The Trust Signal Placement Guide

Almost every site has trust signals. Most have them in the footer, which is where trust signals go to be ignored. A reassurance is only worth anything at the moment the doubt occurs, and doubt occurs on a schedule you can predict.

That is the whole argument: the same badge, sentence or photograph does completely different amounts of work depending on which pixel it occupies. The guide maps seven moments in a purchase to the specific signal that answers each one.

It ranks the seven signals that still move a stranger, starting with the least glamorous and strongest, and lists the six that have stopped working, including generic security badges and logo walls. The asymmetry matters: a weak signal is not neutral, because it occupies the place a real one would have and revises everything else if it is caught.

A section for one-person businesses, where trying to look larger than you are is the commonest mistake and being specifically small is a promise a competitor cannot make. Plus the About page, which gets a fraction of the traffic and decides a disproportionate share of the sales, because the people who visit it are close to buying and looking for a reason not to.

Then the part most guides skip: trust after the sale, and what to do when it breaks. The failure is almost never the incident. It is the response.

9 pages, A4, formatted for printing. Delivered as a PDF immediately after payment.