Reviews help you show social proof, they can mirror and solve people’s hesitations, and show you’ve delivered your product or service to a real person. But they can also help you to rank higher in Google and other search engines and see more traffic land on your website, when they’re done well.
Your customers can leave you reviews on Google and Facebook. Their platform of choice identifies them as being more of a real person, and so this helps give you some authority. You can’t share them on Google or Facebook on their behalf, so it's best to direct them there and copy it for your website.
On Google, they do this right on your Google My Business profile, a free account that showcases your hours, phone number, location, website, photos or videos too. The more reviews you have and the higher of a rating they give you, the more likely you are to show first when your summary or business name matches the search. There are a few other factors at play, so having the most reviews won’t always show you first, but it certainly helps.
Facebook Reviews do also give you credit, but Google shows theirs a little more, so if you are providing them with the link, send them to Google instead. You can do this by going to the Home section of your Google My Business login and looking for Get More Reviews.
When sharing screenshots of an email, this certainly helps people feel like the review is more legitimate, and it can help when designing, but changing those into text can be better for matching your pages to Google searches since it’s more text.
They might also be using different wording to what you have elsewhere on the page and since it’s been written in their own words, it might better match words the searcher is also using. You can still use screenshots on social or email, but text is best for your website.
If you own a local only business, putting the location next to the person’s name on a testimonial can help you to rank for that as an extra search term. Say you work in a city or state, mentioning the suburb of that local client could be helpful, since you might not want to just list all the suburbs somewhere.
If the location isn’t important for your business, pick something that is more relevant for you, like the type of business, or the service or product they are referring to.
A page with a review or testimonial is likely to keep someone clicking around, reducing your bounce rate and signalling to Google that they’re interested in what you offer. A bounce occurs when Google can’t register a second interaction on your website and it’s considered a bounce because they often end up back on search to look further.
This behaviour tells Google that your page answered the search so they consider your page as being more useful, especially compared to a site who might match, but has a higher bounce rate.
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