Trust plays an important part in our lives. As a species, we’ve learned to trust each other way more than our ancestors. If you remember, the older generations used to tell us never to get in the car with a stranger.
Now, Uber exists and that’s the new normal. We’re quick to adapt to new situations, and we often trust people that we don’t know. For example, you trust a police officer that you don’t know just because they’re wearing a uniform. The same thing goes for the mailman or the firefighter. You can click on this link to find out more.
In the digital world, the trust issue is quite complex. You don’t know who you’re talking to on the other side of the screen. That’s why a lot of people have been burned by catfishing on certain sites. The one thing in common for all of these situations is that they include people. Well, there’s another issue that arises.
How can you trust anything on the internet when you don’t know who has written it? That was a problem that Google solved perfectly. Since identities are not shown on the internet apart from verified social media profiles, it’s wise to create an algorithm that will rank websites according to their authority.
If a lot of people are going to the same place to get information, that means that it’s a website that can be trusted. Plus, if thousands of other websites are using that source as inspiration, or as an example, it must be relevant to a specific subject. Through a couple of strategies and factors, search engines like Google rank everything on the internet.
Whenever a new page comes online, crawlers get sent out that analyze everything that was written, as well as the code behind it, and give the page a specific index. The index later gets stored in a database and gets pulled back online whenever a user asks a question that contains one of the keywords the page was trying to rank for. It’s a brilliant solution to a complex problem.
What happens when money is involved?
The issue of trust becomes even more complicated when payment methods are introduced. There have been millions of scams online where shady websites have presented themselves as authorities in their niche. Not to mention crypto rug pulls, and different pyramid schemes. This page has excellent info on the subject.
This is an issue that a lot of ecommerce sellers face on a daily basis. When you open an online store, how is the person on the other side going to trust you with their credit card information? For example, sites like Amazon have a reputation that has existed for more than 20 years.
There isn’t a doubt in the consumers mind that they’re going to get scammed if they go to the official site. But what if you’re starting from scratch? How can you ensure that the credit card numbers they’ve entered are going to be safe with you?
The only way that can be achieved is by ranking higher in SERPs. The pages that are at the top for a specific keyword are always authority sites that have a well-established reputation. You won’t find a page that has blog posts with broken grammar and links that don’t work. No one is going to trust a blog that’s filled with errors, and that’s why you need to pay attention to every little thing that happens in your small corner of the internet.
Authority
You become an authority in a niche if you work long and hard. It’s true for your career and profession, and it’s true online too. Whenever you’re trying to rank organically, this is the most important factor to pay attention to.
This is especially true if you’re running a business that’s oriented in giving people financial or medical advice. These two fields have the potential to ruin someone’s life if they are not presented in the correct manner. This means that websites that fall into these categories are monitored much more closely than the ones that are dedicated to sharing news.
Employees that work for these search engines have stated that promoting this type of information has a lot of risk, and they always need to confirm that it was written by an expert. That’s why Google has hired a lot of human raters that check the quality of the websites for particular keywords.
This includes checking for trustworthiness, authority and competence. Even though these human raters don’t have any influence at all in the rankings, they still serve as backup to enhance the programs and to see if everything is working correctly.
It’s like adding a SEO consultant and an additional layer of security before providing information to consumers. In most cases, search engines evaluate authority on a page-to-page index. However, that’s not true in all cases. Factors such as reviews, the length of time that your site has been up and running, the words you’ve used, and the backlinks from other reputable websites have an influence.
Engagement
A lot of people have been tricked by websites sharing food recipes that claim to have all of the answer. You click on a link expecting to get information on how to make a pizza with the ingredients you have, and you’re presented with the story of how the chef went to Italy to learn how to cook.
This raises the bounce rates of those websites since no one wants to stick around and read all of that fluff text. For that reason, you need to focus on creating good content and an outstanding user experience. Visit this link for more info.
Companies like Google have never revealed whether engagement metrics play a role in their rankings. However, it’s common sense that the more time people spend on your website, the more content they’re consuming.
This means that you need to have user purpose in mind and incorporate in a way that’s engaging to consume. This could be done by using video, which is the easiest form of content to enjoy. Podcasts are also something that is gaining in popularity.
