Best Practice For Company/Client Logo Endorsement

[Mark_Ch]

Article: http://searchengineland.com/homepage-sliders-are-bad-for-seo-usability-163496

I came across the following article and somewhat agree with the authors summary.
I find sliders a distraction to B2B users and overall offers no SEO benefits.

Scenario
As a service provider, over time I have worked with many high profile blue chip comnpanies. As part of my site redesign, I'm looking to show users my client achievements.

My initial thoughts are to carry out the following:

On the home page I'm looking to incorporate some high profile company logos (similar to http://www.semrush.com) with a hyperlink "more customers" to the right of logo caption. The link will take the user to a dedicated page (www.mydomain.co.uk/customer) showing a comprehensive list of company logos.

Questions
#1 Is the above practice good or bad.
#2 Is there a better way to achieve the above

Any other practical advise on user experience, social engagement, website speed, etc would be much appreciated.

Thanks Mark

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi Mark,

I disagree with a lot of the points in that article. Sliders/Carousels can be done well. In many cases, I don't think brands are trying to rank for their homepage for anything other than their brand name - therefore, this strategy is serving its purpose.

IBM uses this strategy and is successful. SAP uses this strategy and is successful. And even Apple uses this strategy and is successful (I think I might have just blown a few minds with this bomb).

To your questions:

1. I think showing a representative sample of the logos for the companies you help is fine. Whether it is just 5 and they click a link to go to the dedicated page OR if you use a mini slider/carousel to show the wide range of companies on the homepage.

2. You could consider using a slider of sorts that would have a high profile company logo and a quote from someone at that company that is saying how awesome your services are... if you could get like 5 or so quotes/testimonials like that... that would be pretty awesome - in my opinion.

When done correctly, any of the text you use should be able to be indexed by crawlers, so no FLASH and no crazy difficult javascript.

If you think this is a differentiator and will help people select you as their service provider, then this is a great idea. If you are just looking to make you site look cool, you could just have a page accessible from your navigation that would like to a comprehensive list of company logos.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[GeoffKenyon]

As Mike pointed out, this is pretty subjective and I think you can pretty easily make either argument. I think I'd tend to avoid the slider as it takes up a lot of space, but that's just an opinion. If you really want to find out if one is better than the other for conversion, test it using software such as optimizely! Otherwise, I'd go with your gut.

To answer your questions:

1. I think the practice you described sounds good, should help establish credibility and trust, right?

2. Using the SEM Rush example, I might add a quote from one of the above clients for added credibility. On your /clients page, I'd probably do a couple things: I would add quotes/testimonials for each logo if possible - it's one thing to work with someone, but it means a lot more if you have a quote from them. Second, I'd look at doing case studies if possible.

As I mentioned earlier, you should really test everything. Everyone has an opinion about CRO that's based on their experience but every vertical, niche, and company is different as are their customers so don't just take someone else's word for it. Test everything!