SEO for Testimonial Pages: 7 Helpful Tips

The social proof generated from customer testimonials makes them one of the most valuable additions to your website. By strategically segmenting the testimonials you collect and placing them on your website you can ensure that you reach the right target audience. An important piece to ensuring your testimonial page performs well is optimizing the page for SEO. Taking steps to ensure that your page shows up in search for the right audience is the best way to draw traffic organically to your testimonial page. SEO strategies are changing all the time, so we’ve updated this post in 2022 to give you the most up-to-date information.

What is SEO?

First of all, what is SEO? Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of changing your content to make it easier to find in a relevant search. There are many elements to SEO, but a few tips can enhance the SEO on your testimonial pages, and make them easier for customers to find. When users can find your testimonial pages easily, they’ll be able to quickly see that your customers support you and your business delivers on its promises.

SEO is more complicated than simply matching keywords on a page to keywords in a search query. Google’s most recent updates allow the search engine to understand language at a high level. This means that good information, language structure, and functional elements like page load speed are more important than keywords. While matching keywords to a user’s search query is still an important factor that Google uses to bring users to the right page, those keywords no longer have to be used verbatim. So, it’s important to keep in mind the overall messaging on the page and the overall performance of the site.

Here are 8 Tips to Enhance SEO for Testimonial Pages on Your Website:

#1: Choose a powerful long-tail keyword

Many businesses have testimonial pages so it’s important that you choose a specific long-tail keyword that differentiates your page from the rest. Simply using the keyword “Testimonials” or “Customer Testimonials” will not be effective and optimizing your page for search. Choose a keyword that aligns with your industry and other differentiating factors of your page.

Also, consider what your audience might search. They might search a term like “do customers like Example Business?” or another phrasing searching for quality or verification of your performance.

#2: Create a keyword rich page title

Once you know what keyword you plan to target, you need to create your page title. Make sure you add your long tail keyword to the title. It’s more powerful to add it to the beginning of the title for SEO purposes.

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#3: Select a page URL that aligns with your title

Now that you have a keyword rich page title chosen, you need to create your page URL. Depending on how long your page title is you can either use the entire string of text, or shorten it to help it perform better in search. It’s essential to include your long tail keyword in your page URL as well.

#4: Write a meta description

Next, you’ll want to further optimize the page by writing a meta description that aligns with your page title and URL. This description will appear in search results and be the first description a user sees when looking at the search results generated. Make your description concise and include your long tail keyword.

#5: Add some on-page content

You’ve chosen a keyword and optimized the title and URL to align with that keyword, and now you need to ensure there is supporting content on the page. Having keyword rich on-page headings and body text will help you perform better in search. Taking the time to write body content that correlates with the customer testimonials you add to the page will strengthen your on page SEO.

Also, if your customers have submitted text testimonials, make sure these are readable by web crawlers. These web crawlers will determine what your page is about, and feed this information into a search engine’s algorithm, which will then decide how to rank your page on a search engine results page, or SERP. If the web crawlers can’t read the text on the page—if, for example, it is contained in an image element instead of included as text on the page—they can’t determine what your page is about.

#6: Choose alt text for page photos

When designing your page pick an image that aligns with your long tail keyword, and update the alt text to include your keyword. This will strengthen your page’s message and improve your search rank.

#7: Build links

Links are also a very important part of SEO. Your text should include links to other, relevant, pages. For example, when a customer’s testimonial mentions a particular product or service, you might include a link to it. It’s also helpful to include links to other reputable sites. This can be difficult for some testimonial pages. If you have testimonials from other reputable businesses, it can be helpful to link to their websites.

Finally, it can help your SEO strategy substantially when other sites link to yours. See if you can find unlinked mentions of your site, products or services. When you find these, contact the site owner to see if they will link to your site. Remember, this will only help your SEO if the site is somewhat reputable. Some links are considered toxic, and should be disavowed, or they’ll actually hurt your SEO value.

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#8 Improve page performance

Google and other search engines want to deliver the best experience to their users. This means they prioritize pages that perform well, since these pages are more likely to answer a user’s questions quickly and effectively. If your page loads quickly and it’s easy to navigate your site, Google will be more likely to rank it higher on a SERP. Google offers free tools like Optimize to help webmasters fix problems on their site and improve functionality.

Overall, updating elements with relevant keywords and improving the page’s performance will help you improve SEO on your testimonial pages. By optimizing for search, you have a better chance at bringing organic traffic to your testimonial page. This, in turn, will allow your current customers to do the talking for your brand.