Where to put testimonials on your website

Most small business websites handle testimonials the same way: a page in the menu called Testimonials, holding all of them, visited by just about nobody.

Go check your analytics. That page is usually sitting somewhere below Contact and just above the one you forgot you made.

None of that is a knock on testimonials. A page of praise, off on its own, is the one part of a website visitors correctly clock as marketing, and nobody walks into the room where a business keeps its own compliments.

Testimonials work when they sit right next to the thing the visitor is doubting at that moment.

Next to the price

This is the most valuable spot on any small business website, and just about nobody uses it.

The second somebody reads your price is the second they think "is that a lot?" It's a specific doubt, at a specific moment, with a specific answer: a previous client saying the price was fair, or matched the quote, or came in under what the other guys wanted.

Three quotes, and theirs was the only one that walked me through what they found in the attic.

Put that next to the number itself rather than on some other page.

Next to the thing that scares people

Every trade has one fear that costs it work.

For general contractors it's the job that never ends. For anybody working inside somebody's home, like cleaners and painters, it's mess and strangers in the house. For anything paid up front, it's the guy who takes the deposit and stops answering the phone. We've all heard the stories.

You know what yours is. Find the testimonial that answers it and park it directly under the paragraph where you make the promise.

A claim from you is marketing. The same claim from a client is evidence. Put them side by side and the second one does the work the first one can't.

On the page they landed on

If your best-performing page is a service page like "emergency plumbing", then the emergency-plumbing testimonials belong on it.

Visitors coming off a Google search don't take the tour. They land, they decide, they leave. A testimonial two clicks away might as well be in a drawer in Schaumburg.

Near the button

Whatever your call to action is (call, book, get a quote), put one testimonial right beside it.

That button is the last moment of hesitation, and hesitation at the button is what turns an interested visitor into a closed tab. One short piece of proof at the point of commitment saves a real chunk of them.

Keep the page too

Nobody browses it, but it still earns its keep:

• It gives you somewhere to send a prospect who asks
• It's a page search engines can index, full of the words your customers use
• It's where somebody who's already sold goes to feel sure

Just don't let it be the only place. A testimonials page is a filing cabinet. The ones doing the work should be out on the floor.

How many

Three to five per spot, and no more than that.

Twenty testimonials in a row get skimmed and then skipped, same as any long list. Three specific ones get read.

Twenty is a good problem to have. Spread them around so each page carries the two or three most relevant to whatever that page is asking somebody to do. (This is what the Exalted widget does for you: approve the ones you like and put them wherever they need to be.)

The one rule

Rotate them, but never invent them. The minute a testimonial reads like the business wrote it instead of a client, every other one on the page loses its value too, and so does the price, and the guarantee, and everything else you've claimed. More on that here.