Cultivating high-quality reviews for your business is vital for building a brand that your future customers will want to trust. Reviews allow users to gain an additional perspective on your product or service that they wouldn’t otherwise have from customers just like themselves. If you’re searching for a trustworthy company to handle this process for you, check out our suggestions for the best reputation management companies based on reviews from customers like you.
Ensuring that reviews are displayed prominently helps your brand:
- Build credibility
- Turn customers into brand ambassadors
- Utilize customer-created content
- Manage your reputation
We spoke with experts in a number of different industries about how they leverage reviews and promote customer-focused content. See what they have to say about how to be intentional about online reviews.
We let people know whenever we have earned a great review and post them on our website. We also use a review widget or direct feedback option on our website’s home page. Positioning positive client reviews so that your audience learns from happy and satisfied clients across platforms.
Reda Elmardi, CEO, StrongChap.com
Always remember that trust factors like reviews are more trustworthy if they aren’t all set apart from the rest of your content. You want your website visitors to subconsciously believe these people are trustworthy throughout the process, rather than only catering to those on the hunt for testimonials.
That’s the reason why landing pages particularly do well with short testimonials or client logos near the CTA (call-to-action). Study each click, purchase, or download as a leap of trust and these trust factors are the bridge to getting your customers there.
Collin Matthews, Founder and CEO, Cookwared
Put all your reviews, good and bad, on display to encourage customer feedback. Formulate a recommendations page on your website or get inventive by devising a campaign around sharing your client experiences.
Will Cannon, CEO, Signaturely
The most important way that we leverage our product reviews is through structured data markup. In our opinion, this is the biggest benefit of online reviews. Marketing teams can promote reviews in the SERPs by using rich snippets in their product HTML descriptions.
Google’s web crawlers will read these rich snippets and present the reviews in their search results. This helps your listing be more eye-catching when users are searching through Google SERPs for a particular query.
Jeff Neal, Engagement Officer, Critter Depot
It is important to give your reviews space on your website, especially if you are a smaller business. Having it highlighted on your home page can be a big selling point for new customers who are perhaps intercting with you for the first time, and could quite easily close your website window, never to return if they lose interest or don’t know whether you are a trusted source.
Instead of losing them, give the consumer a chance to get to know you instantly through these highlighted reviews that show your best side as a business, because even if the consumer is interested in the service or product, trust will play a massive part in their decision, especially with online scams of all sorts being so present.
Ethan Taub, CEO, Billry
Especially important for companies selling products or services through their website, having reviews appear as the consumer makes their way through the basket and towards final purchase can really help to bolster the consumer with confidence to purchase if they are having any last minute second thoughts. Having feedback throughout the purchase journey can really help to remind the consumer your positive traits, while seperate you out from any competitors they are looking at, who may not be presenting this as part of their online purchase journey
Shayne Sherman, CEO, Tech Loris
In 2018, we decided to integrate positive reviews into our social media marketing campaigns and it gave us an impressive 14% increase in the numbers of new clients we gained through that channel. Bottom line: Flaunting your site’s review in your marketing efforts and in other ways is a very efficient way to build the integrity of your brand. It draws prospects closer to you and serves as testimonies that doubtful individuals could believe in.
Natalie Maximets, Certified Life Coach, OnlineDivorce.com
According to TrustPilot, 9 out of 10 online consumers look at reviews before making a purchase. In fact, products with as few as 5 reviews show a 270% increase in conversation rate compared to products without reviews.
That said, it’s important to show reviews that are authentic. We all know of companies who only publish the best reviews and hide any negative feedback, but that’s not a smart long-term move; consumers know that perfection doesn’t exist, so aiming instead for transparency and using negative feedback as a chance to improve your product or service, and demonstrate excellent customer service is something we recommend to our e-commerce clients.
Dan Cassidy, Founder and CEO, Brandhopper Digital
I always make sure to leverage rich snippets to promote reviews. In this way, Google can take data from the structured markup to display your star-reviews in the SERP which helps to increase the click-through-rate of your website. There are many types of rich-snippet designs for your website. But, it depends on the website you are working on. Furthermore, rich-snippet results are eye-catching than that of normal search results that have no rich snippets. Not just that, websites with a proper rich-snippet tend to have a higher organic CTR on your website.
Bram Jansen, Chief Editor, vpnAlert
If you have permission to do so, a picture of the person writing the review along with their occupation really humanizes a review. This is beneficial because it adds credibility and adds more weight to what they have to say. People are more likely to listen to the experiences of other people rather than a person marketing their own service. Ensure to include some of yourmost poignant reviews in your marketing materials, and it will go a long way in convincing prospective customers.
Miles Beckler, Founder, MilesBeckler.com
We have a different approach towards maximizing the use of reviews on our site. One major practice has been to highlight a different review on our header each week. This ensures that the reviews reflect the consistent improvements we’re making on our service, while highlighting how valuable we consider all the customer feedback we get.
Yasir Nawaz, Digital Content Producer, PureVPN
I found having a page dedicated to reviews was more effective than leaving reviews under specific products. People are very cautious now when making online purchases, and even more so when it’s CBD products for their pets! What I absolutely love about our reviews is that often our customers send in pics of their pets along with the review. It really makes the page more attractive, and a lead more inclined to read the review and make a positive purchasing choice.
Chelsea Rivera, Co-Founder, Honest Paws
Our company values trust among all else and that’s why we make sure that reviews from our previous and loyal customers are available the minute visitors open our website. We highly encourage our customers to rate our service out of five stars and for them to say a thing or two about our performance. Making these detailed reviews readily available will let potential customers know what to expect out of our business.
Simon Elkjær, CMO, avXperten
We put them on the front page. We have adopted a funnel like layout for our website. You can click the moment you can land on the page or scroll down for more information. The first bit of information you land on when you skip the first CTA is the brands that have hired us and an awesome review.
I love this technique of showcasing business brands that trust us. Our clients are all business and showing seven logos in a row will have a larger impact than making space for seven different reviews.
Devin Johnson, CEO, Kennected
UGC and reviews are fantastic for Instagram ads. Especially, if you’re resharing stories that tag your brand. What better review can you get, than a happy user showing what they’re doing with your product?
Domantas Gudeliauskas, Marketing Manager, Zyro
Businesses should share and promote glowing reviews, particularly on social media, because this is just good cross-posting practices and because social signals are powerful. The wisdom of the crowd, in almost every context, is trusted.
Kasper Langmann, Co-Founder, Spreadsheeto
A very important trick with online reviews is that you generate a landing page that is targeted to the keyword of your brand + reviews. You use this page and show off all your reviews, as many as you have, for all your products and services that you are offering.
The page should have your brand and reviews in the title, and should also have some text describing how you got those reviews and why you think that they are relevant. And add a link to this page to your menu, so that your other visitors can click on it and see all your reviews.
People will often search with this keyword and will land on your page to see all the reviews, so that you can control what reviews they are seeing and show them also other things (and use them in remarketing campaigns).
Peter Mesarec, Marketing and SEO Consultant, seos.si
I am a business owner who loves to get feedback from online reviews written by customers about their experience working with our team and fulfilling their orders. One of the places we promote these reviews is in our monthly newsletter. We’ll include a blurb halfway through the newsletter of a recent five-star review and thank the reviewer for submitting this review. We also like to include a call to action and encourage readers, and customers, to leave reviews on sites like Yelp and Trustpilot.
We also send positive reviews, especially those mentioning members of our customer service team, in companywide emails. This gives the team the chance to read the review and praise the team member mentioned for their awesome work!
Deborah Sweeney, CEO, MyCorporation.com
A recent study found that customers spend 31% more with businesses that have good client testimonials. Currently, many companies harness their video testimonials to foster customer loyalty and improve business performance. Not only does it help you provide social proof and shape your brand reputation, but it will also make your company more trustworthy and credible.
Only by creating video testimonials can you generate more leads and boost conversion rates. Whether you put a video testimonial on your landing page to close mid-funnel to bottom-of-the-funnel customers or use it as tutorials to educate and convert potential customers, it is an organic and honest way to connect with your potential customers.
Alexandra Zelenko, Senior Marketing and Technical Writer, DDI Development
When it comes to online services, there are so many competitors that your clients will make sure to look at every testimonial with a fine comb before making a final decision. So it’s critical for businesses to share and promote their reviews in order to attract more clients, since word-of-mouth is still king in 2021
Sam Shepler, CEO, Testimonial Hero
One of the best ways to leverage online reviews is to control how the review is framed. You can’t do that on an open marketplace like Amazon but if you have a connection to your former customer by email then you can ask for a review in a very structured way. What you want to do is frame their review in a problem, product, solution framework. You want them to relay what kind of problem they were having, how they found your product, and how it solved their problem.
Bryan Philips, Head of Marketing, InMotion Marketing
Review streams (just another crucial WordPress plugin) have probably been the dealbreaker for us. Unlike testimonials which are often static (they don’t change unless you do the changing) review streams automate the whole process of displaying reviews. Review streams help us with gathering all our online reviews into a single data-set. It also displays a different set of reviews every day. Displaying our reviews helped us build trust among new clients. According to recent consumer reviews, 92.4% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy products from a site if they see positive reviews on the site.
David Sheppard, Webmaster, HVACJudge.com
As a small branding agency, we build websites for clients on occasion, and just recently we worked with a house cleaning service on their website where we utilized different ways the existing business had been reviewed. We used a logo bar with star ratings from the different local service marketplaces and review aggregators like Thumbtack, Yelp, and Google Reviews.
Below the logo bar we also included notable reviews and testimonials, so that they are showing that on average they are providing great service, and that their service is so good that certain individuals go out of their way to write paragraphs of praise of their service.
Jake Edmisten, Owner and Creative Director, Troubador Design Co.
Posting just the positive reviews with everything 5-stars in it gives the impression that reviews are fake. Try to showcase all sorts of reviews that you have received on your services. But for the negative reviews, make sure you also display how your customer service team responded and catered to the problem. You can market impactful customer service here to attract new customers.
Bishal Biswas, CEO, Word Finder
As a business that creates organic infant formula, our customers and their babies are our priority. Therefore, we showcase our customer reviews directly on the homepage of our website. We include an image of the parent who supplied the review along with their babies’ age and city and state of residence. We also include relevant emoji along with their review to add a fun aspect to the review.
Kathryn Schwab, Head of Content, Bobbie
Leveraging your online reviews for marketing purposes is about building your tactic around a strong quote. You can use said quote for a social media ad or make it part of a larger piece of content explaining a related idea.
Chris Laan, Founder, DesignerSheds.com
The best way I could think of displaying clients reviews on your website would be by highlighting a few different ones every now and then. Client reviews are indeed important and are worth highlighting on your website so everyone sees; however, you cannot base your company’s reputation on a couple of opinions that are years old, so maybe once a week change and add new reviews to your website’s front page.
Tom Winter, Co-Founder and CRO, DevSkiller
We decided to go with a review plugin that pulls review data directly from Google. There are dozens of them out there and they all work about the same. But one thing we do a little differently is we purposely show our less than perfect reviews. I believe this shows more transparency since we aren’t afraid to show some of our mistakes (and what we did to fix them).
Guy Peters, Founder and Owner, MOP STARS Cleaning Service
You should showcase reviews on the homepage (preferably in the 1st half), in the product description for every product you have in your online store, and on your main social profile stories and posts. I like to give a strong call to action on many of my homepages like ‘Check Out Our Reviews,’ or ‘See How this Helped Others.’ I use the reviews on my website to drive the sale, but I use the reviews on my social profiles and marketing materials to help pique interest in potential buyers.
Ron Stefanski, Owner, OneHourProfessor.com
We use reviews in two ways on our website. First, we host a rotating queue of comments left by our 3 million-plus a month shoppers who’ve either used our site’s coupons or installed our Chrome extension. These actual shoppers reviews are all about service reliability and transparency. Second, we also include a Coupon Success Rate average on our coupon category pages. Like voice-of-customer reviews, these serve to communicate the success rate and terms of each of our live coupon offerings. Few sites are this transparent, and it really helps build additional trust beyond just our user reviews.
Nick Drewe, Founder and CEO, WeThrift
Remember not to be afraid of receiving low reviews, and use this as an opportunity to showcase your commitment to customer satisfaction. There are review section plug-ins that allow customers to edit their review after receiving appropriate customer service. It would help if you showed your prospects that you value their satisfaction and that your business will not stop until they’re satisfied.
Stephen Light, Co-Owner and CMO, Nolah Mattress
We know that social proof is an important marketing tool to build trust in an online product, so we make sure that our customer reviews are front-and-center at all times. Our reviews are dated and include the option for photos and videos, so our potential customers can know that these happy customers are real, verified buyers who had a positive experience with our site and with our product.
Yuvi Alpert, Founder, Creative Director, and CEO, Noémie
Having a dedicated review section on the menu bar is a great way to let the customers know what your existing customers say about you. Always provide the basic details of the reviewer. If you offer multiple services, make sure the review is tagged with the service that the reviewer has availed. It gives better clarity.
Caroline Lee, Co-Founder, CocoSign
We have had all of our staff implement the link to our Trust pilot ratings in their email signature. The 5 star graphic reinforces that we have a solid reputation and in business, customer service is King.
Thomas Fultz, Founder and CEO, Coffeeble
We promote our video reviews on Instagram as Instagram Stories. This has proven very successful and 17% of our website traffic now comes from our Instagram video reviews. A new strategy we’re trying is asking Instagram influencers to review our products and make a post about it to their followers.
Gilad Rom, Founder, Huan
We have a highlight reel of client reviews at the bottom of our webpage. This is a nice option because it displays reviews in an ‘easy to find way’ for anyone visiting our site. They do not have to dig through a lot of content to find the reviews.
When a client enters our site and sees the positive reviews left by real people, they can feel more comfortable in choosing us to support them.
Jonathan Cohen, Co-Founder, Cohen & Winters
We showcase reviews in our ‘About Us’ page so that website visitors get to know us better and build the confidence in what we do. It helps get the word out there in a transparent manner and forms an essentialm part of the decision-making process.
Oliver Andrews, Editor, Property Claim Assist Ltd.
It’s important to reward and incentify reviews. Personally thank the reviewer. Give them a shout out, reward them with something small but special. If you do something nice for them, people will remember that and will do something nice for you. That is the law of reciprocity and it works.
Natalya Bucuy, Marketing Director, LiveHelpNow
Test out reviews on your landing pages and by your fillable forms to optimize conversion. In our tests, using tools to showcase your reviews can increase conversions by up to 50%. For our landing page, we added a review from a prominent client alongside several logos from popular companies that use us. This is vertical social proof, meaning featuring endorsements from companies that the reader looks up to.
Rochelle Burnside, Product Marketing Copywriter, Best Company
We have a webpage dedicated to success stories which also contain links to review sites like Yelp. Our dedicated page also includes video testimonials to grab the visitor’s attention as well as selected testimonials to highlight our customer reviews. There are a few major online review sites like Trustpilot, Yelp, and Google Review, but we’re not in a high volume business, so we primarily depend on Yelp reviews. Jenny Winstead, Program Manager, latutors123.com
We have embedded a third party called Trustpilot, on our front page, that provides a compilation of our service ratings and a list of satisfied customers with transparent testimonials that visitors can easily see and go through.
John Li, Co-Founder and CTO, Fig Loans
Online reviews are a great way to reinforce your messaging. If you have a testimonial that reinforces a major USP, use the testimonial. People will trust the testimonial more than your ad copy, and you’ll build credibility with prospects.
Ian Sells, Founder and CEO, RebateKey
Every page of our website has a list of testimonials at the end which shows the happy clients and the work we have done for them. Also, we add the listings in the local listings – this mirrors our hard work!
Elizabeth Hicks, Co-Founder, Parenting Nerd
Use reviews for specific products or services as part of your social media marketing. Highlight the review, thank the customer and tag them (with their permission), and get a conversation going about the content of the review. A personal recommendation from a trusted friend or relative is the best way for you to gain a new customer. Short of that, however, honest and credible reviews put new customers at ease and show that your business is trustworthy.
Dwight Zahringer, President, Pure Cabo LLC
We show reviews on each individual product, where customers are free to leave their own as well. We also have a direct link in our menu to a reviews page where we have slightly more elaborate examples with before and after pictures next to each testimonial. Other than offering easy-to-use places to leave reviews on products, we simply ask. Sending out a post-purchase email to follow up with a customer who has had enough time to try out the product. This is the perfect place to ask for an honest review and it’s also important to help reduce buyer’s remorse by keeping them engaged and letting them know they are valuable to you beyond the checkout.
Camille Chulick, Co-Founder and CEO, AverrAglow.com
Companies should share the reviews they receive – both bad and good – with their clients to show credibility. There are 67% of buyers who trust brands more when they see both good and bad reviews.
Chris Von Wilpert, Founder of Content Mavericks, Content Mavericks
Positive experiences with your brand create perfect stories for social media posts, email marketing, and advertising. Reviews are organic content that you can leverage! You may also want to consider a third party service, where you can count on the strength of their SEO to get you new customers and eyes on your brand.
Pauline Manu, Consumer Advocate Manager, Sitejabber
Online reviews should be strategically positioned around a website, ideally in three separate locations. First, social proof and testimonials should be the second thing a website visitor notices, after the hero shot and value proposition. This serves to immediately establish credibility and validate a customers’ buying decision. Second, more testimonials should be placed above a ‘Call to Action,’ somewhere that encourages the website visitor to book an appointment or view items. Finally, a dedicated testimonials page can serve to strongly establish a business in the eyes of a potential customer.
Devin Schumacher, Founder, SERP
To showcase our reviews we use a software called Endorsal.io to pull Google reviews onto our home page or anywhere we want to play the widget. We use online reviews on our website, in our email follow up sequences, and in retargeting advertising on Google and social media.
Potential new customers want to see what their peers have to say about your business. It’s a tribal thing. Even if they don’t know the person leaving the review, there’s a measure of trust they get when they see favorable reviews.
Darrell Evans, Co-Founder, Yokel Local
At Respona, we use a carousel at the bottom of our landing pages to share our user’s quotes. We reach out to some of our founding users to share their thoughts on their long term growth with the platform. We make sure that every featured review or quote has a face, personality, and level of credibility to attract similar leads.
These reviews and quotes are used as another incentive for leads to seek further information. These reviews are invaluable because they are another form of referral marketing which incentivizes leads to take action. Whether it is to do more research about our saas, click through our site, or set up a demo, the reviews help with building real estate in the heads of our target audience.
Farzad Rashidi, Co-Founder, Respona
Display ratings using a hover mechanism. When I displayed those online reviews on my product images, I got amazing results. My click-through rate was tripled and the sales have skyrocketed.
When customers hover over any images of the products, reviews are being displayed. With it, customers no longer need to scroll down to see the reviews. Instead, they’re directly being spoon-fed by the best reviews from reputable review sites and customers we have. Then they have the option to go through each review to view the detailed review.
Israel Gaudette, Founder, Link Tracker Pro
A review carousel. It’s all about putting the best foot forward with the best reviews. On my eCommerce website’s homepage, I showcase my top highest-rated reviews at the bottom using a dark mode theme. I focus on the first five reviews as I’ve proven them to be the ones that will influence a customer’s buying instincts.
Reviews that have 4 to 5-star ratings are the best ones to show. It’s important to include necessary information on the review like the reviewer’s name, star rating, first 50 characters of the review, and the review date to make it trustworthy enough. And to augment it more, it’s crucial to let them add their personal review as well.
With it, they’ll be excited and enticed to revisit your site and post a positive review when they find that your product meets their expectations. Jeff Walker, Founder and CEO, Best VPN Canada
We have aggregated community reviews from Google, Facebook, and other sites in addition to our own. Under each listing (senior living facility) we have a star ranking with a link to the reviews. By clicking this you are able to see who posted the review, on which platform, and when. These aspects are all incredibly important for anyone making an online purchasing decision.
Stephan Baldwin, Founder, Assisted Living Center
Our online reviews are positioned at the end of every webpage on our website. When it comes to marketing, we direct our traffic through our PPC and social media advertising campaigns.
Promoting and sharing reviews from clients follows the principles of client acquisition and referrals through word of mouth. Reach is a crucial and major factor when it comes to promoting online reviews. The more people know about your services, the more your brand awareness grows.
Zach Reece, COO, Colony Roofers LLC
Add review badges and add links to common sites like Yelp. These badges and links take a step further and enable viewers to check out a larger pool of reviews on other platforms like Yelp, Facebook, Google, etc.
If you have service pages, display relevant reviews on a sidebar on specific pages. For instance, if you offer deep cleaning services and a customer leaves a review for the same, include that on your deep cleaning service page. Segment reviews according to each service you offer.
Dave Nilsson, Founder and Director, ConvertedClick
One of the first things we did when designing our website was prominently display our Trustpilot rating on the top banner. It is an immediate indication to visitors that our reputation is solid, we are a quality service and that our clients are incredibly happy. I think if you are fortunate to have solid Trustpilot or other directory ratings that are impressive you should display them prominently before anything else. It’s the at a glance judgement that earns instant trust from new visitors.
Alastair Kennett, Founder and Managing Director, Optimale
When showing reviews on a website, sandwich them in between the brand story and services or product section. You want people to start to get a feel for your business, then show them a review when they start to wonder, ‘how can I trust them?’ Adding customer testimonials into targeted video ads is also becoming more popular. It makes sense, given the customer’s tendency to prefer video as a content form and rely on reviews for credibility.
Cierra Loflin, CMO, Zodiac Guides
Ultimately, developing a strategy for effective review promotion comes down to finding places to repurpose the reviews in your greater content marketing strategy. Showing off positive feedback on social media, responding to positive reviews on Google My Business, or adding reviews of your product to your landing pages are all important ways to avoid letting any positive review content go to waste.