A new business has no testimonials. Meanwhile the competitor’s site is full of them, and they appear to be doing the work of building trust. The temptation to write a few plausible ones is real.
This article argues against that, and more usefully it is about what you can use instead. Several kinds of evidence are available while you have no reviews at all, and some of them are stronger than reviews.
What an invented testimonial actually does
The problem with fake reviews is not “it would be awkward to be caught”. The real problem is that doubt spreads across the whole page. The moment a visitor finds one testimonial suspicious, every other sentence on that page is suspect too — including the price you stated honestly and the promise you can genuinely keep. The heaviest cost falls on the claims that were true.
Readers also spot these more readily than people expect. Stock-library faces turn up on other sites through a reverse image search, and several reviews written in the same cadence and sentence shape are a signal in themselves. Depending on where you trade, advertising regulations are a separate matter again.
Four kinds of evidence you can use instead
Publishing your process is the strongest of the four. A testimonial is somebody else’s word and cannot be checked; a process can be judged directly by the reader. Set out what you do first, what you verify, and what form the result arrives in, and a reader can infer how you work with considerable accuracy.
Published pricing is a differentiator for small businesses in particular. In a market where most firms make you enquire to learn the price, stating the figure and what it does not cover is itself a trust signal. Giving the exclusions equal weight strengthens it further, because it says there is nothing being kept back.
Refund and cancellation terms are something nobody wants to read first and everybody looks for last, just before paying. Clear terms leave the impression of somewhere you can still have a conversation when things go wrong.
One more can be added: showing the actual work product. Even where clients cannot be named, you can show an anonymised report format, a tool you built, code or documentation you published. These are not testimonials but evidence, and evidence is stronger.
Getting real testimonials
Once you have a first customer you can ask. A few practical points.
Timing: immediately after the work finishes. Memories fade and so do the answers. Questions: instead of “could you write us a review”, ask specifics — what made you look for this, what you were worried about, how it actually went. Asked that way, the answers come back as sentences, and those sentences are the testimonial.
Editing: keep it minimal. Fix typos and leave the phrasing alone, because the smoother you make it the more invented it reads. Then confirm the final version with them, and agree at the same time how much of their name and organisation may be shown.
Rules for publishing them
Having only one or two is perfectly fine. Few but real beats many but doubtful. And the fewer reviews you have, the more the other four — process, pricing, refund terms, company details — do that job in their place.
Placing trust signals across a page is covered further in the SEO archive, and the screens immediately before payment are handled in the turning the site into revenue series. Why we publish our method rather than client stories, and what that looks like in practice, is on our process page.