One of the most important factors to think about for your website is how to enhance Trust and Confidence in the initial seconds a visitor lands on your site.

You can be certain that if a visitor mistrusts your site or your brand, they will be gone.

So if visitors are coming to your site, spending less than a minute on your landing or homepage, then bouncing – what can you do?

1. Understand visitor intent

Every visitor, coming from various sources of traffic, will have a different intent.

Google search console allows you to look at keywords that drove organic visitors to the site. That keyword holds a lot of hidden information: like what they intended to see, buy, learn when they conducted the search, and what your site is delivering. Keywords can also give you hints on where they are in the buying funnel.

For example: Take someone who searched for custom Airpods price vs. airpods quality vs. best iPhone headphone. The person is now at a decision buying stage. The person that is looking for quality is aware of the product but wants more information. Finally, the person that searched for best iPhone headphone still isn’t aware of airpods. The messaging for each of these visitors should vary – and the landing page must address them all in order to gain their trust and confidence.

2. You understood the intent, but do you understand who?

As much information as you have about your visitors can really help you design your website copy and layout to meet visitor varying needs. For example, if I know that my visitors fall into three categories; male millennials, female baby boomers, and female/male executives; I have the very difficult task of trying to address each of these very different types of people.

How do I know that that is my site make up? There are tools that allow you to gauge demographics, even GA offers a rough view. But it’s not enough. I would suggest contacting a segment of visitors to understand more about the general make up of visitors. It may be worthwhile to see who makes up the majority of your “return visitors” and why do they come back and buy from you.

3. Take a stroll

If you’ve uncovered the “who” and more on visitor intent and what buying staging they’re at, put yourself in a visitor’s shoes, conduct a search and land on your site. What is the experience like? Considering who the visitor is and what stage they’re at, you should have an idea of what they’re looking for – well is it visible? What would be the next course of action that they should take? Is it obvious?

A lot of companies underestimate the power of doing walk-throughs as a team, considering these different scenarios. But the amount of information that it can lead to, in terms of missed considerations and information, can have a tremendous impact on bottom line. Do it separately for mobile and desktop (and several times depending on how many paths and customer profiles you’ve identified).

4. 5-second test

Sometimes getting a fresh perspective is worth a million words. 5-second usability tests allow you to have visitors that fit the profile of your own website visitors give you a fresh perspective on what they think your value proposition is?

It’s important to see if the test users can answer the 3 critical questions about the business.

• What is the product or the service that is being shown?
• What is the company’s name?
• What is in it for the user / customer?

Ultimately, this brief experiment helps you see how that first impression is likely to be for the visitor.

Conclusion

It’s important to understand the underlying reasons why visitors feel a lack of trust and confidence on your website. The methods described above will help you uncover truths about your site to allow you to better optimize it for greater usability and engagement and of course, a better first impression.

One of the most important challenges is to gather the data then ensure you propagate and classify it correctly. The data we collect gets classified as:

• Fix it right away
• Research Opportunity
• Investigate further

Successful research is always a healthy mix of qualitative and quantitative data and it is always important to understand this data and see the bigger picture.

Trust or Bust – How to Improve Website First Impression

PS. For GrowRevenue it’s quite simple with the first impression. You don’t even need to see the website to know what it does. It’s in the name! 😁