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Do You Look Legit? The Psychology Behind Website Design & Credibility

A black man holds a phone as a white woman sitting next to him looks at the screen and both smile, an example of an imaged used in positive psychology web design. Both have coffee cups in their hands.

There are countless websites on the internet, and while we aren’t as much in the Wild West days of a few decades ago, there are still plenty of security risks that make users careful. That caution is entirely reasonable. However, businesses want to give an immediate trustworthy impression on their website or else cautious users are more likely to close the tab. One of the best ways to instill that immediate credibility is to understand the psychology behind website design. In this blog we explain some key design practices for how your business’ website can instill trust and credibility.

Keeping Cognitive Load Low and Trust High

Psychologically, the human brain can only process so much information at once. This is obvious when someone is trying to speak with another person who is reading. Although they can hear them, they don’t cognitively process anything they say. This cap or limit of what we can process is our cognitive load. If cognitive load is overwhelmed, it can be confusing and even paralyzing. That paralysis can lead to an immediate sense of distrust for users.

For website design, you can manage your user’s cognitive load by organizing information into categories and groups. Rather than providing all the information about your business and every one of its services or products all at once immediately at page load, you start with an overview and/or some key recommendations (your users would then click on what they need/want). These should also be legible and visually organized, so that users can easily understand them.

Similarly, rather than listing every single page on the website, the menu is organized hierarchically, allowing users to first pick a larger category and then find the more specific page they want there. These website designs apply the psychological principle of Hick’s Law, which observes that humans make a choice from various options by subdividing into groups and reducing the available options speeds up their decision making. Thus, reducing cognitive load and using hierarchical designs allows users to speedily navigate it without becoming cognitively overloaded.

Keeping It All Connected – No Broken Links

Along with ease of navigation by not overwhelming your users, you also don’t want to perplex them with links which lead to the wrong page or a page that no longer exists. These broken links immediately impact a website’s credibility as users find themselves on a page they didn’t expect or one that doesn’t exist at all. It can feel like a trick or raise questions about the website’s maintenance, and thus its reliability. Broken links can also be detrimental to a website’s SEO.

There are a few ways to prevent and repair broken links. If they are to your own website’s pages, be sure to update these links or create redirects that will immediately take users to the right page. There are also tools that will help you find broken links. These can be plugins, website audits, or even using Google’s Search Console. Any of these will help you find those pesky broken links.

Optimizing Performance

Another maintenance tip that helps to improve a website’s credibility is to ensure all pages load quickly and run smoothly. When a website takes a long time to load or chugs along at even the simplest interactions, users begin to lose trust and patience. Just like broken links, it raises questions of credibility around the website’s maintenance, which in turn raise security and quality concerns that transition to their impression of the business itself. Psychologically, poor performance can also make users feel that they are not in control of their experience on the website, which will further harm their trust of the website. Ensuring your website operates efficiently on all devices, including mobile and desktops, helps to secure credibility for your website and business.

The Trust in Words and Brands

Along with functionality and performance, there are numerous other methods for psychologically fostering trust in your website’s design, including the good word of others. Testimonials from customers help to establish trust and credibility in a few ways. First, is that they simply act as evidence for your business’ quality of services/products. Psychologically, attaching images or videos of smiling clients to these testimonials further establishes trust and credibility, as humans naturally have positive associations with happy faces.

Along with testimonials, you can also feature the logos of companies your business has collaborated with on the website’s home page. If users trust these brands, they will immediately transfer some of that credibility onto your business. As well, psychology has demonstrated that humans have innate positive associations with images they recognize. Seeing brand logos they know, even if they do not have a lot of experience with them, will inherently increase the credibility of your business and website.

Verifying Security

Another way to visually improve the credibility of your business’ website is through security verification. For example, an SSL or TLS certificate indicates that the traffic on your website has been encrypted, making it safer for users. These encryptions are then verified by various services, such as Let’s Encrypt and  Google Trust Services, to tell a browser. Today, if a website isn’t encrypted, browsers will often warn the user and advise they not load the page. That won’t fare well for your business’ reputation as users are directed away. Thankfully, if you’re using a service like WordPress or Shopify for your business, they include such security (so long as you keep your website updated).

There are also other security features that comfort users to build website credibility along with increasing its security. Such services include reCaptcha, which protects websites from malicious bots, preventing fraud and attacks. When reCaptcha is added to a website, it also adds a badge, informing users the website is being secured. This immediately supports a business’ credibility as users see the website is more secure.

Open Information is Essential to Credibility

If someone thinks information is unclear or being kept from them, they immediately become less trusting. That’s no different for users on websites. Open communication and clear information are critical for a business’ credibility on the web. Clear links to all policies and providing all relevant information on products or services builds and establishes trust. Also, providing clear and direct contact information is essential to a website’s credibility. When users see there is a clear physical address, email, or phone number they can contact for more communication, their trust increases. Conversely, if these contact methods are not included on a website, customers immediately become suspicious of a business.

Trusting Credible Design

You should now have a good sense of some essential business for website credibility and its importance. Even then, there’s still more psychological principles to learn for web design, such as colour associations. Nevertheless, by considering the psychology behind website design, you can trust that your business’ website will establish its credibility. If you’re looking to improve your website’s credibility or create a new, trustworthy design, contact our web design team at Rosewood Marketing. You can trust their expertise.

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AI and SEO: How Artificial Intelligence Impacts Search Rankings

Glowing AI Button on top of a slate brick background

AI is increasingly everywhere these days. Considering AI seems to be doing so many different things, the term AI has become a bit of a confusing catchall and buzzword. Nevertheless, you now find most apps and programs are now including and loudly featuring some kind of AI tool or functionality. You’ll also find AI write-ups from Google’s new search AI, Gemini, at the top of many searches. It shouldn’t be a surprise that AI is now having a significant role and impact on SEO. Since search rankings are critical for any small business to expand its discovery on these platforms, we explain some of the ways to consider how AI impacts SEO.

How AI Has Changed SEO

AI and learning algorithms have drastically changed how internet searches work over the past decade. You will want to consider these when creating web pages that are optimized for search engines.

Moving Beyond Keywords

Search engines like Google have been using learning algorithms (i.e. AI) to move beyond simple keyword searches. These algorithms help identify word associations and larger concepts to create semantic based searches. Semantic search considers phrases and the associations between specific words. More advanced semantic searches will also consider previous searches, location, and the user’s profile for a more complex meaning. These are the same kind of semantics we use to understand language and meaning. Google began using these semantic searches in 2015 with RankBrain. They grew in sophistication when they launched BERT, and last year they launched an even more advanced semantic model with the AI MUM.

Understanding Pages

Search engines like Google have also begun to use the same AI tools on the web pages they crawl. Rather than searching for certain words that indicate a topic, Google’s algorithms now try to more fully understand the information and/or content on pages. The information and meaning they gleam from the page is then used to rank the site according to the semantic meaning in a search. This is to try and provide more relevant results for searches rather than just targeting what most fits those individual keywords.

Together, this semantic shift means that small businesses need to move beyond considering individual keywords to target certain phrases and start considering more complex connections. For example, you could consider, what is the kind of information or resources people might be searching to want this page? Is there a certain question or need that the page or your website answers? What related phrases are people searching that you could connect to your business’ website?

AI’s Getting to Know Us

Another way search engines are using AI that has a direct impact on search engines is understanding users rather than individual pages and searches. Along with monitoring search semantics, Google’s AI tools monitor how and what users search to personalize their results. These AI profiles are designed to help predict and re-rank sites according to that user’s calculated interests. However, these AI profiles are also beneficial for smaller businesses as they allow them to consider target audiences and profiles for their SEO. With these in mind, businesses can start to tailor their webpage’s content and SEO to users in whose searches they would prefer to rank higher.

How Gemini is Changing Search

One of the most recent developments of AI in search engines is Google’s Gemini. MUM, and BERT before it, who were already trying to extract immediate answers or quick summaries from high-ranking search results. However, Gemini is a generative AI, which uses language model functionality to produce a written-up summary and answer. Rather than quoting from a single page, Gemini consults multiple high-ranking sites and tries to combine these for a single ultra response.

While Google does link to the source pages Gemini used, there are drawbacks for websites. Ultimately, this result is not designed to motivate users to visit the actual page. Google has given the answer and users are expected to be satisfied. However, Gemini is often wrong. Most generative AI tools still suffer for any specific topic and tend to provide inaccurate or false information. In turn, this means users may still be motivated to visit specific pages for more accurate information from a human.

The other important thing to consider is that Gemini results like these are still more tuned to general research searches like “where do salmon migrate.” Gemini cannot put together products or services. Instead, if searching for products or services with Gemini, it will direct users to local businesses. Users will still be visiting and browsing the specific pages of small businesses.

Keeping an Eye on AI and SEO

As we mentioned, Google and other search engines have already been using more advanced algorithms for nearly a decade. However, we also can’t deny that the recent surge of generative and other AI tools has led to a rapid shift in SEO with significant impacts on search rankings. Small businesses will need to keep monitoring this active landscape to ensure their websites continue to rank high. Of course, that’s also the benefit of a dedicated marketing team, like Rosewood Marketing. We continue to actively monitor how AI and SEO are actively changing. If you’re interested in revising your SEO strategy or ensuring a new website will rank high in this new AI frontier, be sure to contact us.

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Understanding Google Search Quality Ratings and Why They Matter for a Business’ Website

Woman using laptop to review search quality ratings

Search engines like Google have a tough job of trying to deliver the most useful and relevant results from all over the internet to its users. A huge part of how they establish a hierarchy for delivering those results is search quality ratings. These ratings are extremely important to the SEO and discoverability of a business’s website. We’ll discuss what search quality ratings are, why they’re important, and the metrics behind these important numbers.

What Are Search Quality Ratings

Google works with over 16,000 external search quality raters to determine the search quality of a page or website. These raters examine the quality of results for internet searches to determine if the results are relevant and/or useful for users. These quality ratings are important for Google and other search engines because they ensure they function optimally. If search engines failed to provide relevant and useful results, people would stop using them.

Why a High Page Quality Matters

On the simple side, providing a high-quality web page means you are providing users with a quality experience on your website. However, that search quality is also an important metric for how Google generates search results. Pages with high quality will be given priority in search results, while those with low or failing quality will be delisted from searches entirely. Considering that Google still provides over 83% of all internet searches, it’s a serious concern if your pages aren’t being listed. Ensuring you meet Google’s quality expectations means that your website is optimized for search engines and is discoverable.

How Google Defines Search Quality

Since it works with so many quality raters, Google provides a thorough, 176-page document explaining how search should function and what kind of results should be returned for an acceptable quality. There are certain major criteria that search quality raters consider when determining the quality of a page: purpose, content, and its EEAT.

A Page’s Purpose

First, raters consider why the page was created and what is its main job is. They want to determine whether it does this job in a way that is beneficial for those accessing the page. Some of the main beneficial functions are sharing information or content, expressing an expert perspective, providing a place for others to share points of view, selling products or services, and entertainment.

A Page’s Content

When considering search quality, Google divides a web page’s content into three groups: main content, supplementary content, and ad content. 

  • Main Content is any of the content that is central to the page accomplishing its purpose. That will be the articles or the entire article itself on a blog page. On a business page, that main content could be services with descriptions or products with images and prices. This main content is a huge component of the quality rating. 
  • Supplementary content is anything that improves or aids the user’s experience. These can include navigation aids, links to articles or other pages, or even comment or review sections. If designed well, they add to a page’s overall rating; if designed poorly, they will reduce it. 
  • Ad content is any kind of content that is sponsored. These are less typical on business and nonprofit sites, but they are still a key part of the quality rating. Even if you did not make the advertisements, their quality will affect your page’s rating if the raters find them excessive, obtrusive, deceptive, or distracting.

The EEAT Rating

Google has search quality raters who consider a page’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (EEAT) for its content and purpose. The major search engine puts special emphasis on that last one: trust. To determine the EEAT of a web page, raters need to consider the knowledge of the content’s creator(s) and the reputation of the website’s owner(s). This metric is especially important for pages that Google defines as “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) pages. These are web pages whose purpose or content can impact a person’s or society’s health, financial stability, or safety and well-being. Google considers these pages important and has search quality raters subject them to high scrutiny. Their EEAT rating needs to be thoroughly validated to obtain a high-quality ranking.

The Research for Quality Starts with Your Website

Search quality raters can conduct some thorough research to verify a page’s EEAT. To determine your website’s reputation and expertise, raters will search through the website for pertinent information. This will include information about your business, its owners, and staff, and look for any contact information to further verify the page’s credibility. As a result, these are all important things to include on your website in an “About” and “Contact Us” page.

Quality raters will similarly research any named creators of the content. That includes reading reviews about the website or business. The rater will also research whether the business or website is recommended by experts, mentioned in news articles, or has received any awards. Again, including or linking that information on your website will help make the rating process easier and increase your business’ trustworthiness for both quality raters and prospective customers/clients.

Designing for Quality

Search quality ratings are vital to your website’s SEO, which is why you want to design a website with high-quality pages. Without suitable page purposes, quality content, and a good EEAT rating, pages can remain undiscoverable. A poor-quality rating will severely reduce a business’ discoverability since many pages on a website are designed for SEO to increase discoverability. This is especially why blogs on websites need to be well-written and accurate. Their content needs to meet quality standards, or it will begin to negatively impact the reputation and trustworthiness of a website and overall decrease its quality rating. If you’re interested in improving the quality of your web pages or designing an entirely new quality website, contact us at Rosewood Marketing.

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