What instills branding trust - resources

[BobGW]

Hello,

If you look at the top keyword in one of our companies, and across the long tail, you'll see one thing. Not better companies for the industry. Not companies with better information. Just Trusted names. Trust Trust Trust. Big guys you can trust and little guys you can trust.

So since everything's about branding trust in this niche, how do you revamp a website to instill new trust and thus increase in rank?

Resources are always helpful, or direct answers are more than welcome.

Thanks.

[MikeTek]

Hi Bob,

This is one of the woolier aspects of SEO ("quality" or trust).

One thing I'd recommend is getting familiar with Google's Quality Rater/Evaluator Guidelines: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

These are the guidelines they provide to their ~10k human search quality raters - this is the group they use to review potential changes to their search results to gather qualitative data on those results.

You'll see that there's not much "hard" data to go on here, but one way we've measured this and made it actionable at Distilled is by running surveys that we can deploy via SurveyMonkey+Amazon Mechanical Turk to get some sense of how the "average user" would rate a site across some of these points.

Here's a blog post that walks through the process: https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/replicate-googles-panda-questionnaire-processing/

There are no universally-applicable tips here, but trust elements like badges, aggregate user reviews, testimonials, etc are good places to start. Depending on the niche, if you're dealing with "YMYL" (Your Money Or Your Life) topics, basically any advice that could have a serious impact on a person's quality of life, Google has made big shifts recently (see: "Medic" update) to prefer sites where the "experts" running them or publishing content have clean, established reputations in the space (not just accolades displayed on the site itself but elsewhere on the web). This seems to have been particularly important for sites that are offering both advice and selling "solutions" related to that advice (for example, a medical advice blog that's connected to an ecommerce site that sells dietary supplements).

Hope this helps!

Best,
Mike