Every year at UpCity, we take great pride in our Excellence Awards season. Our 2021 season has since wrapped up, and all of our National and Local award winners have been notified, but there are still steps our winners can take to leverage that success. In fact, one of them is so simple, it can often be overlooked.
Here’s why taking the small step of embedding badges onto your website can reap big value, along with best practices for doing so.
Establish Credibility and Trust
Website badges are typically forgotten in marketing plan discussions, but to understand their importance, let’s put ourselves in the customer’s shoes. Think about when you make purchases online. How can you tell if an eCommerce site is legitimate or not? What are some of the traits you look for to determine if a business is trustworthy?
With so many internet scammers out there, we can’t blame customers for having their guards up. Name recognition helps, and reviews or customer testimonials are another great way to demonstrate that your business is reliable.
Trust or award badges, however, prove to your website visitors that your business is in fact accredited and has been verified by other notable, third-party businesses. Not to mention, you earned that award–show it off with pride!
Cultivate Win-Win Partnerships
The benefits of displaying badges on your website go beyond showcasing your talent. By listing awards on your website, you’re linking to external sites with authority. That helps Google understand your niche, increases your visibility amongst targeted audiences, and boosts your SEO.
While this badge provided by another company helps advance your credibility and visibility, it benefits them as well. It helps their SEO efforts as much as yours, and it’s free advertising. It’s a win-win situation for both parties and makes for a nice gesture to facilitate your ongoing partnership with that organization.
Presenting Your Badge of Honor
To get the most out of your badges, the best practices for SEO and design apply. If the badge links to an external site, make sure it opens in a new tab. Or have the badge link internally to relevant content, such as a blog post on what the award means to your business.
When adding more content to your website, you need to make sure that everything still flows well. If you have several awards, consider whether all of them are worth keeping to avoid a cluttered web page. Typically, the most recent awards or ones your business is particularly proud of stay.
You can also play around with the badge colors to avoid a different company’s brand color palette clashing with yours. Popular options include grey or switching to your company’s brand colors. At UpCity, we take our advice seriously. That’s why we provide all our annual Excellence Award winners with badges so they can celebrate their hard work. We encourage our customers to not be shy, and share their success! We get it. In fact, we couldn’t help but display our latest badge, ourselves.
