How to establish authority and build trust with your customers while improving SEO of your e-commerce store

Adding value to your customers’ lives, establishing authority in your field, and building trust between you and your clients goes a long way when it comes to making your business stand out in the marketplace.

At the same time, some of these strategies can also improve your SEO and help you get more organic traffic over time.

So how can you accomplish all of this?

1. Add a blog to your website

Adding blog posts to your website will help your company communicate better with your customers. It will give your brand a voice, a personality that people can relate to. This way, you’re not only selling products or services, but you’re also building a community.

Use this opportunity to educate your clients about what you do, highlight your best-sellers, and tease your sales and events:

• Sharing unique or hard to find information that will be helpful to your customers will establish authority in your field.
• Being transparent about how you run your business will create trust between you and your clients.
• Share occasional behind-the-scenes moments that humanize your company and warm up your leads.

Publish several new posts a month, and over time you will see an increase of your organic traffic from search engines. And keeping your focus keywords in mind when writing these posts will help you rank higher in search results for those phrases and you’ll attract prospective leads to your website.

2. Create comprehensive gift guides

Customers love gift guides that make it easier to get shopping done around the holidays or other special events.

It gets overwhelming when people need to come up with dozens of gift ideas for their family members, relatives, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. So you can simplify this process for them by providing helpful and thoughtful suggestions via timely published gift guides (for example, the Christmas shopping season starts as early as October!). Some directions to take for gift guides are:

• Occasion-based (Christmas, Birthday, Mother’s Day, etc);
• Role-based (Gifts your dad will love for any occasion);
• Status-based (10 gift ideas for office Secret Santa, 12 funny yet appropriate gifts for your boss);
• Gender or age-based (20 gifts any teenage girl will love);
• Price-based gift guides (20 gift ideas under $20).

Implementing this strategy will result in grateful and happy customers who will use your store’s recommendations to heart.

You can send the guide to your e-mail list subscribers and upload it as a separate page, group the products in a category or in a blog post that can be shared.

3. Shine the light on what you’re offering

Your product page design should be minimal as there’s no need to write an essay about each product feature. However, you can make use of storytelling techniques to describe your products in your blog posts or on separate pages and link to them from the product page, giving the customer an option to read more.

And of course, it works the other way around as well: This post will link over to your product page as well, creating a content-rich page that can be discovered through search and links over to your product.

The “Before and after” format  is quite persuasive if it’s relevant, just like benefit-oriented stories that customers love to share.

Don’t be afraid to ask your online community for reviews and other user-generated content to share on your blog and social media.

What you’re offering is not just products and services - it’s a lifestyle and a sense of belonging.

4. Add customer review functionality to your website

Social proof is a great tool to build trust between the company and visitors who are not your clients just yet. Show them that other people love your products by adding reviews to your website. Depending on the platform you use (Wordpress, Shopify, etc) you’ll need to install a plugin, an app, or use a service such as Yotpo.

The additional benefit of providing testimonials is having your company or product name frequently mentioned in reviews, adding to the search engine optimization of the website.

5. Add gamification

Add fun quizzes that will help your visitors choose the right product. Keep quizzes short and sweet so that customers don’t get tired, border or sidetracked. Prospective clients will derive value from this kind of user experience, be it entertainment or education, and will help make your brand more memorable.

6. Add product videos

A short video is worth a thousand words when it comes to describing a product.

People prefer watching a video and seeing the product “in action” or in a 360-degree. Additionally, you can suggest several ways to style the item if you’re selling apparel or accessories.

If your customers can envision using your product, they can imagine how it fits into their life. Walking away from a purchase will be so much harder since they are already attached to the idea of owning your product.

7. Add a wishlist option

Let visitors curate a wishlist on your website. This is a great way to build a long-term relationship with a prospective consumer.

They will be able to save the items that they like for when they’re ready to buy. Maybe they’re debating between a few different options? This way they can easily find them again.

This wishlist feature gives visitors an incentive to create an account on your website and submit their e-mail address. This way you can continue communicating with them and sending them updates. Add value by promising to notify them when there’s a change with the product (price drop, inventory changes and so on).

8. Be easily available

Gain the trust of your potential customers by assuring them that you stand by your product. Have a comprehensible exchange and return program, and make sure that it’s easily found on the website.

Being ready to solve any problems with shipping or handling of the order will help you gain customer trust and confidence in the quality of your products. Have your contact information on display, including your customer care phone number, e-mail address, and a physical address if your business is brick-and-mortar.

Additionally, chatbots and live messenger support have been making their impact on e-commerce in the past few years because being able to answer any questions promptly converts and helps make purchasing decisions on the spot. You should also set up a separate FAQ page for frequently asked questions.

A lot of these tips go beyond building a well-designed website. They often cross paths with marketing, branding, and public relations, but this is what it takes nowadays to deliver great value to customers and provide amazing service.

And that’s how you can gain trust of your clients and establish authority in your field.

If implemented the right way, these suggestions will help with search engine optimization of the website as well. Moreover, they will increase number of loyal customers who are happy to recommend your business online and grow your social proof portfolio.

Contact us to request a quote if you’d like help in improving your website with your customers in mind!