How chartered surveyors build trust

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How chartered surveyors build trust

In the commercial property sector, trust is a hugely important commodity. Obviously, if no one trusts you, who will do business with you? So how can you use the web to create a sense of trustworthiness?

The digital landscape has changed hugely over the last few years. Now with the explosion of social media in business, companies have far more customer ’touch-points’ where they can gain, and so often, loose trust with potential and existing clients.

Getting Google to Love You

Even though the digital landscape has become so much more complicated in recent years, having a high Google ranking can still have an effect on how trustworthy clients perceive you to be. Page 1 for a search for commercial agents or chartered surveyors in your geographical area, or area of expertise, will develop trust in your company or brand.

So your on-going SEO (search engine optimisation) programme is still important. But today, getting those high search engine rankings is about more than just loading your page content with keywords. Google Panda (that dreaded algorithm change that you have been so bored of hearing about) has meant that commercial property websites need to work harder. Since Panda, Google now puts a great deal of emphasis on the quality of that content on your website.

Craft Your Content

Don't just throw your content together and don’t see it as a chore. Have your target audience in mind when you write. Then create genuinely useful, interesting content that you think will appeal to them.

It is important that you write for your audience, not for Google. If you try to do the latter, your content will be littered with keywords, spam links and be unreadable. If you write for your audience, trust me, it will naturally appeal to Google as well.

Whose Linking and Liking You

Creating inbound links to a website has always been a mainstay of good SEO. Google is ultimately a democracy, if it sees lots of links to a website, it believes it must be popular and hence trustworthy. So the site gains a high ranking.

Yet putting SEO and Google to one side for a moment, if your audience sees credible sources linking to your website, that will result in a positive perception of your own company. Whether those potential clients be, vendors, commercial tenants, investors or developers that credible link will radiate trust.

The Social Space

The huge proliferation of social media sites has seen the greatest impact on the digital landscape. These social channels enable you to engage with your audience in a less formal way. This can be hugely powerful if done right, but disastrous if not.

 

Philip Burrows, Marketing Consultant