The testimonial you wrote yourself

Somewhere on your website there are three testimonials. They rotate slowly, with three little dots underneath. "Very happy, highly recommend!" - Mari K., satisfied customer.

You did not invent them. Mari really said it, on the phone, and you wrote it down. But what reached the page does nothing at all any more. No visitor has ever read the second one to the end.

And here is the heart of it. The problem is not that the sentence is untrue. The problem is that there is nothing in it anybody could check - and praise nobody can check counts exactly as much as praise you wrote for yourself. The reader does not tell the two apart, because they cannot.

Why a satisfied customer writes nothing

Before getting to what belongs on the page, it is worth understanding why you had to write it yourself in the first place.

An annoyed person has a reason to write. They want somebody to know, and they want it now. Writing is an errand that closes a feeling for them.

A satisfied person wants nothing. Their feeling is already closed, because you solved the problem. Gratitude is a fine thing, but it wears off by the next set of traffic lights. It leaves behind no sentence, no line, no star.

From that follows a consequence most owners read the wrong way. Three ageing testimonials are not a message about the work. They are a message about asking. And that gap will not be closed by your work getting better every year - it closes only when somebody asks, and asks in a way that makes answering easy.

The four questions a testimonial has to answer

"Very happy, highly recommend" answers none of them. A testimonial that works answers all four, and still tends to fit into three sentences.

• Who. Name, company, role. An anonymous testimonial is a sentence you wrote yourself - that is how every reader takes it, even when it is not true.
• What the trouble was. Not "we were looking for a good partner", but what was actually broken, missing or getting on their nerves.
• What changed. One concrete thing. Concreteness is the one part that cannot be invented, and therefore the one part that convinces.
• When. A year or a date. A testimonial with no date could be eight years old, and the reader assumes it is.

Of the four, the first is the hardest and the most important. A great many sites carry "M. K., company director", because it feels more polite. In practice it makes the testimonial disappear: there is nothing to check, and the reader draws the simplest conclusion.

If the customer will not give a name, this is not a testimonial. It is a quote. A quote has its place - you can bring it into your own text and say honestly where it came from and why there is no name - but it does not belong under a testimonials block. One named testimonial outweighs five unnamed ones.

And ask permission to link to the customer's own site. They get something back, you get a reference from a real company, and the reader can check in two clicks that this person exists. Checkability is the only thing doing any work here.

How to get words you did not write yourself

Most owners do not ask for a testimonial because asking feels like begging. It is not. You are asking for two minutes for something this person already thanked you for on the phone. There is simply one shift in the asking that changes everything.

Do not ask for a testimonial. Ask a question. "Would you write us a few words" puts a person in front of a blank page, and in front of a blank page most people write "very happy, highly recommend". A question gives them something to take hold of:

• What was it that made you choose us?
• What would have happened if this work had never been done?
• What would you say to a friend weighing up the same thing?

The answer to a question like that is the testimonial, except the person never had to invent it. And they usually answer concretely, because the question was concrete.

The second shift is simpler still: write down what they say on the phone. The best sentences are spoken aloud, while the work is being handed over, and then forgotten. Write them down at once, and ask permission later in one line: may I use this on the website, with your name and company. Almost nobody says no. But almost nobody asks either.

Ask only once. A second reminder turns a satisfied customer into an irritated one, and then you have one more testimonial, but not the one you were hoping for. How to do the same thing on the Google business profile, and why a flawless score there arouses suspicion, has an article of its own.

The line that runs here

Invented and bought reviews are a short story: do not. European consumer rules treat invented feedback as a misleading practice, and that does not change because the service itself was genuinely good.

The more interesting version is subtler, done nearly everywhere and usually in good faith: you ask for testimonials only from the customers whose happiness you are already sure of.

There is nothing dishonest in that, as long as you do not claim otherwise. But almost every such block carries the heading "what our customers say", and that sentence claims something untrue. It is not what your customers say. It is what your selected customers say, and those are two different things.

The fix is not to put bad testimonials on the page. The fix is to write a heading that is true: "What customers have told us". Two words of difference, and the reader no longer has to wonder about you. It is the same logic that runs through the rest of the page: a sentence promising more than it carries does less than a sentence promising exactly what is there.

Three places where people talk about you

And you steer only one of them.

Your own website. Here you decide what it says. That is exactly why it weighs least on its own, and exactly why being concrete is an obligation here rather than a decoration.

Your Google business profile. Here you decide nothing except the replies, and that is precisely why it is believed more. Those reviews also do a second job: they move you on the map, and somebody searching on a phone for a local trade often chooses straight from the map without ever reaching your site.

Everywhere else. The Facebook group where somebody asked for a recommendation. A forum reply. Two neighbours over a fence. The largest of the three and the only one you neither see nor steer. What social media actually does here has a separate article.

The job of the testimonials on your site is not to replace the other two. Their job is to catch what the other two started. Somebody heard about you from a friend, looked you up, and now wants to see whether it holds. They have almost decided already. Three uncheckable sentences will not carry them over the last ditch.

What a machine reads about you

More and more people no longer type the name of a trade into a search box; they ask an assistant who to recommend. The assistant does not read the adjectives on your website - every site has them and they are the same everywhere. It reads what is said about you, and it prefers sentences with a name, a place and a situation attached.

Which means a concrete testimonial does two jobs at once: it convinces a person and it gives a machine something worth quoting. A general one does neither. How the whole mechanism works is set out in a longer article.

And one technical point worth knowing, because it gets sold wrongly all the time. If somebody offers to put "review markup" on your site that will bring gold stars into your Google results, that will not happen with reviews about yourself. Google stopped showing stars for reviews a business publishes about itself years ago, precisely because anybody could write their own. Stars in a search result come from the business profile, not from your markup.

That does not make testimonials on your site pointless. They simply do a different job from the one the seller promised: they convince a person who is already on the page, and they give an assistant text worth quoting.

Half an hour this week

• Read the testimonials on your site against the four points above. If one has no name and no year, you are better off without it. An empty space is more honest than a filled one nobody believes.
• Look at the heading. If it says "what our customers say" but you picked them, change the heading, not the testimonials.
• Write out the three questions you will ask. Not a template for the customer, a template for yourself, so you do not have to think it through every time.
• Ask your last three customers. Not thirty. Three is doable, and three is already more than you currently get in a year.
• Ask for the name and the link in the same message. Going back for them later is twice as awkward.
• Put a repeating entry in the calendar, twice a year. Without it this article stays a good intention.

If your site has no place for testimonials at all right now, or the ones there date from long ago, that is part of the content work, not a project of its own. And if the website, the business profile and search are all tangled at once, we can go through them together.

Mari said something kind to you and it was real. It is only that what reached the page is no longer her sentence. It is a summary of it, and what the summary lost is precisely the part that would have convinced somebody. Next time, ask one question and write down what they answer.