What We Look for as Signs of Trust

Trust is perhaps the most important currency online. Search engines look for signs of trust to identify if a company is worth ranking high in their results, and actual website visitors look for signs of trust to see if the company is worth spending their time and money with.

Search engines tend to over-rely on inbound links as the major signal of trust, often to the frustration of the reputable company whose website doesn't naturally gain links, even if they're a company that's been operating for 50 years or more, and have a service or product that has gained them an excellent reptuation offline, and have served and continue to serve many happy clients. Even if you're a brand new company, you may have jumped through a lot of hoops to establish yourself - been accredited/certificated by various organizations, invested in a bricks and mortar presence, employed people and have gained a great offline reputation in a short space of time. A search engine algorithm is oblivious to all of these signals of trust simply because they can't be measured automatically / algorithmically. It takes a manual review of a website to really get a closer look at the ACTUAL company itself - its history, past work, testimonials, accreditations and certifications earned, whether it's regulated by a government body, to understand its offline operations and also its future plans. These are all great signals of trust and they should be reported on when they're found. That's exactly what we do.