Today, 93% of people use the internet to discover local businesses. This means several things for businesses, but one key takeaway is the importance of a great website. In a lot of cases, your company’s website will be the first impression that you make on a potential client. The question is, what kind of impression are you making?
There are several important standards that a company website needs to meet, and all of them are important for building client trust. In this article, we’ll go over these standards, why they’re important for client trust, and how to design a website that will make a winning impression on potential clients.
Capturing Interest with a Great Design
According to various studies, it takes only 50 milliseconds for someone to form an opinion on a website. That’s not enough time for them to read a single word of your site’s content or try out a single feature. Instead, it’s your website’s visual design that’s entirely responsible for forming the first impression that, more times than not, determines whether someone sticks around or clicks away.
If you want your company to appear professional and reliable, a professional web design is a must. Template designs made using free online website builders may be affordable and convenient, but they’re probably not going to inspire a lot of trust in your brand. And they’re definitely not going to help you set your company apart from the many competitors who are all using near-identical designs.
Human beings are visual creatures, and we’re programmed to make rapid, subconscious decisions based on what we see. With a professional, eye-catching website design, you can immediately capture the interest of people who visit your site and ensure you’re making a great first impression.
Establishing Authority with Compelling Content
An eye-catching design is what captures a visitor’s interest, but compelling content is what makes them stick around. You can rest assured that anyone who takes the time to explore your website will be judging your brand based on what they read. If your web pages are full of bland, typo-ridden content, you’re not going to win many of them over.
The content on your website is your company’s opportunity to establish itself as an authority in its field. Different content can serve different purposes (for example, you may have landing pages designed to capture leads while the purpose of your homepage is to inform visitors and provide a general overview of your company). In every case, however, your website’s content needs to be well-written, engaging, and authoritative.
It’s hard to convince potential clients that you’re an expert in your field if you don’t sound like an expert. Populate your website with high-quality, informative content, and it will go a long way toward building client trust.
How to Use Content to Attract Prospects and Win More Clients
From blog posts and articles to videos and social media content, we’ll show you the strategies and best practices to position your firm as an authority and attract high-value clients.
Security as a Top Priority
It’s a bit of an understatement to say that most people today are wary of the websites they visit, especially when it comes to providing personal information like payment information. Cybercrime is at an all-time high, and many people have been bitten in the past. Before potential clients are going to trust your website (and your company as a whole, for that matter), they need to know that it’s secure.
The good news is that there are a lot of things you can do to tighten up your website’s security—and there are also several ways to communicate this to people who visit your site. When you purchase security packages from reputable providers like Norton or McAfee, you’ll receive security badges that you can display on your website to help alleviate concerns. Using an SSL certificate on your website, meanwhile, will change your URL from “http” to “https” so that visitors and search engines alike know that it’s secure.
Of course, the biggest benefit of properly securing your website is that it prevents successful data breaches. And when it comes to building client trust, nothing is more detrimental than being responsible for the theft of their sensitive data. For this and a long list of other reasons, ironclad security needs to be a top priority for any website owner.
Providing Value with Built-in Features
People visit company websites for a lot of different reasons. But if you want them to stick around and keep coming back, you need to provide value. This value can come in the form of entertaining or educational content that you publish on your site, or it can also come in the form of helpful features for your audience to use. We’ve already covered the role that high-quality content plays in building client trust, so let’s take a look at how to do it with built-in features.
When you provide helpful tools and features on your website, you not only give people a reason to visit it but you also establish your company as one that’s able to meet their needs. At TitleTap, for example, we offer a Net Sheet Calculator that real estate law firms and title companies can add to their website so that visitors can automatically calculate closing costs on real estate transactions. When potential clients use a tool like this and see that the company providing it is already making their lives easier, they’re a lot more encouraged to continue down the sales funnel.
This is obviously just one example of how you can provide value and establish trust with built-in features on your website. Whatever this looks like for your company, giving your website visitors access to valuable features is a powerful way to start building a relationship with them.
Website Best Practices for Law Firms and Title Companies
Conclusion
Most of the people who visit your company’s website for the first time are going to know very little about you and your brand. This means that the first impression your website makes will make all the difference when it comes to determining if they trust your company enough to give it their business. By designing a secure and functional site that features an attractive design, compelling content, and helpful features, you can ensure that you’re making the right first impression.
At TitleTap, we specialize in helping law firms and title companies create high-quality websites that are carefully designed to build trust and drive sales. Contact us today to learn more about our industry-leading web design services!