Speaker 1: 0:52

Hi Ed Dawson here, and, as I'm a bit busy at the moment and need a break, welcome to another one of my best of SEO is not that hard podcasts. These are the episodes from the back catalog that I think have the greatest hits and ones that are still relevant and provide great value for you. So, without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome to episode 79 of SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of KeywordsPeopleUsecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer SEO. I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years. I've built sites from the ground up, bought sites and sold sites in large exits. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Today I'm going to talk about why you should be collecting and using customer testimonials on your website. It's just a pure fact in marketing that recommendations and testimonials matter. If a friend recommends you something, you are going to pay a lot more attention to that product, service or experience than if you don't have any recommendation from anybody product service or experience than you if you don't have any recommendation from anybody and the next best thing is a recommendation just from any third party. So, while it's important that you actually blow your own trumpet and put on your own website why your product and service is great, nothing really beats other people giving their view and sharing it with potential customers. Now, as well as being obviously a really positive thing to have customer testimonials to share with potential new customers, it's also good for SEO, for example, with helpful content updates and you know EEAT being a thing now then obviously to have customer testimonials and real reviews of people on your own site and on other sites is actually an indicator of eeat. It shows that you've got real customers who are really enjoying the service or the products that you provide. And even if it's your website that is just purely informational, you can still have testimonials. You can still have people um people's testimonials shared on your website that show that you're actually been useful for them and helpful. So, yeah, it's a really really powerful thing to do and it's really easy to do.

Speaker 1: 3:03

So let's have a look at how we can go about actually capturing reviews. So the first tip is really simple Just go to see if people have left reviews for your products, your website, your services elsewhere already online. So that could be places like Facebook reviews, google reviews, places like Trustpilot, just people talking on Facebook or on LinkedIn, or people talking about your website or service on their own website website. So have a look around for those first and see if you can find any good testimonials there, because then you can just go straight to those people and say do you mind if I just put this on my website? Thanks so much for sharing and saying how great you think we are. Is that okay if we just feature your words on our website and you'll find, most of the time people say, yeah, that's fine, hey, great, brilliant, put it up and you can provide them a benefit as well.

Speaker 1: 3:50

But if you want to, by linking to the source of their review Say, if it's someone reviewing you in a blog post or something like that, then just link back to that blog post. It's good for them. They get a link. It's good for you because you can also show directly this is where that link is, and it really will boost your credibility straight off. So that's the first thing Just look for reviews that exist that have organically just been created already online, and the second way of gathering reviews is actually to ask people for them.

Speaker 1: 4:18

Now it's going to depend upon the type of website you've got as to when is the best time to ask people now. If you're the kind of website that has users where you've got an email address, that's great. I would ask people via email after so many days after they've signed up whether they will provide a review if they're enjoying the service you can. If you're selling people products, so many days after they've received the product, you can email them and say can you review the product? Can you review our website? And if you are an informational website where you don't have people's details like that, you can just put calls to action on your website saying have you enjoyed reading this? Has this been helpful? Please click here to leave us a review. And those are just simple ways you can do that and you can just ask people to fill in a form or reply to an email, and those are all great ways of gathering reviews.

Speaker 1: 5:10

The alternative is you can actually there's plenty of tools out there that you can use to help capture reviews for you. Keywords people use. We actually use a service called Sender and their URL is senjaio. I'll put a link to it in the show notes and they provide a really nice sort of landing page to capture reviews, and it'll help capture video reviews as well audio reviews. It'll let people leave a picture so they can go with the reviews and they help create um sort of different ways of sharing those reviews with other people. And they're not hugely expensive and they're actually free um for the first 15 reviews and then after that you can pay if you want to use more of the reviews down the line. But there's a great way of actually providing that lead capture form for people to put reviews in. They're really good and we found that since using them our actual review rate has gone up, so really really useful.

Speaker 1: 6:09

Now in terms of helping persuade people to leave your review. You can actually just ask for the ask for reviews with no incentive, and you still will get some, especially if you've got a really great product. But it always helps to try and incentivize people a little bit. Now I wouldn't suggest incentivizing people to the point where they will just do the review just to get the incentive, because then you're probably not going to get the best reviews and you're also not necessarily going to get genuine reviews. But there's nothing wrong with doing little incentives, and those could be things like offering people coupons, discounts or entry into giveaways. A little one that we've been doing at QH People Use is when we send people a review request, we say to them that they'll get a bonus, free reward, if they provide a review, but we don't say what that reward's going to be, and then it gives a curiosity gap where people go, oh, I'm going to get something, but they don't know what. So to find out what they're going to get, they have to leave a review, and that's that has actually helped us boost our review rate by probably at least two or three times after we put that, that sort of unknown reward in. So that's, that's like a really good thing to do to try and boost the numbers, and that's something I'd recommend.

Speaker 1: 7:30

So once we've got some review, do we use them to the best effect? Well, we're obviously trying to use them to boost our conversion rate. So it's a conversion rate optimization piece. So we want to put them in places where people first interact with us. So you want some on your homepage so that when people first come across your brand, they see other people in positive reviews of your brand. So it reinforces, it's like a social proof piece that when people come to your site they see other people like them, saying you know how this site has helped them. So that's but the first place.

Speaker 1: 8:05

I would definitely also use it wherever you've got calls to action. If you're trying to get people to sign up or try something for the first time. If they've got other people there saying how it worked for them, then that's going to get people to sign up or try something for the first time. If they've got other people there saying how it worked for them, then that's going to boost people following those calls to actions. It's also great to use, if you have an email sequence the follow-up sequence for anyone that's signed up to your service to put those reviews in as part of that email sequence to further reinforce that social proof message around your product. Let people know that you know they're not alone in using your product. There are other people using it and how it's solving problems to them and how they're getting a return on their investment in your product and how they're enjoying using your product you know. So make sure you get them in all the right places. And if you're selling physical products, obviously get those reviews of those physical products on your product pages. Get those reviews of you as a e-commerce provider on pages such as when you're going through checkout or on your home page to show you're a reputable supplier of these products, and then you get specific product ones down at the product level. So it's all about finding the right place and for the right kind of review to sort of boost that social proof and that conversion rate. So my takeaway for you today is get collecting testimonials on your website and then start sharing them with your prospective customers to boost your credibility and your social proof and your conversion rate.

Speaker 1: 9:39

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywords people usecom to get an instant hit of more seo tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick seo tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel 5 on twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of seo is not that hard.