How Trust Plays An Important Role In SEO - Semalt Expert
All through our Series on the three pillars of SEO have discussed authority and relevance and will now discuss trust. What is trust, and how does trust affect SEO? To explain the importance of trust is simple. Let's look at our everyday lives. We need trust; in fact, we use trust in everything we do. From choosing our favorite coffee spot to our preferred newspaper vendor, our decisions are influenced by the level of trust we have in these service providers. Trust is essential in our everyday lives, and this trust influences our decisions on who we prefer to talk to, where we would prefer to go and what sources of information we would rather believe. If trust means so much to us, it's expected that trust can also influence the perception of both search engines and internet users of your website.
SEO is Trust
Trust is difficult to build up, and it is easy to destroy. As SEO specialists, we need to discover the secrets of building this intangible bond? Moreover, we focus our attention on what forms the basis of online trust.
Websites need to establish trust, especially with online marketing, to convince search engines and web users that they offer the best possible services or information. On the other hand, search engines need a way to establish that a site is trustworthy to assign a value to that website. From the search engine's perspective, they identify trust based on the domain age, frequency of updates, the traffic of that website, or its popularity, and its content. If a website can have high scores in each of these items, that website is bound to appear on Google's first page because they will make google itself look good. We are yet faced with a new problem, which is earning this trust.
Building trust is no walk in the park, it is a time-consuming and challenging task, but it is worth the effort if when your website earns that trust. Building SEO trust is a long term process. As beneficial as it is for optimizing your website, it is one thing that can take long to impact, but without SEO trust, your website is bound to suffer.
As we mentioned, human relationships depend on trust, and search engines work in a similar way when they determine the trustworthiness of a site. One way they do this is by evaluating "the company around you." By your company, we are referring to the website you link and the sites that link you. Which website shares your content? And more of these questions are used as cues that help search engines determine whether your website should be trusted. Once this trust is broken, google reacts in a similar way we humans react when our trust is broken.
How to gain the trust of search engines
Trust flow
As a new website, it is challenging to acquire trust because your domain is young, and Google has no reason to trust you. So the first thing you should do is acquire links. By acquiring quality links from already trusted sites, you show Google who your friends are, which goes a long way in showing them who you are. By acquiring relevant links and secure connections to your content, you prove that you are worthy of being ranked by search engines. Today, it is no longer hard to find the quality of a link thanks to many tools provided by Google. When doing your link building, you must keep an eye out for such analysis to ensure you are not using weak quality links.
If you own a website, you probably know that it is essential to update your content and reinvent yourself regularly. If you fail to put in new content once in a while, your website can lose its current rank. Google and other search engines prefer to see fresh content, which can help build your bounce rates.
What is the Trust Factor?
Google's trust factor is the combination of several other factors that they consider when applying a tag on how trustworthy a website is. At this point, we should state that the more trustworthy a site is, the more likely its articles will rank better on Google SERPs. We will also mention some factors that make your website look less credible, harmful, or of poor quality.
What Affects on page Trust Factor
Here are some factors that influence how much trust is given to a website.
- Does your site have things like privacy policy, terms, and Disclosure? Often, we ignore such prompts when we visit a website, but did you know that they are essential? Although they do not function as SEOs, they prove that your website is legitimate, helping you earn more trust.
- There should be unity in the information on who is the owner of the site and the information on the contact us page.
- The length of the articles on your website. Now here is a trick you aren't likely to see often, the longer your contents, the better, especially for web content. Having great content on your website, which is regularly updated, is considered a sign of trustworthiness to google.
- Do you have any eternal links? To gain trust, you must share from the Trust other websites already posses. To find an excellent website that is trusted, look for sites that already rank well on Google search results. When doing this, be sure to link websites that aren't your competition because if you do, you might as well run an ad for such websites. A good example of websites to link could be a Wikipedia site or a government website.
- Do you have video content on your website? In our article on how to keep your visitors engaged, we discussed the importance of videos to a website. With more videos on your website, you increase the chances of your website getting high ranks. It is typically best you use videos from youtube, with a lot of good reviews and high ratings. Since Google owns both youtube and the search engine, you can benefit from such videos' popularity and trust. This will also convince your viewers to stay longer on your site.
Off-Page Trust
As professionals, Semalt is familiar with terms such as this. If you've been reading up on SEOs, you should have "get quality links" a couple of times. As a website owner, getting quality links is one of the fastest ways to build a trustworthy image for yourself. Unfortunately, this is also one of the hardest ways to gain trust. High-quality links are hard to acquire. To get quality links, your content must be exceptional. By creating good quality content, other big and established websites may decide o link your website in their content, which gets you both traffic and trust. Since your content was helpful to them and their readers, thy link you as a form of referencing or appreciation, but as we said, trust takes time, so do not expect this to happen immediately. Building high-quality links is a long process.
Now that you've seen the potential of links, it would be wise to warn you not to spam low-quality links. This is because such an SEO loophole can no longer help a site rank. Google has updated its algorithm to stop such actions from affecting a website's ranking. Several years ago, having even low-quality links was a good way to influence your website rankings positively. However, if you try to post many links today, you will only suffer the wrath of Google. Low-quality backlinks cause more harm than good.
Additional Factors that Affect Your Trust Factor
Asides the On-page Trust and Off-page Trust, you have several other factors that affect your trust factor. Some of them are:
- Social media activities. Social media have become an important aspect of our lives. These days, Google keeps an eye out for the number of social votes a website has. It does this by looking through your brands; Facebook likes shares comments, etc. The more social presence your site has, the safer Google feels trusting you. To help improve your site ranking, create social media accounts, and be active on them. Not only will this help you will Google, but you will also experience more exposure to your possible visitors.
- How long do people stay on your site? Google considers this also. Can you remember when we made mention of the quality of your web content? This is where it comes into play. Relevance is also important when building trust. With relevant content, visitors spend more time on your site, and this is a good indicator to Google that your site can be trusted.
Increasing the trust factor of your site can be stressful. That is why we a Semalt are here to assist you. This process can belong, and you can only achieve it through patience. It is worth it as you begin to enjoy more traffic and 1st-page dominance of SERP. Remember, there are no shortcuts to this as Google will penalize any site that tries to use tricks to get better rankings. When you have a good trust factor value, you have improved your site's reputation.