Website visitors are quick to judge — and rightfully so. As consumers become more protective of their personal information and face an increasing number of buying options online, small website owners must work smarter to drive more conversions, compete on the modern web and, perhaps most importantly, build customer loyalty.
Many small businesses employ a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy in order to rank higher in search results and stand out from their competition. While SEO is critical, even the best practices won’t help to garner trust from your users.
Digital Trust Optimization
To inspire trust from your users, consider optimizing for Digital Trust in addition to your SEO strategy. Digital Trust Optimization (DTO) enables your website to earn confidence from users so they are more likely to engage, purchase and share your products and services with others.
How does Digital Trust Optimization work?
Through our Trust Center and tool suite, small businesses can easily analyze how to employ security best practices and maintain a trusting relationship with your users. DigitalTrust’s suite of tools are easy to implement and work with practically all major content management, e-commerce, and website builder platforms.
DigitalTrust provides an action plan to help simplify the optimization process and boost user confidence through its Trust Center tool. Your website is given a Trust Score, along with a step-by-step breakdown on how to improve your score in order to gain more user trust.
DigitalTrust’s Trust Center evaluates four major areas of your site to determine your Trust Score:
- Usability
- Factors impacting your site’s usability such as speed, design, readability, and accessibility.
- Safety
- Factors impacting your site’s safety such as security, privacy, data collection, and any 3rd party integrations used.
- Transparency
- Factors impacting your site’s transparency such as the accessibility of your policies and business information pages.
- Reputation
- Factors impacting your site’s reputation such as feedback and endorsements.
How does usability gain user trust?
Modern website users expect a smooth experience that delivers them exactly what they’re looking for. Any obstacle can cause users to lose confidence in your site’s ability to give them what they want and find someone who can.
Your site’s usability includes all the factors that contribute to an easy and fast user experience. This includes your site’s page speed, design, network performance, and accessibility features.
Our Trust Center provides you with a comprehensive overview of your site’s usability and offers easy steps to make your site more usable, including:
- Increasing Page Speed
- Optimizing For Mobile
- Decreasing Page Size
- Improving Readability
- Increasing Network Performance
- Allowing Maximum Accessibility
How does safety gain user trust?
As internet usage increased over the past decade, so have the instances of cybercrime. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that $3.5 billion was lost to cybercrime globally in 2019 alone. As a result, users now expect websites to take their security seriously if they’re expected to hand over their personal information.
Our Trust Center provides you with a comprehensive overview of your site’s safety practices and offers easy steps to make your site more safe, including:
- Employing data collection best practices such as using 2-step authentication and HTTPS
- Establishing clear cookie policies
- Effective page encryption
- Safely using third-party libraries and other external dependencies
- Properly handling Personal Identifiable Information (PII)
How does transparency gain user trust?
If users are being asked to hand over their personal information, they should know how it’s being used. Through transparent policies and practices, you can develop user trust by making clear what kind of data you are collecting, as well as why and how you are collecting it.
Our Trust Center provides you with a comprehensive overview of your site’s transparency practices and offers easy steps to make your site more open and trustworthy, including:
- Creating clear privacy, cookie, and return policies
- Featuring verified business information prominently on your site
How does reputation gain user trust?
For many users, a business’ reputation will be the number one factor in whether or not they decide to purchase your products or services. Maintaining a sterling reputation and providing evidence assures users that you have a history of delivering on your promises. Without this proof, users will likely seek out a more well-known, established business to fill their needs.
Our Trust Center provides you with a comprehensive overview of your site’s reputation and offers easy steps to boost user trust, such as:
- Including customer testimonials and third-party endorsements
- Encouraging feedback on review platforms like Yelp, Google, and Amazon
- Displaying trust badges such as safe checkout badges and accepted payment badges
Find out how your site scores in these four key categories (link to/point to Trust Score module)
Why does Digital Trust Optimization matter?
According to a report by Edelman, 81% of survey participants said they “must be able to trust the brand to do what is right.” If you aren’t doing everything you can to earn user trust you are likely losing new followers and sales.
Optimizing for Digital Trust gives small businesses a chance to present a memorable first impression that elicits trust from new users and better ensures that they return. Consumers are generally eager to support small, independent businesses, but you must provide the same convenience and high-level customer service as larger companies.
DTO helps level the playing field and allows small businesses to compete with the giants of industry by showing that the user’s experience, and security, is taken seriously.
How can I optimize my website for Digital Trust?
Our website optimization and monitoring platform provides real-time intelligence and easy-to-implement tools that boost site performance and user confidence. Our intelligence tools scan over 100 elements of your website in minutes to deliver you a simple action plan that helps you build trust among your user base. Each element is weighed based on user impact, so that we can identify which elements to prioritize, along with providing easy instructions on how to make improvements.
Our suite of tools work with most major content management, e-commerce, and website builder platforms, including WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, GoDaddy, among others. All you need to do is add a code snippet to your site once, and administer the rest from your dashboard.
The DigitalTrust suite includes the following tools:
- Confidence Monitoring
- Checks 50+ key areas of your site and alerts you of any changes that might impact user confidence
- Cookie Opt-Ins
- Simplifies the cookie opt-in process as required by GDPR and other major privacy regulations
- Identity Verification
- Provides a third-party verified badge for your site that confirms your identity with your users
- Net Promoter Score
- Provides a simple way to survey your user’s feelings about your site over time
- Policy Builder
- Helps you create clear, straightforward policies that stay in one place by conveniently following users and giving them constant access
- Visitor Feedback
- Collects feedback from your users and manageable through your dashboard
See for yourself how DigitalTrust can help your business boost confidence, and sales, with ease. Because nothing attracts customers quite like trust.
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