Trust signals that do something
The ones that work are the ones a liar would find inconvenient to fake. What to do when you have no reviews yet, and why inventing them is unlawful in the EU.
A visitor who has never heard of you is asking one question: is this a real business that will do what it says. Everything called a trust signal is an attempt to answer it, and the ones that work are the ones a liar would find inconvenient to fake.
The ones that carry weight
- A real address and a real way to contact a person. The single strongest signal available to a small business, and the one most often left out. A site with no contact route reads as a site that does not intend to be contacted.
- Prices. Published prices say you are not deciding what to charge based on who is asking. Hidden prices on a product with no sales process reads as a trap, and visitors treat it as one.
- Named humans. Who does the work, what they have actually done. Not a stock photograph of a team that does not exist.
- Specific detail about the work. Measurements, materials, process, what is not included. Detail is expensive to invent and cheap to state if it is true.
- A plainly worded policy on what happens when something goes wrong: returns, refunds, delays, mistakes.
- Evidence of having done it before. Photographs of actual work, actual output, actual premises.
Note the pattern. Each of those is either checkable or costly to fabricate. That is what makes them signals rather than decoration.
The ones that do nothing
- Badges and seals nobody recognises, which are usually just images and are known to be.
- Stock photography of smiling people in an office. It is recognised instantly and it actively subtracts, because it establishes that something on the page is not real.
- Claims with no referent. Industry-leading, trusted by thousands, award-winning without naming the award.
- Five-star ratings with no reviewable source behind them.
- A long About page about passion that never says who anybody is.
What the US rule actually prohibits
Worth setting out, because it catches several things businesses do without thinking of them as fake reviews.
- Creating, selling or buying reviews from people who did not use the product, including reviews by people who do not exist and AI-generated ones.
- Spreading reviews you knew or should have known were fake, which puts a duty on you rather than only on whoever wrote them.
- Incentives conditioned on sentiment. A discount or gift card offered only for a five-star review is prohibited, even where the reviewer is a real customer who genuinely liked the product.
- Reviews from company insiders, including staff and their relatives, that do not clearly disclose the relationship.
The third one is the trap. Asking happy customers for reviews is fine and encouraged. Paying for positive ones specifically is not, and the distinction is whether the incentive depends on what they say. Ask everybody, reward nobody for the content of their answer.
What to do when you have no reviews yet
Every business starts here, and the answer is not to wait or to manufacture them. It is to substitute specificity for social proof, which works better than most people expect.
- Show the work in detail. Photographs of what you have made, the process, the thing half-finished. People reading about a product they cannot touch want to see something, and almost anything real beats nothing.
- Say who you are and why you would know. Two honest sentences outperform a page of institutional language.
- Remove the risk instead of proving the quality. A clear refund position does the job a review would have done, by making being wrong cheap for the customer.
- Say what you are not good for. It is the most effective trust signal available to a new business, because nobody writing marketing copy would include it.
- Then ask. After a job goes well, ask for a review while it is fresh, by name, with a link. Most people will if asked once and not if asked never.
The quiet signals
Some things are not presented as trust signals and are read as them. A site that loads quickly and works on a phone. Links that are not broken. A copyright year that is current. Spelling. An email address at your own domain rather than a free provider. None of these persuade anybody, and each of them, done badly, quietly removes a reason to believe you.
The about page, specifically
It is one of the most visited pages on a small site and is usually the worst written, because it is approached as an exercise in self-description rather than as an answer to a question. The question a visitor has is not who are you. It is should I trust you with this.
What answers that, in order: who does the work, what they have done before that is relevant, how long this has existed, where it is based, and what it does not do. Five facts, each checkable, which is why they work.
What does not answer it: the founding story, the passion, the belief that customers deserve better, and the word journey. Those are about you, and the reader is not asking about you, they are asking about their own risk.
If the business is new and has no history to point at, say so plainly and say what you did before. A new business that admits it reads as honest. A new business performing established reads as neither new nor honest, and the performance is usually transparent.
Work to do
- Rewrite your about page as the five facts, and delete the founding story unless it is load-bearing.
- Open your site as a stranger and find out, in thirty seconds, who runs it, what it costs and how to reach a person. Fix whichever one fails.
- Remove every claim on your site that has no referent, and every stock photograph of people.
- Add one sentence saying what you are not suitable for.
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