dozen tabs open. They may be giving a certain amount of time to your website or maybe they’re giving it like ten seconds to just get an idea of, “Is this for me?” And if it can first pass the “Is it for me” stage, then there’s this sprinkle of interest.

And then it goes on to “Does this seem credible?” And that’s where things like “As mentioned on Glassdoor” or “We work with LinkedIn” or whatever it might be helps. If there are brands that people do recognize, and do trust, and it appears with your brand, and they’ve never heard of your brand, then that’s one thing, that’s one little trust signal that’ll just bump up the overall. Together, it’s all a bit complex because there are multiple trust signals that will hit them.

So another trust signal right off the bat might be, does the first line, that USP, the big headline at the top of your site if you’ve got one, “Does this sound like it’s for me and does this sound like it’s real?” And if you’re trying to showboat by saying we’re so passionate, and this is a ground-breaking company, etc. If you’re using boring language like that, that usually goes against you, and people are sceptical of it.  So my advice would be, when you’re thinking trust signals, you’re thinking of a very sceptical audience. A poll was carried out on one copywriter which is actually fantastic. Her name is Joanna Wiebe and she’s a Canadian-based conversion copywriter. And she says: “When people hit your site for the first time, it’s just got to pass two things. It’s got to say ‘so what?’ And then it’s got to prove it, and it’s got to do if fast.” So, “Why am I here? Why did I just hit this page? Yeah, okay, this sounds like it’s for me,” and then right after they’re thinking, “All right, prove it. Is this actually worth my time?” So the two things which are quite handy to remember is “so what?” And then “prove it.”

What do people get wrong about trust signals?

I think the biggest misconception that I see over and over again is people think that they can self-qualify themselves or they can prove that they’re worth a website visitor’s time by saying that they’re trust… Not necessary to say, “I’m trustworthy,” but, trying to say how good they are.

And every rule can be broken but on your website, anytime you say something nice about yourself, you can’t say it yourself. So, what does that mean? If you want to say your culture as a recruitment agency is a fit for the candidate, the type of candidate you’re trying to appeal to, you need to get other candidates that have gone through your agency, or your company, to say that.

You might be able to say that this is what you stand for, and this is what your beliefs and values are as a company. It might be that you are a recruitment agency that serves the creative industry. So you’re looking at people that work in advertising, in marketing or in PR and you might be trying to come across as hip or cool. But you can say that, and you can show pictures from your office. So a trust signal might be a picture from within your office, and people can see how you’re dressed, or how many people there are. But you want the candidate, through the means of a testimonial, to say “I really liked working with this recruitment agency and the reason why I liked working with them is because culturally they really get what it is to be a creative, and it’s something that I didn’t experience in the five other companies or recruitment agencies that I’d gone through.” They have to give you that testimonial, you can’t say it yourself. So, to answer the question, the moment you think that you can pat yourself on the back and put that on the website, you’re doing it wrong.

What’s the ROI in online trust and what metrics do you use to measure it?

One of the easiest ways to see if your site is actually interesting and desirable is when people come to your site, do they come to one page and then leave or do they browse through? Now, I’ll add a little bit of nuance. If they are coming to a blog post, then usually your bounce rate might be very high, and that’s normal. I’m often seeing bounce rates in the 90s. But if they’re coming to your home page and then they’re just taking off without checking any other pages out, that’s usually an indication that your site is not interesting enough. And that’s when you’re specifically looking at the metric of home page and bounce rate for first-time visitors.

You can do that in any Google Analytics which most websites are running by looking at the number of new visitors, or by looking at what the bounce rate is on the home page. You can then add little things in. If you, let’s say, have an explainer video on your web page, have they played the video, and you can track that as an event in Google Analytics. Sometimes some companies will have really long home pages because they’re doing a lot of selling on the home page. So you might want to use something like Crazy Egg, which actually shows you how far down the page people scroll. And if you’ve seen that people are only really consuming, let’s say, above the fold, which is like kind of before you start scrolling, and they aren’t going very deep, your home page is not interesting enough. So when it comes to interest those are some ways to use metrics to qualify if your page is good on a first-time visit.

Then on desire, it’s really quite simple, it’s how many times are you getting some of your audience to return back to the website? And what incentives are there for them to come back? So it might be that you are trying to see how many people join your newsletter, so a total percentage. Is it .01% of the traffic that comes to your site that converts into a newsletter? Is it 1%? Is it 3%? It might be even higher. But are you able to show that someone has come to your site and they’ve actually decided to give you some of their information in exchange for staying in touch, which is really giving you their email. Or maybe you’ve even got some sort of a white paper, some sort of a reason for a potential candidate or a client to give you more information, let’s say a phone number, a name, and an email in exchange for something else? That, to me, says that is a very strong metric for judging if you’re actually getting a bit of desire from your site.

And then there’s the really obvious one, which is how many leads has it generated at the end of the day? Like, how many people who were in touch to become a candidate were qualified?  If you’re getting a bunch of leads from people that actually don’t fit your supply of people that you need to sell onto the demand, then your filtering process is broken. But if you are getting the right kind of candidate that’s a very obvious metric to track against the total volume of traffic that you’re getting. So that’s a few directions I would take it but again, I would break it down by interest, then desire, and then finally, action and apply metrics to each of those three layers.

How can you build trust at the very top of the funnel?

So that is where the random role of PR comes in. Usually you can control the experience once people hit your website to kind of present the side of your company you want to present. But at attention, if, let’s say, you want to get some coverage in the press and usually a lot of people are like, “Well, I don’t want to pay that PR agency that much money to get press or that freelancer or consultant.” Where PR is quite handy is if an article placed on another site that the audience recognizes, let’s say a brand which is relevant for your recruitment agency to end up on Inc or Entrepreneur or Forbes, or whatever brand that your audience is used to seeing. If you can appear on that website, and create the first time they’ve heard of your brand and create that attention, by the time that traffic goes from that article back to your website or they bookmark the article, then they end up googling your brand a week later, or whatever. When that traffic hits, the performance of that traffic is so much better than pretty much any other traffic I’ve seen. And it’s a lot lower. But you don’t get the volume of traffic if you’re doing a bunch of advertising, because that advertising traffic when it hits your site is sceptical. It is not ready to believe anything you have to say. But when that traffic comes from a PR placement, and it’s in a publication that someone trusts, and then they come back to your website, they’re already warm. You don’t have to prove to them or sell to them as hard. And that is one way, at the attention level to get trust going, by using some PR because people will trust your website a lot more if that’s the original way they heard of you.

What does it mean to create false memories for a website and does this apply to trust as well?

As a marketer, you deal with perception and what is going through the mind of someone else and what they are viewing. And it’s not always actually the reality. So, here are two examples. When I was a street magician I used to do this thing where I would levitate up, just maybe three or four inches in the street, and I could only do it for an audience of about three people. I learned everything from watching a video on VHS back in the day and it said: “After you’ve levitated for the audience, take your hands in front of your chest, and maybe put like 10 inches between them. Don’t say this is how high I went, but right after you’ve levitated for them, throw out your hands and say, “How high did I go?” And use your hands with those like, 10 maybe even 12 inches to say how high did I go?” And that was a little bit of anchoring. And so what that would do for the spectator, I didn’t believe it until it happened over and over, is when I asked them how high did I go, in that moment of emotion, they would often mirror my hands to actually show that I had gone up almost a foot, which is entirely false. I no longer do that trick but it showed me something crazy. That in that moment if you could seed in and anchor in something that was slightly exaggerated, people would go for it.

The other example is, there was a magician who was actually really looking at false memory specifically. And he did three tricks for an audience. He went into a university and had the class for one hour where he did three tricks and the audience was amazed by it. He also did a fourth trick, but in reality he didn’t actually do it. He put one coin on one side of the room, and that coin was to disappear and appear on the other side of the room. But the key thing here is, he didn’t do the trick. He just talked about what an amazing trick it was and explained how the coin would go from one end of the room to the other. He described it in detail. And a month later, the students were asked to describe the four tricks that were done in that classroom. And most of the students, in their memory, remembered a trick where the magician had taken a coin on one side of the room, and it had disappeared, and it appeared on the other side of the room. This is out of the book called “Fooling Houdini.”

Now, how does that apply to websites? Why am I talking about this nonsense? The reason why is, if you can nail down the actual experience you want people to have when they visit the website, and explain to them what it is to become a candidate for your recruitment agency, whatever industry your website is in, when they think of your brand, and this probably sounds like hokey, but when they think of your brand they’re going to internally feel the emotions as if they had already joined or as if they had already experienced working with your brand. If you’re talking about a recruitment agency, If you can write down, and really nail down tangibly, what it’s like to become a candidate, or what it’s like to become a client and write that out in plain English, and you’ve done your research where you understand what your market’s about and what they’re interested in, and you’re not using flowery language, and you’re really nailing down what experience you want people to have. If they read it, and they view that a few times because they’ve come to your website a few times then you will get them to feel like they had already experienced working with your brand.  I wouldn’t have believed this, but I’ve started seeing this, and I’ve started like bending against this idea of false memories. I don’t think it’s really that disingenuous, but I think if you can nail down your brand, and you can write clearly as to what they’re going to experience by working with you, before they start working with you, they’ll already have emotionally, internally experienced and created memories that actually aren’t there.

Follow Filip on Twitter @FilipMatous.