Earning trust and building social proof for your brand is a non-negotiable and crucial element to increasing your brand reach—especially in this day and age when authenticity is unmistakably important.
One of the best ways to garner more trust from buyers is through testimonials. These can turn non-persuaders into actual customers and generate natural links for your website.
Testimonial link building is a natural link building campaign in which genuine feedback is given about the offer, tool, or any content published on the website in hopes of earning backlinks.
Unlike other link-building campaigns, testimonials are earned through actual use (authentic experience). So, it is backed by human beings truly doing great work and cannot simply be automated by tools or technology.
How to Execute Testimonial Link Building
The best part of this guide is knowing how to use testimonials to earn links for your website. Let’s dive in.
Step 1: Identify Opportunities
Start looking within your business ecosystem. Simply identify which entities can be potential testimonial opportunities. You can make a list of software subscriptions, vendors/suppliers you purchase goods from regularly, service providers like agencies and accountants, and training or courses you’ve attended.
Since you’re a paying customer or user, these entities can highlight your feedback or testimonial to attract more clients.
Next is to check if the vendor or company has a section on their website dedicated to showing off their testimonials – i.e., any page on customer stories, case studies, testimonials, or success stories.
You can see it directly on their website’s footer or menu, or you can run quick Google searches like “tool/company name,” “testimonial,” or “case study.”
You’re doing this because if companies can display testimonials, they’re more likely to accept and publish yours (with a link to your site—as you can see in others).
Step 2: Craft a Strong Testimonial
You can only get a link if you provide a good testimonial. To increase the likelihood of approval for your testimonial, focus on tangible results (e.g., since using the XYZ tool, our team has cut reporting time by 35%).
Most companies want their testimonials to feel human and credible, so permitting them to use your photo, company logo, or any asset that will show actual results (e.g., screenshots) will increase the credibility of your testimonial.
Step 3: Outreach and Submission
Once you’ve secured an opportunity for a testimonial, reach out and send it to them. It is also best to give optional formats to make the editing much easier, i.e., providing formats – i.e., text, short quote, or video.
Don’t forget to include a homepage link to your website.
Step 4: Maintain and Monitor
After your outreach campaign, invest time every week to monitor your testimonials. You can use tools like Ahrefs’ alerts or Google Alerts to spot new brand mentions.
Another testimonial link building strategy is reaching out to outdated testimonials you’ve given before and offering to refresh them based on your current tangible results. The idea is that it will help preserve the backlink’s value (not lose it along the way, as they may have changed their webpage’s content, etc).
Advanced Testimonial Link Building Strategies
If you follow the step-by-step process above on how to earn links through testimonials, you’re good to go. But if you’d like to innovate and be more creative with link building, here are a couple of tactics that you can try:
Video testimonials (higher chance of being embedded)
While text testimonials are easy to pull off, adding an extra layer of authenticity by showing your actual face or results through videos can help better explain how the product, service, or any kind of offering has helped your work. It carries more emotional weight than other content formats – making it difficult for your target prospects to ignore.
On top of it, video testimonials can easily be embedded – increasing the likelihood they’ll include your testimonial.
Offering co-branded case studies with partners
Exerting more effort into your testimonial makes much sense, especially if you’re going after high DR sites that are authoritative and trustworthy in your space. One way to stand out is to offer collaboration on a full case study instead of a mere short testimonial.
A co-branded case study may include the actual challenges you faced, the entire process by which the vendor/partner or company helped solve them, and the tangible results achieved along the way.
In an era of content marketing, case studies are more powerful and get more published. This could increase the chances of earning backlinks from other highly authoritative pages, both from the website you gave a testimonial to and from other publishers who’ve seen the work.
Combining testimonials with social proof badges
One advanced testimonial link building strategy that many search marketers highly regard is complementing testimonials with social proof badges (e.g., “Trusted by 9,500+ customers” or as simple as “As used by XYZ company”).
By providing the testimonial, you may also request inclusion in those recognition areas – where placements can be company logo placements with links, brand mentions as partner or “featured client” pages.
The combined testimonial and social proof badge is a solid testimonial link building strategy that can help you earn homepage links and brand associations with other reputable entities, strengthening your authority in LLM and traditional search rankings.
Industry-Level Applications of Testimonial Link Building
If you want more nitty-gritty into execution, here’s how testimonials can work in market-specific link-building campaigns.
SaaS
Software-as-a-service brands heavily rely on social proof from real users. Basically, it’s not that easy to sell software subscriptions, so they are constantly looking for testimonials from real customers. You’ll see this play out in many SaaS markets, with dedicated pages for customer stories, testimonial links, and results pages. And a bonus if most SaaS websites today have higher than DR50—juicy links.
Agencies
Any marketing, design, or consulting agency often features credible client and partner reviews. These add an element to social selling and closing new deals by actually showing trust from existing clients’ campaigns. So, if you can provide clear, detailed testimonials (including screenshots of analytics and results), you’ll have a chance of gaining visibility from their websites.
B2B
B2B vendors and suppliers have their case study library or customer spotlight section where your testimonial can be integrated. This gives you the SEO upside of links, reinforces more of your brand’s topical authority, and positions your brand as a trusted and legitimate user of certain professional services.
Local Businesses
Don’t ignore smaller, local businesses. They often build community trust that is sometimes way more powerful than national brands—especially if you’re targeting a hyperlocal audience for your products or services. By exchanging testimonials with trusted local partners, you not only help them acquire more customers, but in return, you get highly relevant local links, which are powerful in ranking your website for local SEO.
Written By
Reviewed By
Sef Gojo Cruz
COO at SharpRocket, overseeing end-to-end operations, from crafting link building strategies to leading high-performing teams. Previously led SEO initiatives at Workhouse, a digital agency in Australia, and Keymedia, a real estate media company based in New Zealand.
