Written by: Matt Thorpe – Grasshopper Web Consulting
As a digital marketing and SEO consultant, a key part of my job is building trust for customers. If my clients want their customers to buy their products or services then they must trust them from the very start of the buying journey, even before they reach the site.
When customers are searching Google for a particular service they are bombarded with many options. There are paid ads at the top of the page (the first 3-4 positions), they see local business listings (usually the next 3 positions) and then they hit the organic listings. It’s my job to land my clients with a presence in all three of these areas.
Paid advertising is a fairly straightforward process because you can pay to appear on target keywords provided you have the budget. But I’ve noticed a change. I’ve noticed that consumers have become fickle and understand that paid ads are well, just that. They know that paid ads often contain companies that have recently gone into business or have a very low reputation score. They often don’t trust paid ads which is why the organic positions are so important.
Organic Rankings Radiate Trust
If a business has reached the first page of Google, they have more often than not, invested time and money into an SEO strategy. They’ve most likely hired an SEO services company or an SEO consultant.
Ranking on the first page in competitive industries usually takes time, so the company would not have gone into business just recently (unless they’ve purchased another company or bought a domain name that already ranked.) This is why people trust organic listings more than paid.
The Google Organic Listings Click Breakdown
Whilst Google is doing its best to monetise the top positions and push organic listings down the page, the natural positions still pick up a strong proportion of the clicks.
According to Backlinko, the first organic position on page 1 attracts 31.7% of all clicks, which is 10x the number of clicks received by the number 10 spot. Second position, collects 10% and 3rd position around 7%. Below this point, you will receive very few clicks, until now.
Enter Trustist A.K.A the Game-Changer
Trustist is a customer reviews aggregator platform that enables you to combine all your positive feedback into one place. Trustist enables you to collate reviews from Google My Business, Yell, Facebook and Twitter.
The advantage of this is that you can combine all your hard work into a single place. Rather than missing vital reviews (or social proof) on another platform, they get to see all your feedback before they buy.
But how Does This Help With Organic Listings?
The beauty of Trustist’s platform is that it enables you to integrate the combined reviews into your website so that your star ratings appear in Google search results for every page on your website. Yup, you read that right. All of your star ratings will appear in the search listings, like this:
Trustist uses a clever schema mark-up to tag your pages so Google displays the stars with each page.
The benefit of this is pretty amazing. It means that when your pages appear on a search results page (SERPS) they are immediately given an injection of trust. It also means that people’s eyes are drawn to your pages beyond anyone else’s unless they have their reviews integrated as well. As of August 2020, this isn’t many so you can gain a real advantage.
These trusted star ratings enable you to attract clicks to your pages even if you are not in the top 1-3 positions. You may be 7th down the page which isn’t great, but the stars draw the eye down the page and help you to get the clicks.
This is not only great for your business but it’s also great for your long-term SEO because Google can see people are attracted to your website and will then bump you further up the rankings. Google wants to show websites that people are looking at. If your site is capturing the clicks then Google will see that your site is in demand. It’s a massive WIN/WIN.
How I got my Client the Top Spot 5 Times, Using Trustist
I’m not going to tell you that Trustist will get you to the top positions in Google on its own, because it won’t. But it will give you the edge when you reach page 1 because you will standard out from the rest.
Getting to Number 1 – Keywords, Content and Links
To get to the first page of Google for your ‘money terms’ and be in with a shout to dominate your industry niche, you need to put in the work. You need a technically sound website, you need to have undertaken detailed keyword research, and you need great content and good inbound links.
For my client’s site, we revamped my client’s website completely. We researched what keywords and phrases customers were searching for at every stage of the buyer journey. We also backward-engineered our competitors to see what rankings we could take from them (all is fair in search, right?).
We then created detailed pages about the products and their construction. The key thing to understand about ranking pages is that they need to be detailed and authoritative. They need to provide value to the visitor and answer questions they may have. This ensures Google sees your pages as valuable to somebody searching for a particular keyword.
Finally, we executed an outreach campaign by acquiring some inbound links from relevant websites that would pass us authority. These three activities enabled us to reach the first page of Google within two months.
Page 1 to Position 1 with Trustist
When you reach page 1, there is a fine line between being great and never reaching your full potential. You’ve succeeded with a big chunk of the hard work just by getting there. Now you must refine your site further and focus on the small details that make the big difference. You need to go beyond what your competitors are doing, and this is where Trustist is in a league of its own.
The Trustist star ratings enabled my client to attract and gain more clicks, more customers and higher rankings. Not only did the stars do the trick in terms of gaining attention but they also built massive trust because the number of ratings is shown with the stars.
When people see a rating this high, they know they are about to visit an established company that manufactures a high-quality product. Before the person has even visited the site, they have made up their mind to trust the company. This is then further reinforced when they reach the site because the company is over 100 years old.
The Trustist Verdict
As somebody who has provided SEO and digital marketing services for over 15 years, I can tell you that Trustist really is a game-changer. You still need to master the art of extensive keyword research and great content, but this tool really does add that human attraction to your search appearance. In short, you get more visibility, more clicks and it helps you to establish yourself at the top of the pile.
It has enabled my clients to capture the number 1 position for 5 (yes 5), high-volume, high-converting ‘money terms’. At the time of writing this, one of my clients has 168 five-star ratings, site visitors are up over 200% and sales are over 100% up on 2019. They are having a record year.
They now dominate their niche, have an order book packed with 4-months’ worth of orders and the phones are ‘red hot’ (their words, not mine). And did I tell you, this all took place during the COVID-19 global pandemic?
Thank you Trustist. I will be using your platform for all my clients in the future. I consider Trustist to be a key part of my SEO toolkit.