Putting Reviews on Your Own Site

Why site testimonials are discounted

A visitor knows you chose them.

Which means a page of glowing quotes carries less weight per item than a platform listing, where the selection was not yours and the reviews cannot be edited.

They are still worth having, and the way to make them work is by borrowing credibility from a source the visitor is able to check independently.

A quote from a real platform review, properly attributed and linked, is an entirely different thing from a paragraph in quotation marks with no source at all.

The attribution that helps

• A first name at minimum, ideally with an initial.
• A location, which is also useful for local search.
• The job, in a few words.
• A date, or at least a year.
• A link to the source, where it came from a platform.

The fifth is what separates a credible testimonial from an assertion. Anybody can write a quote; not everybody can point at where it came from.

Anonymous, or a bare set of initials, reads as invented, and it damages the genuine ones alongside it.

A worked example

A business with a testimonials page of fourteen quotes, all attributed to initials and a town.

They were entirely genuine, collected over years from thank-you emails.

Nobody believed them, which the owner discovered when a customer said as much during a quote, apologetically.

They replaced the page with six quotes taken from their map listing, each with the reviewer's first name as it appeared there, the job, the month, and a link to the listing.

They also asked three of the original fourteen whether their names could be used, and all three agreed.

The page became shorter and considerably more persuasive, and the customer who had raised it mentioned the change unprompted.

Permission

Straightforward for platform reviews and worth care for private ones.

A review posted publicly on a platform can generally be quoted with attribution as it appears there, since the person published it themselves.

A private email is different. Somebody who wrote a warm thank you did not publish it, and using it publicly needs asking.

Most people say yes, and asking takes one message: whether you may quote a line on your website with their first name and town.

Where somebody prefers not to be named, do not use it anonymously instead. That is the version nobody believes.

Where to put them

Distributed rather than collected, which most sites get backwards.

A dedicated testimonials page is visited rarely, and by people already convinced.

A relevant review placed on the service page it relates to is read by everybody considering that service, at the moment they are deciding.

One or two per page, matched to that page's content, does considerably more than fourteen collected on a page nobody opens.

The homepage can carry one, and it should be the strongest and most specific one you have rather than simply the most enthusiastic.

Quoting accurately

A point of both honesty and credibility.

Quote what was written, including the ordinary imperfections of how people write.

Trimming for length is entirely reasonable, provided the sense is unchanged and the cut is marked with an ellipsis.

What is not reasonable is tidying the grammar, removing a qualification, or joining two sentences that were separated by a reservation.

A visitor comparing your quoted version against the platform, which is now possible because you linked to it, should find them the same.

Star rating markup

A technical option worth understanding and approaching carefully.

Structured data can mark up reviews on your site so a rating may appear in search results.

The rules around this have tightened considerably, and self-serving markup, where a business marks up reviews of itself on its own site, is treated differently from third-party reviews.

Which means implementing it incorrectly can result in the markup being ignored or the site receiving a manual action.

For a small business, the practical position is that the platform listing already produces a rating in the results, and that duplicating it through markup on your own site is a technical exercise with modest upside and real downside if done wrong.

Worth reading the current guidance before implementing rather than following a plugin's defaults.

Screenshots of reviews

A shortcut worth avoiding, and it is common.

An image of a review carries none of the text, so it cannot be read by a screen reader, cannot be indexed, and cannot be verified against the source.

It also looks like what it is, which is a picture of something rather than a quotation, and pictures are easy to fabricate.

Quoting the text with attribution and a link does everything the screenshot was meant to do, plus the things it cannot.

The counter-case

Where site testimonials are not the priority.

A regulated profession where testimonials are restricted, which makes this the wrong page to build entirely.

A business with a strong platform listing, where linking to it does more than reproducing it.

And a new business with two reviews, where a testimonials page of two is worse than none, since it draws attention to the scarcity.

In that last case the answer is to wait until there are six or eight, and to put effort into collecting them rather than displaying them.

Review widgets and what they cost

A tempting shortcut with a real price attached.

Several services offer a widget that pulls your platform reviews onto your site automatically, keeping them current without any effort.

What it costs: a third-party script on every page it appears on, which adds weight, adds a request to somebody else's server, and occasionally fails to load.

It also produces content that search engines may treat as belonging to the widget rather than to your page.

For a small site, quoting five reviews as plain text and updating them twice a year achieves the same effect with none of the cost.

The widget solves a maintenance problem most small businesses do not have, since five quotes take ten minutes to refresh.

Keeping them current

1. Date each one, or at least state the year.
2. Replace the oldest as new ones arrive.
3. Remove anything over three years old unless it is exceptional.
4. Check the links still work annually.
5. Match each to the page it sits on.

The third matters because a testimonials page whose newest entry is dated 2016 does precisely the opposite of what it was built for, and it is a very common state.

Where those reviews should be collected in the first place is covered in where reviews actually get read.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.