Kelly Johnstone says: “Trust is just the most important thing that any SEO can do and can learn more about it to be able to improve their conversions, improve their traffic, and reshift your thinking on what you think trust is.”

What do you mean by trust? Because there are many different definitions of trust - it can be the trust of links or on-page and the perceived trust by users, or even trust as part of EEAT. So, what do you mean by trust in this scenario?

“In this scenario, trust would be on-page trust when we are trying to improve our EEAT score. Trust is central to Google's EEAT score, but nothing else really matters without trust. I think the biggest problem is that many SEOs see trust as a tick-boxing exercise, you know, adding on reviews, adding on secure symbols, and then going, ‘Yep, I've done those things. So, that means that I have increased the trust on my site’ rather than thinking of what trust is. Trust is a biological process. Trust is emotional. If you're not using emotional content to back that up and to make people feel comfortable with your site and whatever you're trying to do to help increase their trust, it’s just not going to work. You have to be able to let people make an informed decision that they're going to increase their trust in you, rather than just telling someone that they should buy something from you.”

So, trust is emotional. How do you measure emotions?

“Trust is one of those kinds of funny bits because it is emotional, so there's two layers to it, and it does translate very matter-of-factly to two sides regarding how someone interacts with you. So if someone goes on your site and doesn’t see something they like, their distrust immediately comes back, and distrust makes you physically move away from things, and on your websites, that's someone that bounces off. So, if someone's highly bouncing from your site, they've got a high distrust of you, which means they're not finding what they're looking for and they're actively going away. If someone feels trust in you, that can directly be measured in an increase in traffic and engagement on your page and an increase in conversion rate because there's a direct correlation between someone feeling trust towards you to then going and performing another action.”

I like your use of distrust because I don't think many SEOs immediately associate distrust as the opposite of trust, although it's obvious that that's the case. Because you have someone leave your website and haven't found what they're looking for or are uncomfortable with what you offer. So does this bring back the good old 'Bounce Rate' as a key measurement?

“I think in this context, there are lots of things that you can measure as distrust because it is that step back in hesitation. So, if you have software where you can measure how people interact with your site, it might be where people are hovering over buttons, and they're not quite sure, kind of at its worst form, it's people that aren't buying. So, they might even go into your journey as to whatever you're selling and then bounce away from there because they find out the price of it, and then that’s when they feel distrust. So, it isn't direct. If you do all these things, someone will trust you because each person's level of trust will be different. Otherwise, we'd all buy the same things. And we'd all be very similar. So, we will have our trigger points for what deems something trustworthy versus things that will cause us to feel distrust immediately. And a lot of that is working out the ecosystem of where you sit against your competitors. So if you're writing your messaging and not looking at what your competitors are doing, when people go and hop between different sites to do their price comparisons, they'll go, ‘Oh, hang on a minute. They're saying this’. And then that automatically makes them distrust you, and you've not done anything differently there, or you've not done anything bad. But you know, that ecosystem impacts someone's trust.”

What would be an example of something on someone else's website that makes the user distrust you?

“It could be that they have more reviews if we think that way. A classic example of Amazon is when you're scrolling through looking for something. If you've got something that has five reviews and five stars versus something that has 10,000 reviews and four and a half stars, you'll most likely, even if the price is the same there, you're going to go for the one that has more reviews because you’ll think that's a safer bet. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with it. It could be the same product. But those external trust markers mean you’ll go for the one you feel safer for. So, it could be other messaging as well, not just things like reviews. Different service levels could be one business offers something and another doesn't. And because you're not talking about that, even though you might sell it, then it means you're going to go for the other option because that sounds more appealing to you.”

If we're talking about reviews, is there an ideal number of reviews where, psychologically, it doesn't matter anymore? So, 20+ reviews, 100+ reviews, even if you compare it with another website with 10,000 reviews, as you say, as long as the reviews are thorough and have a decent star rating. The actual quantity of reviews doesn't matter anymore?

“It depends on the context of the reviews in your industry and what software people use. So, if everyone uses Trustpilot, and you're using Reviews.io, you know you're not playing in the same camp as anyone else. So, it isn’t easy to compare. I think many people also look for authentic reviews. Many people won't trust all five-star reviews depending on what you sell. If you had 10,000 five-star reviews and scored five out of five, that looks a bit dodgy because we know that not everyone says that. I work in the insurance industry, so we get a lot of four-star reviews because people say they haven't used it yet, even though you know they've bought the product.

I think people expect you won’t ever get a five-star product because different people will have problems with it as they go along, so I think there's something in the volume and in the star rating, and kind of that sweet spot between four and five. That's kind of the best thing to look for.

One of my businesses has over 300,000 reviews now. So we're still building them up. But they work for us. And for us, that shows it's a feedback method, not just a message we can use to help drive more customers. It is a way of ensuring that we continue updating our product. It's worth thinking that reviews aren't just a way of bulking up and making sure that you get more customers. It’s more about making sure that you can make continual improvements and know what your customers love as well than an absolute minefield for working out the level of trust and what people like to help drive your messaging.”

If all of your competitors focus on and tend to use Trustpilot as their review platform of choice, is it a mistake to focus on another platform instead?

“I would think so, yeah, because if that's where everyone else is, then focusing on another platform will mean you're not playing in the same area and if that's where people will look for their reviews, then if they're looking at your competitors, you're not in that same landscape. So if they're going on to review sites as part of their buying journey to see what people are thinking, you're just not going to show up there. So it's like not being on Google.”

Okay, and what about video recordings? Because obviously, you can use software to record what your users are doing. You mentioned earlier that subtle signs of a user not necessarily trusting you could be hovering over a button, and perhaps you know that video recording could be a good opportunity to capture that. So, do you favour those types of recordings and data points?

“Yeah, they're really good. I think there's some study where you can have about eight people and you can learn 50% of the problem areas on your site just by seeing how they interact. I think that's a pivotal point in being able to work out what those problem areas on your site are with your UX teams, as well as software like Contentsquare and Hotjar, all of which can help you dig into what people are doing on your site, they go above and beyond the level, you can get out of Google Analytics.”

And talking about data points that stirred just eight people could represent 50% of your audience. But I guess it's selecting the right eight people. So, how do you select the right people to represent your audience?

“That would be going down to demographics, looking at who's buying your product, and making sure they're representative which might be people in the market for whatever products you're selling and making sure you're asking them. Use companies that do this every day because then you're not getting any bias when they're doing the interviews with them, making sure that you're looking across platforms and not just on the desktop. There aren't many sites now that don't have at least 60% Mobile, so it’s important to make sure that you're asking those questions as they go down, making sure that their potential customers that you're looking at, as well as looking at people that might not have ever heard of you before. So, then they haven't experienced what your site journey looks like.”

Can you measurably tie back your improvements to your on-site experience and trust the bottom line of what you're trying to achieve?

“If we're using things like Optimizely, tests for wording around buttons or wording on page or design elements, you can A/B test those to make sure that it is going to help with whatever you want it to do whether or not that's clicked a quote, whether that's conversion. So, it's fairly easy to measure the impact there of minor changes.”

And what about measuring it back to traditional SEO metrics in terms of success? Can you tie it back to traffic improvements or ranking improvements for certain keywords, the fact that users stay longer on your site and are more satisfied with the experience?

“I think that goes back to understanding user intent and ensuring that any decision you're making is customer first. So, suppose you are making those decisions that will increase trust because you're thinking about what's driving their decisions. In that case, if you're thinking about their pain points, which will automatically increase the quality of your page and the intent of your page. SEO is one way that you can find those questions. And you can find that intent and match it to what someone's looking for. So, being able to narrow that down can then help to improve traffic. And yeah, it can measure that. It's a lot easier and harder to A/B test from an SEO point of view because you'd have to do it on a much wider scale with many different pages. We found that when you shift your perception of trust and start to build that on pages, make sure that the decisions you're making for them help them feel more informed, then that increases your SEO and also increases your conversion at the same time. So it's a win-win.”

Throughout 2023, AI has been a hot topic. Can we use AI in any way to automate the trust improvement on your website?

“It depends. We use Jasper in our team, which we've recently onboarded. Not because it helps increase our efficiencies but because AI is only a writing tool. And it will only ever be a writing tool to increase trust, because as I said earlier, trust is emotional. You have to be able to understand the pain point. So, there will always be a person there filtering it in to ensure it's answering the right questions. I think AI on its own is never going to do that. Because it will never fully understand your customer base and their problems, it will never be able to brief itself and do some legwork around the writing. So, I think AI can be used to increase efficiencies. But it can't do the majority of the legwork. A lot of SEO is quite manual, so there's only so far I think it can go in helping us, but I think it's here to stay. I think people who aren't using it might start to lose out or be less efficient than others who are starting to embrace it.”

You've shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023. Now, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“Creating ‘Link bait' that uses things like five top tips because they are never actually helpful. I think that any form of content created that isn't useful for users and is just designed purely to get links or to exist is not good enough anymore. You need to ensure that any content being produced is useful for an end user.’’

Kelly Johnstone is Head of Content at Staysure Group, and you can find her over at staysure.co.uk.