Reviews & Testimonials For Link Building: All That You Need To Know

Having an online presence is essential if you need to promote your brand and products or services. At the same time, it establishes trust with the potential buyers. Reviews and testimonials play a key role in this context as positive ones have the potential of making your brand more credible. The significance of genuine words by your real customers does not end here because even negative ones can be valuable. They provide actionable insights that you can actually use to improve your product or service in the future.

Beyond serving these benefits, reviews and testimonials have emerged as a powerful link building tactic as well. Not only getting them helps your business, but giving them for others can also be equally advantageous. You can actually write one for someone else and avail its benefit for your link profile. If you are looking to use this tactic as a part of your link building strategy, here are some facts that you need to know about it.

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How reviews and testimonials can strengthen online marketing for businesses?

When it comes to link building, everyone knows about techniques like guest posting, blog comments, forum posts, content marketing and more. Reviews and testimonials, as an alternative technique, take you a step ahead, whether you give them or get them. Let us see how they can empower the online marketing strategy for any business.

Establish credibility of your business

Without any doubt, customers trust people rather than brands. Obviously, they are more likely to make a purchase decision on the basis of what real customers say rather than what businesses advertise. Hence, reviews and testimonials serve as a subtle word-of-mouth marketing strategy for brands. The positive ones build credibility of the business and even boost sales for them.

Improve search rankings of your website

Every single review and testimonial that a brand gets is a piece of fresh and relevant content. From Google’s perspective, it is something that updates the website, which translates into a new crawling opportunity. At the same time, something you post for another business is also valuable. Search engines see your brand’s name in the statements you post, which can increase your site’s visibility and authority. Moreover, reviews and testimonials can also enhance the chances to rank for long-tail keywords. You can analyze the comments and identify the keywords and phrases that people use and optimize your site for them.

Earn backlinks and unlinked brand mentions

Another tangible benefit that reviews and testimonials serve for your business is that they bring the opportunity to earn backlinks and unlinked brand mentions. Linked ones bring visibility automatically, while you can request the reviewer to link the unlinked mentions for direct benefits. As a reviewer, you are able to get visibility for your website by posting reviews for other businesses.

Steps to link building with reviews and testimonials

Building backlinks is easy but you cannot get great results unless you follow the right practices and take the right approach. You can go through https://seojet.net/blog/build-backlinks to understand the link building basics. It explains everything about keywords planning, anchor text usage and link maps as the elements of link building. However, things are a little different when you use reviews and testimonials for getting backlinks. Here are the steps that you need to follow.

Identify a list of relevant sites

Start by identifying the products or services that are relevant to your business and you may actually be using on a daily basis. A backlink on a review for a grammar check tool, for example, will be apt if you run a content agency. Obviously, you cannot expect a review on a makeup product to be relevant in this context. Whatever brand or product you choose to review, relevance is the key. If the other business will publish your review on their company website, consider their domain authority as well. This is because linking with a high DA site will give a push to your DA as well.

Prospect opportunities

Once you have a list of relevant sites you may connect with, start prospecting opportunities. Not every business has a provision to accept reviews directly on their site. In such a case, you can post a review or testimonial for them on a review site. Alternatively, you can share the word for them on your own website in the form of a blog post.

Write a unique review

After identifying the sites where you can post a review in their favor, the next step is to write a unique review. Whatever you write, it should be authentic and offer trust and authority as well. Don’t forget to use some relevant keywords in the text. Placing keywords near your business name in the review can boost your relevance to these keywords. This gives you better chances of appearing in search results for these keywords.

Reach out to the business

Finally, reaching out to the business you have reviewed is something that you should not miss doing. Provide them your business name and website to them and request them for a backlink. If you have good things to say, they will probably be happy to do so. Even if they don’t link back, your business name will still be there on the review. This will serve as an unlinked brand mentions, which is also beneficial for your link profile.

Use reviews and testimonials to build B2B relationships

There is another vital fact that you need to know about using reviews and testimonials as a part of your link building approach. They can actually serve as a strategy to consolidate your relationships with other businesses, specifically the one you testify for. Building genuine B2B relationships can take you a long way but this is major a challenge too. If you do it with honesty and authenticity, the other business will surely appreciate the gesture. Remember that the benefits of such relationships will be mutual. In fact, you can take this relationship forward and secure more backlinking opportunities with mutual collaboration in the future.

Now that you know how reviews and testimonials can act as easy and effective ways to earn quality backlinks, including this tactic in your plan is imperative. While writing them for others is a smart idea, you can also go a step ahead and request them from your customers and niche-relevant businesses as well.