On this week’s episode of Local Search Tuesdays, I share what might be a shocking revelation: No one cares about your testimonials page! Customers want to read honest, unbiased reviews on third party sites, and they know that your testimonials page will only list glowing 5-star reviews. Watch the video for more info, and for why you should keep the page on your site anyway.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, we’re talking about reviews again, but this time, it’s about a specific kind of review – a testimonial on your website. Wanna know a secret? Nobody cares…

Yep, you heard me right – nobody cares about that testimonials page on your site – or the individual testimonials that you have scattered through on different pages. But stick with me through the end of the video, there’s a reason you should keep it.

I know, you’re thinking I’ve lost it and totally gone bananas right now…
Most business owners freak out when I tell them this, and for good reason. Customer testimonials have been around for ages, and used to be much more powerful.

Before the internet and online reviews, the only way to find out about a business was to ask your friends and family if they’d been there – or to read the testimonials on the business’ marketing materials.

In the early days of websites, businesses simply moved those testimonials online, and they were still an effective way to attract more customers. But in today’s world, they’re almost worthless for most verticals.

Potential customers DO want to read what people have to say about you – but they want to read honest, unbiased reviews.

Think about it – if a customer had a bad experience at your business and wrote an absolutely horrible one star review about you – I’m talking a review that’s so bad it makes you cry… would you include that review on your testimonials page?

Of course you wouldn’t. You want awesome reviews on your testimonials page, so people see how great you are.

The problem is – people are hip to that game. Everyone knows that if there are testimonials on a website, they’re all going to be glowing 5-star reviews that say how amazon you are… So they’re not going to read them.

Don’t believe me? Check your Google Analytics. In nearly every case, the only traffic that hits your testimonials page is from your own employees.

There’s no value for potential customers in having a page on your site that displays 100 perfect reviews – no one will read them. Instead, set up a reviews page, like I mentioned a few videos back, and include links for all your review sites.

Instead of displaying random testimonials on the various pages of your site, display a message that says something like “see what our customers have to say about us” and link to that page, so potential customers can read those honest, unbiased reviews on the third party sites that they trust.

Don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to collect testimonials, or as they’re sometimes called, “first party reviews”. Sometimes customers won’t feel comfortable leaving public reviews, or they’re not computer-savvy enough to leave a review, but they’d be happy to leave a testimonial. It’s always good to understand how customers felt about their experience.

And even though potential customers won’t read that testimonials page, you should still include it on your site.

From an SEO standpoint, there’s one thing that’s important about testimonials: Those first party reviews are the only ones you’re allowed to display on your site and mark up with review schema, which potentially gives you review stars in search results.

And yeah, that’s not always easy to do if you don’t have a good agency partner who understands how all that schema stuff works. So if that’s you, check out GatherUp – it’s an awesome reputation management tool, and they’ve got some really easy to use built-in widgets for your site that handle the review schema markup for you.

So now you know why that testimonials page on your site isn’t really important for potential customers, but still matters from an SEO perspective. That’s all the time we’ve got for this week’s video, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here:
We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.