The Trust Factor

I attended a Marketing Webinar earlier this week run by Herefordshire & Worcestershire Chamber of Commerce and it was very good. It covered a lot of ground and I believe all that attended would have learned something. It started out by asking everyone to answer the question ‘Why do people buy from any company’. The matter of Trust was a common answer. And there is no doubt at all that TRUST matters when it comes to business. Without Trust, any transaction is unlikely to take place, whether you are ordering a rubber duck online or commissioning a huge warehouse conversion. Basically, people have to trust the person they are buying from to deliver the goods or services that they have agreed to pay for. Trust, therefore, is a large part of the marketing process. And as Peter Baylis puts it, ‘Marketing is all about convincing your would-be customers that your offering is either No Risk or at least Low Risk’. Trust is not easily won either, it being the last in the Know – Like – Trust trilogy. It is no surprise then that businesses like to be trusted, and many will do all that they can to make sure that everyone trusts them, this being the whole reason for all those Testimonials and Google Reviews. After all, if Fred of Hereford thinks they provide a good service, it looks like I can trust them to deliver too. However, there is more than one form of Trust and sometimes it can get a bit confusing. The other type of trust I am talking about is the Trust Factor (TF) you may hear being banded about by SEO professionals. Comments like ‘The TF on your site is a bit low, especially when compared to your competitors’, being seen in many an SEO Audit. But what is this Trust Factor, and is it anything to do with how much people trust a business? To answer the second part of the question first, the answer is an emphatic NO, the TF is not nothing to do with the customer trust level of any business, it’s all to do with #SEO. Ah, OK But is it Important then? As with many areas of SEO, the answer is ‘It depends’. But first, what is TF when it comes to SEO? As you may be aware, any Search Engine considers a huge range of factors when considering what site to rank for any given term. A big part, perhaps as much as 40% covers the area of Backlink structure, that is links from sites to the site being considered for inclusion in the Search Engines results. Amongst this data is something called Trust Flow. This is an attempt to work out how good the links really are (when considered as a whole), there being a lot of difference from a link from the BBC site as opposed to one from the local fish and chip shop. Consider it a measure of Quality versus the Quantity of links (that has a measure too, this being called Citation Flow). It, therefore, goes to say that a site with a 1,000 low quality links could be trumped by a site with just 5 high quality links. But how is Trust Flow calculated? It must be to some degree based on Google’s PageRank measurement, this being used in their early days as almost the sole reason a site was listed for any given term. Every site was given a PageRank out of 10, the higher the better, the figure being calculated by looking at every site that was linking to the site in question and then checking on the PageRank of those sites, (which of course was calculated by looking at the sites that linked to these sites). As you can imagine, this is a long-winded task and must be something that is calculated every now and then, and not every time a search is made. But the fact is that it is calculated and that it has an effect of the results. Thus having a high TF (nee PageRank) is something to aim for. But Can You Rank with a TF of Zero? The answer is an emphatic YES, but it does depend on the marketplace in question, as in some cases, you won’t see any sites with a low TF in the results (not that you as a searcher would know this). However, the reason for this is unlikely to be solely based on the fact that the TF is low, but rather that they are doing everything else right in Search Engine terms and thus win their ranking because of this. Conclusion Trust is a vital commodity and every business should (must?) do their best to earn this in everything that they do. Trust Factor, on the other hand is important but should never be considered as a measure of the Trust humans have in any site or business, it is merely one of the many factors used by Google and its kin to decide who to rank for what….

For more information on The Trust Factor talk to Serendipity Online Marketing Ltd