Brand and business owners and representatives, marketing managers, reputation management specialists, and others in a similar role, can you talk about your process of collecting and utilizing online reviews, especially when it comes to embedding them on your websites? Have you found the process beneficial for your competitiveness and sales?

Question

John Karsant · Accepted Answer

Our process has three parts: collect reviews at the right moment, format them so they're usable, then embed them where they answer a specific buying question.

We collect reviews directly after a customer has completed a defined point of contact, typically after a marketing campaign has produced measurable results regarding lead quality, meeting volume, or changes in the sales pipeline. At this stage, clients have sufficient experience working with the leads generated to provide detailed, meaningful feedback on how the services provided met their needs.

Next, we prepare collected reviews to be used as evidence by tagging each review by service line (lead generation, appointment setting, and outbound),  by industry, and by the outcome experienced by the client (such as quality, speed, consistency, support)

Finally, we place each reviewed comment on pages that specifically relate to the subject matter of the comment. If a page is describing your outbound lead generation services, we display reviews that discuss lead relevance and meeting quality.  Similarly, if a page is explaining your onboarding process, we place comments that speak to the customer's experience and their interaction with our service.

Aleksey Aronov · Answer

My perspective is really a unique one. I'm a nurse practitioner with 16 years of clinical experience in hospital setting. I decided to open my own mobile IV therapy clinic in NYC called VIP's IV (vipsiv.com). I am literally doing everything myself. I literally had to learn how to set up a domain, DNS, hosting, and use WordPress and learn how to build websites. I set up my Google Business Profile (GBP) as well. This is all because I want to maintain a very lean budget. Also one of the best things about GBP is that it is super easy to use and it is free.

I collect reviews from all of my clients. I just sweet talk them into giving me a review after I provide them with services and portray on how important reviews are for business. They always give me one and never refused because I am so nice about it. I collect them right now only on Google Business Profile. To show them on my site I am using a WordPress plugin called "Trustindex.io Widgets for Google Reviews". It has a free tier which is perfect for my budget right now. It is super easy to connect to my GBP to the plugin and the reviews pop up on my website. Super easy plugin to use even for a rookie like me.

I know having testimonials visible on my website and GBP is super important for conversion and yes they are super helpful to get new clients. I know this because a lot of my clients mention that the reason why they booked with me instead of my competitors is because they saw the great reviews, comments and mentions I got.

I used Yelp in the past and used to stress a lot about getting reviews for Yelp as well when getting them for GBP. The problem that Yelp gives business owners is that for the ratings and reviews to appear on top of my Yelp Business Profile I have to be a paying subscriber. If you use their free service Yelp demotes your reviews that you got organically and writes that they are "Not Recommended" which is super annoying. In my humble opinion, this is a very crooked tactic that Yelp uses. They basically hijack your data and extort your data. I do not recommend using Yelp.

Aleksey Aronov AGPCNP-BC
VIPs IV
https://vipsiv.com

Brandon Perton · Answer

As a business owner, we treat online reviews as operational trust signals, not marketing assets. We start by collecting reviews organically after transactions. They are never incentivized or gated. This way, the feedback shows real customer experiences.

For use, we focus on selective embedding rather than dumping testimonials everywhere. Platforms like Trustpilot make this easier than it used to be. They offer several widgets, but we've found that simpler implementations work best. We've added a Trustpilot badge to key pages. This helps users decide if they can trust us with their items, without cluttering the review feeds. The goal is reassurance, not distraction.

From a performance standpoint, this has provided significant benefits. Reviews help ease doubts, speed up decisions, and boost conversions. This is key when customers are sending valuable items, where trust is more important than price. Reviews also serve to safeguard us. They help ease doubts, lower support issues, and set customer expectations before anyone reaches out.

The biggest lesson is that how you present reviews matters as much as collecting them. We focus on authenticity, not volume. By avoiding gates or incentives, we've created a 'trust moat' that competitors with curated or incentivized feeds can't match. A clean badge or summary score can boost competitiveness and sales more than filling a page with testimonials.

Riley Beam · Answer

Most of our clients are more than happy to share their experience, but they don't always know how to put it into words, or they don't want the extra hassle. Something we do, and something I think always works really well, is filming customer testimonials ourselves. We take the entire responsibility of documenting their story so they don't have to do much, which also removes friction, if there was any. We guide the conversation so they can just talk honestly about what they went through and how we helped.

Embedding them on the website has been great for trust and conversion because people dealing with legal issues are already stressed and skeptical, and polished copy doesn't always land. Hearing it directly from someone who's been in that position makes a bigger impact.

And when we use them on our website, we don't overproduce or dress them up. We pull out the most meaningful line from what they said and use that as the headline. Things like "They will fight for you" or "I was more than just another case." It best reflects what we stand for and how we treat people, without them having to dig or read a long explanation.

Yauhen Zaremba · Answer

Reviews on a website are a powerful form of social proof. We've A/B tested them multiple times, and conversion rates consistently increase when reviews are present on the page. It's important to display all reviews, not just positive ones, since a perfect 5.0 rating can actually reduce trust. While it may seem counterintuitive, we've seen cases where a small number of negative reviews increased conversion rates by making the feedback feel more authentic. We work with all major review platforms and use their built-in tools, such as post-activation review widgets, to systematically collect reviews from active customers.

Nir Shafrir · Answer

I mainly see online reviews as a credibility and discovery tool, not something that directly closes deals on its own.

At Percepto, we maintain profiles on third-party platforms like Clutch and ask clients to leave reviews there after our engagement/project is complete. That's helped us in two clear ways. First, people find us more easily through those platforms, and the reviews immediately add trust. Second, during sales conversations, when someone asks to see reviews, I usually send them to those third-party profiles rather than testimonials on our own site. The fact that the feedback lives on a credible, independent platform makes it feel more authentic, and adds the trust factor.

We haven't embedded individual reviews on our website yet, for now we just show their badges that include average star rating and link out to the profiles. Because of that, it's hard to tie reviews directly to sales. That said, after we started actively collecting reviews, we did notice that more well-known companies and brands were willing to engage and sign with us, which tells me the credibility piece is definitely working.

Overall, I feel like reviews are an important piece of the puzzle (for us and for our clients) and provide a strong supporting layer in the sales process.

Chris Kirksey · Answer

We don't request reviews at all until a client has been with us at least for 90 days. Most agencies request them immediately at the time of onboarding, or after the first month, but that's far too early in healthcare SEO. Real results take time to reflect in patient numbers and revenue and I'd rather have one review that is honest on actual results than five vague ones about how responsive we are.

The collection process itself is included in our quarterly business reviews. During those calls, we work through ranking improvements, traffic growth and lead increases. If the numbers indicate that there is real progress (which they usually do by month three or four), we ask right there on the call if they'd be willing to document that experience. The conversion rate on this approach is around 70% because we're asking when they're literally looking at proof that our work had results. We also provide them with the option of choosing which platform is important to their decision-making process when they hired us.

And with these reviews, we do not simply treat them as social proof, but as SEO content. Every review gets embedded on our website using proper schema markup to allow Google to read and index what services are mentioned and outcomes described. But more importantly, we mine the language that clients use to describe their problems before dealing with them. If a client says they "wasted six months with an agency that didn't understand medical compliance," the exact phrasing tells us how other prospects think about their pain points. So we incorporate that language in our service pages, case studies and even in our ad copy because it's how healthcare providers talk about their marketing frustrations. This alone has cut our cost per lead by 40% and increased our close rate from around 25% to 42% over the past year.

Levon Gasparian · Answer

We use customer reviews as a strategy to maintain strong relationships with our customers by increasing trust and loyalty, so we are highly focused on gathering and analyzing reviews that our customers leave on social media and on review platforms. We use different monitoring tools, but found Mention.com to be the best since our customers primarily use X and Reddit and share their experiences. We also have a customer success team that ensures to reach out to customers for feedback, and some of them land on our homepage.

We evaluate and analyze the reviews received from various platforms to help us identify our strengths and weaknesses, in order to improve our processes and be able to provide excellent customer experiences. Additionally, we always publish customer reviews on our website to enhance the customer experience when visiting our website, and also to prove to new customers that they have positive feelings toward our brand.

Our field, public records/data sharing, is super niche and people need to trust you before they even consider using your tools. We believe that by being transparent with our customers, we will be better positioned in today's competitive market. We demonstrate to a potential customer that we care about our customers by responding quickly and fairly to negative reviews. So, to conclude, using feedback from customers will significantly affect your brand reputation and improve sales if you use it correctly.

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