You noticed that every successful business has an excellent customer testimonial page on its website, which isn’t a coincidence. Positive and unbiased reviews of your products and services are fantastic ways to show that your business is good at adding value to its customers. Naturally, this will make your potential clients believe that your business is legitimate and choose you over your competitors.
Did you know that 92% of customers nowadays read online reviews and that positive ones make 68% of them trust a business more? Well, you get the idea of how powerful customer testimonials are.
Testimonials not only increase trust in your business but, if done well, can boost your SEO. This way, more people can see your website, your online traffic increases, and you can provide your products or services to an even greater range of people. As a result, your conversion rates increase, and SEO ranking increases even more… You get the logic.
How exactly do customer testimonials influence SEO?
Positive customer experiences help advertise and market their products and services, and there are many ways you can use them to your advantage. But before we get to that part, let’s go into more tangible details. Let’s speak about the main areas customer testimonials impact, that can, in turn, improve your SEO ranking.
User experience and domain authority
First, testimonial content can be displayed everywhere on your website, from the landing page or solutions page to the blog section. Don’t stress too much about testimonial placement, as long as they provide value and social proof to visitors.
When you have reviews on your websites that come from third parties, the relevance of your website in a specific subject or industry increases. This is known as domain authority and directly impacts website ranking by search engines.
Impact of testimonials on SERP placement
SEO and SERP are two concepts that are closely related. SEO is a tool used in getting a webpage to the top of the search engine results page for a relevant audience. It should also persuade users to choose the solutions the website owner is providing them. This makes SERP an essential concept in SEO. Since the number of websites is increasing day by day, it is getting harder to select the ones that are more likely to satisfy the needs of people surfing the internet. This is where customer testimonials play an important role.
Google, Yahoo, and other search engines have recognized that customer testimonials increase the value they provide to the people. Let’s take Google as an example – it aims to reward transparent and reliable websites and uses reviews as a tool to achieve that. So far, it has developed many patents that emphasize customer evaluations when assessing a business. This is a great way to provide extra value to people trying to find a solution for their own businesses.
Testimonials provide a direct link of your customers’ opinions about your business to SERPs. The process goes like this:
- Your business gets ranked by third parties.
- Google search engine bots get information on how your website is performing.
- Your business receives an increase in visibility.
Simple, yet effective. You just need to try your best to create the most beneficial solutions for your customers and make sure they provide you with a review. In turn, you will have a positive rating that will improve your SERP placement.
Practical Tips for Turning Customer Testimonials Into SEO Wins
The advantages of a good testimonial page are many, but you can maximize its impact on your business by improving your ranking in relevant search results. Knowing how to achieve this can be tricky. Considering the complexity of SEO, we have provided advice that you can start acting on immediately. This should help your testimonial section into a gold mine for your business.
Organize Your Testimonials Page
Great testimonials and customer stories are your website’s most significant assets when generating leads and closing sales. A well-designed page with different types of reviews featuring both customer video testimonials and written content makes a huge difference in your SEO efforts.
To take it a step further, analyze the key phrases that are important to your website visitors and group testimonials based on keywords. Once you know the target keywords, create a page title that contains your long-tail keyword. For SEO purposes, place it at the beginning of the title. Now, you have a keyword-rich testimonial page that can be hyperlinked to the solutions section of your website.
Analyze your testimonial page and choose the right long-tail keyword
Overall, when you update your testimonial pages to make them more keyword-focused, your SEO score will improve. Since we mentioned the importance of long-tail keywords, you should know how to choose the one that separates your testimonials page from the others. Forget about generic terms, such as testimonials, customer testimonials, etc. Instead, pick a keyword that aligns with your industry and your page’s specific characteristics. Content of your customer testimonials can help here.
Go through your testimonial page, and you’ll probably start to see recurring statements and phrases. They will expand the terms you use, create your keyword strategy and improve targeting. This is a fool-proof method to adjust to any search variation that satisfies the needs of your potential customers as well.
Build backlinks through testimonials
Testimonial link building is an excellent way to increase SEO ranking through positive reviews of your clients. The goal of it is the creation of word of mouth and at the same time exchange of links and increase in brand recognition online.
The easiest way to build backlinks is by researching all the businesses you are cooperating with and visiting their websites to see if they have a testimonial page.
Note: if the testimonials don’t include customer details, such as web address, they won’t bring you value, so you should skip them.
Contact the ones that have and ask them to appear on their testimonial page to show your (positive) opinion about their products or services. Most of them will be happy to feature you and include the link to your website inside the testimonial.
Lastly – Keep Testing
User-generated content material is gaining importance in SEO, but it keeps on evolving, so you should keep an open eye for changes in content on your testimonial pages. Focus on those that resonate well with your audience. In addition, technology keeps on evolving as well, so make sure you’re up to date with the latest trends in the search engine optimization world.
Conclusion
Testimonials provide great value to your consumers, and this is a goal of search engines. This is why using them boosts your SEO and creates a reputation for a trusted and credible business. And that is a win-win for everyone involved.
