Hi. Just wanted some advice regarding testimonials for my business wordpress website. I do not sell anything but offer a service and will ask my clients to leave a review once the job is completed.
I wanted to know what to use for my testimonials ie a wordpress plug in such as FIFO or a 3rd party review site such as trust pilot, which or trustrader? I know the 3rd party sites require a fee but would this be beneficial in terms of seo for my site etc or is there no difference from using the free FIFO plug in?
Testimonials can help with customer confidence in your offerings.
You could choose to use a 3rd party service but that relies on your customer making the effort to post a review, then you always have the possibility of negative comments so you need to be prepared for those and deal with as necessary.
You can always ask your clients for testimonials and publish then on your own site. This is straightforward, just add testimonials as entries and display on your site as required.
Where I set this up for clients I normally set up a dedicated publishing channel for testimonials so they can add the following data
Client name
Client business name
What service(s) or product(s) the testimonial relates to can then be used on service/product page
Their full quote
Short quote version if using in pull quotes etc
Which zones to display quote in eg home page, category pages…
Thanks for that Bluedreamer so you don’t use either correct me if iam wrong your method is like a contact form? I presume then that clients are asked to go to the selected page and leave a review?
It depends what my client wants, they rarely ask to use 3rd party solutions so they are in control of any testimonials they want to use.
Most of them ask their own clients to supply a testimonial via email, then the client will enter it into their content system after they have corrected spelling mistakes, grammar etc. Sometimes supplied quotes can be very long so this also gives them a chance to precis them down a bit as well!
Right but how does all this stack up on the seo front? Would it be more beneficial in terms of seo having testimonials from a 3rd party site or does it not make any difference whatsoever?
Instead of worrying about SEO I’d suggest focusing on how testimonials may help your business in terms of increased sales, customer satisfaction and so on.
If you use a 3rd party site then search engines will crawl testimonial text but I wouldn’t rely on it being prominent in search results.
That’s correct - especially as the testimonials are unlikely to contain the actual terms that people will search for. After all, a testimonial might typically say “You supply an excellent service at a reasonable price” without mentioning the name or description of the product or service that a searcher might be looking for.
The real value of testimonials is in promoting customer confidence about your product or service. As you rightly say, you shouldn’t focus on any supposed SEO benefits.