Word of mouth and customer referrals have always been a big part of business growth and with 88% of customers trusting online reviews as much as they do a personal recommendation, it’s important to add different elements of social proof to your website.

These elements are trust factors that help new visitors see that you’ve dealt with other customers before and they like your work.

In addition to adding social profiles to your page with social counts on your site, there are types of social proof you can add to your site in the form of customer testimonials and how your clients know, like, and trust you.

Below are the 5 top social proof items you can add on your site to show visitors what your customers think of you.

1. Testimonials

If you’re doing a great job for your customers, you’re likely getting responses from them on how much they liked your work. When they email you or call you with their praises, ask if you can use it as a testimonial on your site.

Then make sure you put that testimonial in an easy to find place on your site. All our WordPress themes have a built in testimonial section so you can show off your best work to your visitors.

2. Better Business Bureau

Before website and the internet, this entity handled most company reputation and handled company disputes by customers. Today, if you run an offline, service based business, it’s still a good idea to make sure your company reputation is solid with them.

You can add a BBB image with a link back to your company profile on their website where visitors can see any past disputes or your overall company rating on the site.

2. Houzz

If you run a landscaping company or any business where you provide professional services for homeowners, then you want to sign up for Houzz and add your Houzz badge to your website.

This service can showcase all your previous jobs or project ideas that you can do for homeowners.

3. Yelp Widget Pro

Yelp is one of the oldest local business directories that lets customers leave reviews for your business. If you have several reviews left by happy customers, you’ll want to use the WordPress plugin to add the reviews on your site.

4. Google Places Reviews

For local search, you really want to work on getting your Google Places reviews on and get higher up in the local search results. These are the results Google shares when you look for Dentist, New York City. If you work on your local search, then your business can be one of the top results on the page.

And if you have a lot of reviews on your Google Places then you can use a plugin like Google Places Reviews to shows the reviews on your site.

5. Angie’s List

Angie’s List is very similar to Houzz and was really one of the first customer review services for homeowners. They have since expanded their reviews into other services like lawyers and other professionals outside of the home arena.

Angie’s List is free for professionals to sign up as they charge the homeowner a fee to see their list. When you are finished signing up, you can add a badge to your site that will link to your Angie’s List page.

Conclusion

As a local professional, having these tangible social proof items on your site gives visitors confidence in your business and makes choosing you easier for them since they see that others are happy with your work.

The post Social Proof Marketing: 6 Examples You Can Use On Your Site appeared first on IsItWP – WordPress Technology Lookup Tool.

Businesses and individuals building their very first website can get really frustrated quite quickly. Nothing is as easy as it looks, and you just want to try working with uploading content, graphics and other web elements using FTP (file transfer protocol) servers! If this is your first attempt at launching a website, take some advice from the pros: Start with WordPress. There are a number of reasons why this is such a popular content management system (CMS) so let’s highlight just a few of them.

Free Themes – Many Upgradeable

Once you have registered a domain name, the next item on your agenda would most likely be to find affordable hosting. Most hosting companies now offer some form of content management systems to help newbies get up and running fast. Some even give a choice of several to choose from, the most popular being WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Because of the sheer number of free themes, many of which are upgradeable with customizations, WordPress has the most to offer a newbie. There are themes for e-commerce, blogging, personal websites, news sites and the list goes on. Some themes are interchangeable among different niches while some are only suitable for the niche they were created for.

Large WordPress Community with Message Boards

Whether you have a WordPress theme designed for you by a professional web development company or are going to try your hand with one of the tens of thousands of free themes, you will eventually want to learn how to upload and manage content yourself. Businesses may need to regularly add new products which will need to be priced and this is where you will appreciate the help you can get for free in the WordPress community support forum. As an open source CMS, the community always welcomes input from anyone in the know-how. All you need to do is join one of the forums, pose your question and you will be surprised at the number of helpful answers you get. There are members from literally all over the world, many of which are actually quite technologically savvy. Some are even professional designers themselves.

The Largest Number of Plugins of Any CMS

Then there are the plugins. There are so many plugins that unless you know what you are looking for, your head will start spinning. Plugins are simply a way to extend the functionality of a WordPress theme and these range from social networking plugins to shopping carts for e-commerce sites. Learning to work with plugins can actually present quite a challenge at first because you will most likely need to work with the settings. Here again, the WordPress community in forums can be of invaluable assistance but there may be times when you need to have a special plugin designed for  your site. WordPress Design offers unlimited possibilities for any type of web design imaginable. Although it is, like any other technology, something you need to familiarize yourself with, it is still the easiest CMS out there to learn. Newbies can’t go wrong with WordPress and if they do, there’s always help out there from companies like http://wordpressdesignservices.com/. That’s the best benefit of all.

header image courtesy of SJQ

Businesses and individuals building their very first website can get really frustrated quite quickly. Nothing is as easy as it looks, and you just want to try working with uploading content, graphics and other web elements using FTP (file transfer protocol) servers! If this is your first attempt at launching a website, take some advice from the pros: Start with WordPress. There are a number of reasons why this is such a popular content management system (CMS) so let’s highlight just a few of them.

Free Themes – Many Upgradeable

Once you have registered a domain name, the next item on your agenda would most likely be to find affordable hosting. Most hosting companies now offer some form of content management systems to help newbies get up and running fast. Some even give a choice of several to choose from, the most popular being WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Because of the sheer number of free themes, many of which are upgradeable with customizations, WordPress has the most to offer a newbie. There are themes for e-commerce, blogging, personal websites, news sites and the list goes on. Some themes are interchangeable among different niches while some are only suitable for the niche they were created for.

Large WordPress Community with Message Boards

Whether you have a WordPress theme designed for you by a professional web development company or are going to try your hand with one of the tens of thousands of free themes, you will eventually want to learn how to upload and manage content yourself. Businesses may need to regularly add new products which will need to be priced and this is where you will appreciate the help you can get for free in the WordPress community support forum. As an open source CMS, the community always welcomes input from anyone in the know-how. All you need to do is join one of the forums, pose your question and you will be surprised at the number of helpful answers you get. There are members from literally all over the world, many of which are actually quite technologically savvy. Some are even professional designers themselves.

The Largest Number of Plugins of Any CMS

Then there are the plugins. There are so many plugins that unless you know what you are looking for, your head will start spinning. Plugins are simply a way to extend the functionality of a WordPress theme and these range from social networking plugins to shopping carts for e-commerce sites. Learning to work with plugins can actually present quite a challenge at first because you will most likely need to work with the settings. Here again, the WordPress community in forums can be of invaluable assistance but there may be times when you need to have a special plugin designed for  your site. WordPress Design offers unlimited possibilities for any type of web design imaginable. Although it is, like any other technology, something you need to familiarize yourself with, it is still the easiest CMS out there to learn. Newbies can’t go wrong with WordPress and if they do, there’s always help out there from companies like http://wordpressdesignservices.com/. That’s the best benefit of all.

header image courtesy of SJQ

Businesses and individuals building their very first website can get really frustrated quite quickly. Nothing is as easy as it looks, and you just want to try working with uploading content, graphics and other web elements using FTP (file transfer protocol) servers! If this is your first attempt at launching a website, take some advice from the pros: Start with WordPress. There are a number of reasons why this is such a popular content management system (CMS) so let’s highlight just a few of them.

Free Themes – Many Upgradeable

Once you have registered a domain name, the next item on your agenda would most likely be to find affordable hosting. Most hosting companies now offer some form of content management systems to help newbies get up and running fast. Some even give a choice of several to choose from, the most popular being WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Because of the sheer number of free themes, many of which are upgradeable with customizations, WordPress has the most to offer a newbie. There are themes for e-commerce, blogging, personal websites, news sites and the list goes on. Some themes are interchangeable among different niches while some are only suitable for the niche they were created for.

Large WordPress Community with Message Boards

Whether you have a WordPress theme designed for you by a professional web development company or are going to try your hand with one of the tens of thousands of free themes, you will eventually want to learn how to upload and manage content yourself. Businesses may need to regularly add new products which will need to be priced and this is where you will appreciate the help you can get for free in the WordPress community support forum. As an open source CMS, the community always welcomes input from anyone in the know-how. All you need to do is join one of the forums, pose your question and you will be surprised at the number of helpful answers you get. There are members from literally all over the world, many of which are actually quite technologically savvy. Some are even professional designers themselves.

The Largest Number of Plugins of Any CMS

Then there are the plugins. There are so many plugins that unless you know what you are looking for, your head will start spinning. Plugins are simply a way to extend the functionality of a WordPress theme and these range from social networking plugins to shopping carts for e-commerce sites. Learning to work with plugins can actually present quite a challenge at first because you will most likely need to work with the settings. Here again, the WordPress community in forums can be of invaluable assistance but there may be times when you need to have a special plugin designed for  your site. WordPress Design offers unlimited possibilities for any type of web design imaginable. Although it is, like any other technology, something you need to familiarize yourself with, it is still the easiest CMS out there to learn. Newbies can’t go wrong with WordPress and if they do, there’s always help out there from companies like http://wordpressdesignservices.com/. That’s the best benefit of all.

header image courtesy of SJQ

Businesses and individuals building their very first website can get really frustrated quite quickly. Nothing is as easy as it looks, and you just want to try working with uploading content, graphics and other web elements using FTP (file transfer protocol) servers! If this is your first attempt at launching a website, take some advice from the pros: Start with WordPress. There are a number of reasons why this is such a popular content management system (CMS) so let’s highlight just a few of them.

Free Themes – Many Upgradeable

Once you have registered a domain name, the next item on your agenda would most likely be to find affordable hosting. Most hosting companies now offer some form of content management systems to help newbies get up and running fast. Some even give a choice of several to choose from, the most popular being WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Because of the sheer number of free themes, many of which are upgradeable with customizations, WordPress has the most to offer a newbie. There are themes for e-commerce, blogging, personal websites, news sites and the list goes on. Some themes are interchangeable among different niches while some are only suitable for the niche they were created for.

Large WordPress Community with Message Boards

Whether you have a WordPress theme designed for you by a professional web development company or are going to try your hand with one of the tens of thousands of free themes, you will eventually want to learn how to upload and manage content yourself. Businesses may need to regularly add new products which will need to be priced and this is where you will appreciate the help you can get for free in the WordPress community support forum. As an open source CMS, the community always welcomes input from anyone in the know-how. All you need to do is join one of the forums, pose your question and you will be surprised at the number of helpful answers you get. There are members from literally all over the world, many of which are actually quite technologically savvy. Some are even professional designers themselves.

The Largest Number of Plugins of Any CMS

Then there are the plugins. There are so many plugins that unless you know what you are looking for, your head will start spinning. Plugins are simply a way to extend the functionality of a WordPress theme and these range from social networking plugins to shopping carts for e-commerce sites. Learning to work with plugins can actually present quite a challenge at first because you will most likely need to work with the settings. Here again, the WordPress community in forums can be of invaluable assistance but there may be times when you need to have a special plugin designed for  your site. WordPress Design offers unlimited possibilities for any type of web design imaginable. Although it is, like any other technology, something you need to familiarize yourself with, it is still the easiest CMS out there to learn. Newbies can’t go wrong with WordPress and if they do, there’s always help out there from companies like http://wordpressdesignservices.com/. That’s the best benefit of all.

header image courtesy of SJQ