If you’re struggling to find clients that will pay you what you’re worth or to even notice you amongst the seemingly endless sea of WordPress pros, you’re not alone. It can be difficult convincing some agency owners to spend their hard-earned money on a website and marketing.

That’s why it’s important to build trust in your business from the get-go.

When you gain prospects’ trust, you get:

• Fewer doubts
• Fewer price negotiations
• Fewer headaches

Bottom line: If you can make them see you for the expert that you are early on, it’ll make your job of selling them easier and the process of working with them much more positive.

Ways to Build Trust in Your Business

So, how do you give your business this much-needed boost in credibility? Unfortunately, it’s not enough to have your own WordPress website that says, “We create the best websites!” The key is to show them the proof without having to say anything.

Here is what you can do:

1. Make Your Portfolio Impressive

Ho The trick to building an impressive portfolio doesn’t come down to how famous your clients’ brands are. There are two things you can do instead:

For starters, use your portfolio to demonstrate your area of expertise. Do you build websites for SMBs in Pittsburgh like the 412 Crew? Then, show off your local clientele:

Or maybe you design websites and develop digital marketing solutions for companies on a mission to do good in the world? Then, you could flaunt your work the way The Good Alliance does:

Secondly, don’t just name your clients. Tell their story with your portfolio. Why did they come to you? How did you solve their pain? Let prospects get a sense for how you deliver results and how your clients have prospered as a result.

2. Design Your Clients’ Dream Website… For Yourself

If you’re truly a specialist when it comes to designing websites for your niche, what better way to gain the trust of prospects than to blow them away with the first impression of your own website? A creative to do this is by designing it to look and work similarly to the kind of website you would build for them.

Let’s look at the Pebble Design website, for example:

They can’t nail the style of a hotel website perfectly since features like reservation systems and physical addresses don’t make sense for a design agency.

However, the rest of the home page does a spot-on job of matching the imagery and messaging to that which a hotelier would want to see on their own website.

Imagine what a prospective client of Pebble Design thinks when they step foot on this website and realize the agency really knows how to design for their target customer. It’s a great way to earn their trust.

3. Rank on the First Page of Search

Your customers are paying you to build a website that gets them results. That means it needs to rank well in search so that qualified leads will find their way to it.

As with the example above, this is a case of showing, not telling.

You could easily write up pages and pages about how you’re a skilled WordPress designer. But that won’t mean anything if your own website doesn’t rank and bring you traffic from search. If you want to convince prospects that you can get them results, make sure your own website ranks on the first page of search.

That way, there won’t be any need to call your skills into question. They found your business on Google, after all.

4. Be a Responsible agency owner

You’re not just competing with other web developers and designers on your skill set. You’re competing with them on your business acumen, too. Prospects want to know that they’re hiring someone who can design a website that does what they need it to and that they’re not going to have to hand-hold them throughout the process.

In order to build trust in your business before a project even begins, you can do a number of things:

• Be responsive. If you make them wait weeks for a follow-up to their inquiry or to book a free consultation, they’ll assume you work the same way.
• Have a process for everything, including how you answer contact form submissions and pitch proposals.
• Have a contract ready to go as soon as they express interest in getting started — and make sure the terms clearly protect both them and yourself.

This is a good example from OuterBox:

Not only does the agency clearly state its hours of operation and time zone (which is great when you work with clients nationally or internationally), it also has a response time promise. That’s an excellent way to set the right tone upfront.

5. Ask Clients for Reviews

I could tell you to collect testimonials from clients and publish them to your website (which you should do anyway). However, if it’s a struggle to get prospects to trust you, then you’re going to need to leverage something more than former clients’ shiny words.

You need to give them hard proof.

Bright Local puts out a report every year that covers this very topic. And what they found in 2018 is this:

You need to have at least 10 reviews worth reading before a prospect is willing to trust you.

What’s more, you should have at least a 4-star average rating if you expect them to hire you:

Now, I’m not saying this to deter you from asking clients for reviews. In fact, I think you should take a proactive approach to doing this.

Here’s the thing: even if you don’t create an online profile for yourself on Google My Business or Facebook, if a former client feels fired up enough to tell the world about their experience ( positive or negative), they’ll find a way to do it. So, create your profiles and control the narrative .

Online reviews are also beneficial in improving your competitiveness in search. Case in point, this is what happens when someone searches for “web designer vancouver”:

If you have a local business profile that draws in positive ratings and reviews, your business could show up at the top of search even if your website doesn’t organically rank there yet. And if your rating is good enough, this would be an amazing way to edge out the competition.

Ready to Start Charging More?

Alright, so the goal here is to build trust in your business so that you can make more money. However, just keep in mind that as your revenue grows, your expenses shouldn’t grow with it. If you’re to run a successful and sustainable business, you have to make a profit. If you’re unsure of how to do that, check out this post on how to make a budget.

If you run into any other questions, give us a shout. We’d be happy to discuss your situation and figure out where we can help.