Good at what you do? Prove it!

If I ask you how good you really are at what you do, you’re going to tell me you’re the best - right? But if I asked you to prove this, would you know where to start?

There’s a popular term doing the rounds now and that is Social Proof - which means it’s not about how good you say you are, it’s all about what other people are saying about you - and that means in public.

Go to 90% of websites and you’ll find a Testimonials page - but I can tell you from my own experience hosting thousands of active websites over the last twenty years through our own hosting service - nobody reads your Testimonials page!

So how do you go about establishing credibility and trust?

It’s easy to think Social Proof means what people read on your own social media channels - your business description on Facebook or your LinkedIn bio - but there are many other ways. The key ones are Association, Accreditation and Certification. Feature badges, icons and links for these in the footer of your website and you could be building stronger foundations than you realise.

But what if there is no industry-specific accreditation for what you do?

This is where your credibility comes in. By proudly displaying that you’re a member or registered affiliate of a known and trusted organisation, potential customers can see you as trustworthy by association.

We guided a specialist consultant to do exactly this with his brand new website and saw the results fast. Despite years of experience in his niche and specialist field, as a new business in his own right he did not yet have a bank of happy customers to call upon and offer reassurance to potential new clients with testimonials and case studies on his site. Instead, we found out which professional bodies he belonged to; which networking groups; which documents and certifications he had to support his position as a trusted, reliable business. Once he started to think about it, he came up with almost 10 different ones for us to add to his new website - along with logos and links to each for full transparency plus building reciprocal links for search engine visibility.

The result? Instant credibility!

Just displaying these on his new site showed the world he is a “proper business” - someone taking their responsibility seriously and committed to the long-term service and commitment his potential customers were looking for. Not only did this endear him to private clients, but he received a large public sector enquiry within days of his new website launch as, by displaying his accreditations, he’d already done the initial filtering work for them.

If you’re really good at what you do, don’t wait to be asked to prove it. Go out of your way, right from the start, to show the world your business is reliable, credible and trustworthy because that is what drives enquiries through a website far faster than any testimonial page ever will.