Many customer review sites, such as Tripadvisor, G2 and TrustRadius, enable you to embed reviews of your company directly from their website onto yours. An increasing number of third-party tools enable you to pull and even curate reviews from virtually any site.
Embedded reviews can be a powerful addition to your website, because they earn trust with visitors in two ways: (1) by providing third-party validation and (2) by pulling this validation directly from a respected neutral source.
Trust But Verify
Buyers tend to trust information about your company on third-party sites more than they trust the same information on your own site. That's why -- no matter how many wonderful testimonials and case studies you might have on your website -- many customers will turn to online review sites to verify your story.
Did you know that there is a successful B2B tech reference site, FeaturedCustomers.com, that has built its entire business on scraping and resharing your website's testimonials and customer stories on its own site? It even charges companies for sponsorships -- of their own content!
Why does this business model work? Because the exact same content about your brand is trusted more when it's on somebody else's website.
Embedded reviews flip this scenario around. They allow you to pull third-party content onto your site -- but within an embedded shell that tells visitors that the content hasn't been produced by you but by a neutral third party. It gives you a better chance of keeping tire-kickers on your website. Remember, according to a HubSpot study, more than 85 percent of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
In addition to the review sites that allow you to embed reviews onto your site either for free or as part of a sponsorship, a cottage industry has emerged in review site management software. Many of the top vendors, per Capterra, allow you to manage and embed reviews directly onto your site.
Embedded Star Ratings
Just as you can embed full reviews from review sites, you can also embed your aggregated star ratings from a variety of sources. For those scanning your site, seeing five gold stars from reputable review sites is a great trust-builder.
Getting Started
Where to embed reviews? If you have individual products that are reviewed, embed those reviews on the relevant product pages within your website. If the reviews speak to your company as a whole, don't be shy; add them to your homepage. And if you're an online merchant, embedded reviews in the checkout process can dramatically increase conversions.
If you are concerned about the occasional one-star review popping up on your site, no worries. Many review sites and tools allow you to curate reviews so that negative reviews do not appear.
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