The landing pages on any website have one job, and one job only: to get someone to take an action. And if you think about real world scenarios, when are people more likely to follow through on a recommendation or follow you in the actions that you are taking? It is when they trust you.

And if you think about the Internet and the buying process, the only time your website will convert is if you gain that trust. No matter how pretty your banner is, or how convincing the copy or you put the contact us form straight bang in the middle of the screen - no one is touching it without the trust.

So the million dollar question (and this could be literal million dollars) is how do you earn the trust on just one webpage?

A Real, Physical Address

It doesn’t matter if you offer a product or a service, your location should clearly be placed on your website. The reason being is that it adds instant credibility in the fact you will no longer be associated with many of the fly-by-night spammer websites out there. You suggest to the visitor that it could be possible to visit the office need be or assistance or advice. Many of my clients have implemented this, albeit a little apprehensively thinking that they will be swamped with unwanted guests. I can assure you that so far it has not happened at all, infact - they cannot conclusively say that any visitor to the physical location was purely from the website uninvited.

Put a Local Phone Number

Now I qualified the above header with the word ‘local’ number as we have found that for service based trade industries (plumbers, electricians, etc) benefit by having that local number as many people know their suburb’s phone prefix/area code and hence more likely to choose a local then one that is outside their radius.

I know many websites do have contact phone numbers prominently displayed, but they are often mobile numbers or some kind of toll prefix. If you have that currently, make the switch and test out the effectiveness and let us know in the comments how it goes.

Security Badges for Ecommerce

For those in the know (super internet savvy users), these badges might not mean much as many users of this nature are familiar with the trusted, safe and secure payment gateways. But this type of user is few and far between. In order to assure the visitor that their possible transaction will go smoothly, placing the badges of security firms and padlock logos that you have legally gained is a quick and easy addition to trust building. Most of the time they are relatively small as well, so they can be very easily slotted into the design.

I had an interesting case recently with a client to stop fraudulent transactions. The website was receiving many bogus transactions and hence also suffering from low conversions. The simple solution he came up with his web developer was to display the user’s IP address on the screen and suggested that these were being used to combat bad transactions and make the overall experience safer. After a week or so, there was a significant reduction in fake orders and conversion rate soared as well.

I personally did not think the solution would have been that easy, but I just could not argue with those facts and figures. Now it has become part of my initial steps to solve this problem in the future. I am not calling it the magic bullet, but a great first step.

Post Purchase Procedures

To follow with many others that there are very few one night stand conversions, giving some kind of notification to users about what happens after they have filled out the form or made a purchase also establishes that credibility and trust. After sales support is something many businesses struggle with and if you clearly outline the refund policy for example on a shopping website, the feeling of abandonment after can be reduced. All this information does not have to be played out step by step, but just adding some reassuring copy somewhere on the page can be a definite benefit.

Testimonials

And for those that were not already aware, the icing on any landing page is the testimonials from already satisfied customers. It should be a given on every single landing page, for every single keyword, and definitely be believable and not over the top (ie. not made up).

These are just a few of the points I have found from my experience dealing with clients from our agency, and they work great for us. If you have some more great tips, feel free to mention them in the comments!