aspect - 2:45 pm on Mar 26, 2006 (gmt 0)

I currently have over 200 testimonies on over 20 testimony pages. And we also sprinkle them around our site on the pages where we sell a services.

We also write articles which are case studies with the last word going to the customer.

We try to get a picture of the work we did, occasionally we get a picture of the customer.

It does add trust to a site, especially when not all the feedback is 100% positive (We mimic the ebay system of feedback) and we are so convinced by this that we have just added blog style commenting on many of our pages.

Gathering feedback from our customers is essential and listening to them has made a major impact to the way we do business... we hope that the onsite commenting will help us get feedback about the actual webiste.

The other thing is that testimonies (and some of them are quite long) provide extra content - add key phrases that I would never have thought of. Noting where the customer comes from has been a great help because we now show up for searches in every part of the UK, and it shows the person doing the searching that our premisis is worth traveling many miles to get to... They don't feel so stupid for travel 400 miles if somebody else did it first. And this is the whole point of testimonies and why they work!
You may have heard it said that people are like sheep, actually we are more like wolves or dogs. We go along with the pack. Very few of us are Alpha males who lead the pack by taking a chance. Most of us don't want to be the first to do something. We don't have the confidence without the pack backing us up.
If you go to a web site that offers something amazing, don't you instantly get wary and imagine it's a trap? But if you see a forum with plenty of people using it -- the very fact that there are plenty of people using it is enough to help you overcome one or two complaints you might find on the forum.
Think of a web site like a watering hole. If the watering hole looks inviting but there are no other animals about, you start to wonder if there is a crocodile in there. But if the watering hole has zebras, wilderbeast, elephants etc. You are going to assume its safe, even if one or two Giraffes are complaining that the hippos crapped in the water. :)