Nobody Searches for Testimonials. It’s All About Reviews.

There is a page on almost every law firm website that has been using a keyword that consumers stopped using over a decade ago. It usually lives in the main navigation, between Attorneys and Contact, and it is labeled “Testimonials.”

And we just ran a study that showed 35% of law firm websites have a testimonial page that literally nobody is searching for.

What are people actually searching for?

I recently pulled Google Trends data for 2025 in the United States. I was curious about whether anybody actually searches for “testimonials.” It turns out, they don’t. Consumers search for “lawyer reviews” and “law firm reviews” or maybe even “YOUR LAW FIRM reviews.”

But testimonials? Zero. As in, not a measurable amount of search interest across an entire country over twelve months.

However, the law firms have been slow to notice. To find out how slow, my team at Custom Legal Marketing ran a broader audit through our AI law firm marketing platform, Sequoia. We crawled the main navigation of more than 7,000 law firm websites that rank in the top organic positions across 288 U.S. cities and eight practice areas, and we classified what each firm publishes in its primary menu.

What we found is that 35% of those firms still publish a “Testimonials” page in their main nav. Only 27% publish a “Reviews” page. The label nobody searches for is winning the label war on law firm websites by a substantial margin.

What happened? Why are law firms using an extinct keyword?

The word “testimonials” is a carryover from print advertising, where law firms would quote happy clients in newsletters and brochures. The word implied something curated, something the firm had selected and presented under controlled conditions. It also distanced the firm from the Wild West of unmoderated online opinion. But unmoderated opinons are what the people really want.

Nobody gives a “testimonial” anymore. All platforms are about “Reviews.” Thus, the consumer word migrated and so did their search behavior.

So you have testimonials, what are you gonna do about it?

Immediately after our study, we audited our websites and found that testimonials were still present in our own portfolio of law firms. By the end of this month, we will be testimonial-free, and you should try to be as well. Fortunately, it’s a pretty easy procedure.

First, change the page title and the navigation links everywhere they appear. The H1, the title tag, the header menu, the footer menu, and the mobile menu should all read “Reviews” or “Client Reviews” at the same time.

Second, change the URL slug. In WordPress this is the permalink field on the page editor. Change “/testimonials/” to “/reviews/” and save. Note, this will break all links pointing to …/testimonials/, which is why the next steps are critical.

Third, search the rest of your website for the old URL and replace it with the new one. Internal links from blog posts, practice area pages, attorney bios, and the footer should point directly to the new URL, not bounce through a redirect.

Fourth, put a 301 redirect in place from the old URL to the new one. If there are backlinks pointing at your old testimonials page from places you cannot edit: directory sites, bar association pages, news mentions, podcast show notes, you don’t want to lose that authority. The 301 redirect transfers the existing ranking signals to the new URL and keeps those external links from breaking. Leave the redirect in place permanently.

After all four steps are complete, you’ve officially moved on from the old dinosaur vocabulary and you might even see traffic pickup on your new “reviews” page.