Imagine you’ve just spent the afternoon at the beach. You walk back to your car, and there is a man in tattered clothes wearing a paper bag on his head like a hat–wait, what is he doing? He just gave you a parking ticket for 200 dollars!

Are you really going to accept and pay a parking ticket from a possible hobo? No. You’re going to throw it away, and I hate to break it to you, but that’s how a lot of people visiting your landing page feel too. You need to build up your credibility so you will have a landing page that people can trust. Here are 6 easy ways that you can do that.

1. Show that you’re a real company.

Unless you buy all of your stuff from alley trench coats, I’m sure you like to know a little something about the person you’re buying from. Include a phone number, your address, a picture of your employees or even a mission statement. This will show people that you aren’t a nasty spam robot and build up your landing page trust.

2. Include real reviews or testimonials.

Reviews and testimonials give your potential customer social proof. Sometimes we don’t want to be the first person to jump into the murky lake. If we can see someone swimming along, it will make us feel much more secure about the safety of said lake. Use testimonials and reviews to show people that your product or service is quality.

That being said, please don’t write fake reviews. Visual Website Optimizer gives us a great look below at how to pick apart a fake review, and I promise that posting a fake testimonial will only lead you to shadiness and ruin.

3. Use trust seals.

All of us have seen seals from “Norton,” “McAfee,” “TRUSTe” and many other web security sites. These seals can greatly contribute to your credibility and build landing page trust. Subscriptions for these seals can be a bit pricey, though, and an unknown security company seal might actually cause even more concern (let’s be real, your grandma doesn’t know what McAfee is).

In many cases, something as simple as a lock icon can provide a tremendous amount of credibility. Plus, you can easily customize it to maintain your company branding.

4. Make it worthwhile for someone to give you their personal information.

No one wants to hand out their email address to a stranger, let alone a faceless entity on the internet. If you are asking for personal information, you should really offer something in return. Is there an ebook, pdf or video access that you can give in return?

Sites like Noisetrade are pros at this principle. By giving your email, zip code and country, you are getting an album or EP of your choice, as well as a weekly newsletter of more free music that you might be interested in. Respect personal information and build landing page trust by offering something in exchange!

5. Maintain a professional look and good web design.

This may seem a bit biased since I am a graphic designer, but good design can do wonders for your credibility! You have roughly five seconds to impress your potential customer, and good design can be that factor that keeps them on the site. Make sure your landing page is legible, clean and easy to navigate. Really, you should hire a designer, because if you haven’t studied design, your landing page probably sucks.

6. Be honest.

This seems like a no brainer, right? Please make sure that you are treating your customers how you would like to be treated. Don’t use gimmicks or shady asterisk exceptions on deals or betray the trust that we’ve worked so hard to build up. Trust is something that takes a while to build up, but is truly worth a fortune. Don’t mess it up.

This will start you well on your way to building substantial landing page trust! As your customers believe you to be credible, you are sure to improve in your conversion goals.