Are your enquiry and sale conversion rates low? If you’ve got plenty of visitors but they just don’t seem interested, perhaps your website content is giving you a credibility problem. We’re a suspicious lot and once we arrive on a website that might have something we want, we immediately begin to judge the credibility of the business before deciding whether to enquire or place an order. Naturally, there are several factors involved in that decision but the written content on your site is a major one. Here are 3 ways we use website content to determine credibility:
Quality of the Written Content
A poorly written website peppered with grammatical errors immediately suggests three things:
- The site owner doesn’t care and/or
- The business doesn’t have enough funds to pay a content writer
- Is this a foreign website pretending to be local?
Those aren’t very comforting thoughts for someone considering paying you for a product or service. They’ll go on to think “Is this site legitimate? Will I receive the goods? Is it a fly-by-night site? I’d better not take the risk.”
And all that will happen in just a few seconds.
Quantity of Content on Your Website
If you have only two or three pages of content on your site, and very little information on those pages, it can suggest to visitors that your business is very new or doesn’t have much to offer them. It’s also very likely that your visitors can’t find the answers to any questions they may have about your products or services, or how you do business. Remember, most people won’t contact you to ask – they’ll just click off and find another site that contains website content that does answer their questions. People want to feel at least a bit comfortable about the credibility of your business before they contact you.
Contact Details and About Us
Many will disagree with me but I believe that having your contact details and a little information about who you are on your website is absolutely vital for credibility if you’re a small business. Aren’t you just a little suspicious of businesses that have only a contact form and no details as to who is operating the business or where they are operating from?
Google Search Algorithms and Content Quality
Google regularly updates it’s algorithms, and content quality is often central to the update purpose. They also have a process where humans review and rate content for quality, although with so many websites worldwide, it’s likely that only a small percentage of sites are subjected to this type of review. You can find out more about this by reading Google’s ‘Search Quality Rater Guidelines‘.
I recommend you also read some of our more detailed articles on the topic of content quality and credibility:
Content Writing with Authority: EEAT Factors and Author Attribution
Is your website content failing the visitor credibility check? Perhaps it’s time to call in a professional website copywriting service!
