Testimonial links

By Bill Hartzer · Hartzer Consulting · 25+ years in search, domains and expert witness work

What testimonial links are

A testimonial link is what you get when you send a supplier, software vendor, contractor or service provider a written endorsement, and they publish it on their site with your name, your company and a link back. Vendors want social proof. Real, named, attributable customers who will say something specific are surprisingly hard for them to get. You are offering something they need, and the credit line is the standard way it is presented.

The links themselves are often good. Vendor sites tend to be established, commercially motivated to keep their pages tidy, and topically adjacent to their customers. A testimonial credit sits on a page that a real audience reads — prospects evaluating that vendor — so the link can send traffic as well as authority. And it costs you twenty minutes of writing.

All of which explains why the tactic has been run into the ground. The technique is old, widely taught, and trivially automated by anyone willing to endorse software they have never installed. That is what moves the grade from safe to situational: the honest version is fine, and the honest version is indistinguishable, at a glance, from the version that is not.

How it works, step by step

1. Inventory what you actually pay for. Software subscriptions, hosting, accountancy, insurance, equipment suppliers, the agency that built your site, the printer, the courier, the coffee. Your accounts payable ledger is the prospect list.
2. Filter to the ones you would genuinely recommend. If you would not tell a peer to use them, do not write it down.
3. Check whether they publish testimonials at all. Look for a customers, testimonials, reviews or case studies page. If they do not have one, the pitch is different and much less likely to land.
4. Write the testimonial before you ask. Send it finished. Specific, short, about one thing the product did — a result, a problem solved, a comparison to what you used before. Vague praise gets filed and forgotten.
5. Include what they need to publish it. Your name, your role, your company, a headshot and a logo file. Removing every step between the vendor and publication is the whole trick.
6. Offer more if it goes well. A short video clip or a full case study interview is worth far more to the vendor and usually earns a dedicated page rather than a line on a list.

Notice that at no point do you ask for a link. The credit line is the convention; asking for it explicitly turns a favor into a negotiation.

What it costs in time and effort

Almost nothing, which is exactly the problem. Twenty minutes to write, five to send, and the acceptance rate for genuine customers is high because you are solving a problem the vendor already has. There is no research phase, no prospecting, no relationship to build.

The real constraint is supply. You have a finite number of suppliers, and that number is small — most businesses could write ten or fifteen honest testimonials and would then be finished. That ceiling is a feature, not a limitation, because everything beyond it involves endorsing things you do not use.

The cost that does not show up on the invoice is reputational. Your name and your company are attached to the endorsement, permanently, on somebody else's site. If the vendor turns out to be terrible, your recommendation is still there. I have seen people quoted for years praising services they abandoned within months.

When it works and when it does not

It works for businesses with a real supply chain and real spend: agencies, professional services, manufacturers, retailers, anybody with vendors. It works best where the vendor sells to people like you, so the link is relevant and the referral traffic is real. And it works particularly well as a warm-up tactic for a new site with no links at all, because it produces a small number of legitimate links from established domains without any pretense.

It stops working in three situations. First, when you exhaust your genuine suppliers, which happens fast. Second, when the vendor publishes testimonials without links, which is increasingly common. Third, when you scale it.

Scaling is where the tactic becomes a liability, and I will be blunt about the mechanism. Fabricated testimonials produce a recognizable pattern: the same person and company endorsing dozens of unrelated products, in prose with the same rhythm, appearing on testimonial pages within a compressed window, always with a link. A competitor can find that pattern with a single search on your company name. So can a reviewer. And unlike most footprints, this one is written in your own words, under your own name, with your own face next to it. There is no plausible explanation for endorsing forty products in a quarter.

Common mistakes

• Writing testimonials for products you have never used. The single mistake that converts a safe tactic into a footprint. It is also, straightforwardly, lying in public with your name on it.
• Templating the prose. Three testimonials with the same sentence structure and the same superlatives are recognizable as a batch even when all three are genuine.
• Asking for keyword anchor text. Testimonial credits use company names. Anything else looks like what it is.
• Pointing the link at a commercial page. The credit points at your company. That means the home page.
• Doing it in bulk in a short window. Even genuine testimonials look manufactured if fifteen appear in a month. Spread them out.
• Endorsing anything to get the link. Your name is the asset being spent. Spend it on things you would defend in conversation.
• Treating it as a channel. It is a one-time harvest of a small, finite list, not something you can run monthly.

A worked example

A small architecture practice has no links beyond a couple of directories. Its accounts payable list produces eleven candidate vendors: a CAD software provider, a rendering service, two specialist material suppliers, a print bureau, its accountants, its insurance broker, a project management tool, a photographer, a courier and its web host.

Of those, the practice would honestly recommend seven. It writes seven distinct testimonials over four months, each about one specific thing — the material supplier who delivered on a compressed schedule, the photographer whose images won the practice a commission, the software feature that removed a step from its workflow. Each goes out finished, with a headshot and a logo.

Five are published. Four carry links. One vendor asks for a full case study, which becomes a dedicated page with images of the practice's work and two links. That is five referring domains from established, relevant sites for perhaps four hours of total work, and every one would survive any scrutiny you could apply to it.

Then the practice stops, because there are no more vendors. The version of this story that goes wrong is the one where somebody decides to keep going.

How to measure it

The counts are small enough to track by hand, which is how it should be done.

• Placement rate. Testimonials sent against testimonials published. A low rate usually means the writing was too generic or the vendor does not publish them.
• Link rate. Published testimonials that carried a link. Falling link rates across vendors tell you the tactic is aging in your market.
• Referral traffic. Testimonial pages get read by people evaluating that vendor, so a testimonial link occasionally sends real prospects. Check analytics rather than assuming.
• Survival. Vendor sites redesign often, and testimonials get rotated out. Expect attrition; in my own data the median referring domain stops linking after roughly three years, and marketing pages churn faster than that.
• Footprint self-check. Once a year, search your own company name plus the word testimonial and look at the result set the way a competitor would. If it looks like a campaign, it is one.

The verdict

Situational, and unusually clear cut about why. Written for suppliers you actually pay, in your own words, at the natural volume your business generates, this is a genuinely good tactic: cheap, fast, honest, and productive of relevant links from established domains. It is one of the first things I would do for a new site with an empty profile.

Written at volume for products you have never used, it is one of the most self-incriminating things in link building. The evidence is public, permanent, attributed to you by name, and searchable in one query. Very few tactics hand a competitor a complete report on your link building for free. This one does.

Use it, exhaust your real list, and then stop.