How to put the recognition you've earned where customers will see it

Here is something we did not know until we went looking. When a newspaper says something kind about your business, that is the newspaper's opinion. The moment you put a line of it on your own website, federal advertising guidance treats it as your advertising. The Federal Trade Commission's guides on endorsements use exactly this case as an example: a critic's review is just a review, but an excerpt from it used in the business's own ad becomes an endorsement, and it has to fairly reflect what the critic actually said.

The second thing we did not know: an old endorsement does not have to come down just because it is old. In one of the same guides' examples, an older endorsement posted on social media does not have to be deleted, as long as its date is clear to anyone looking at it.

Put those together and you get a simple instruction. Show what you have earned, show it accurately, and put a date on it. The rest of this guide is how.

Take stock of what you already have

Recognition piles up quietly. It sits in places a customer will never think to look: a framed page behind the register, an email from an association congratulating you, a line on a trade group's member list, a certificate in a drawer.

Spend twenty minutes making a list. Five kinds of thing belong on it:

For each item, write down who gave it, the year, and where the original lives, a link if there is one. That last column is what makes the rest of this easy.

Put each one where the decision happens

A single "Awards" page is better than nothing, but recognition works hardest next to the decision it supports. A few rules of thumb:

• Your strongest item goes where a first-time visitor lands. Usually that is your homepage, near the top, in one plain sentence. Not a logo wall. A sentence: who recognized you, for what, and when.
• A person's credentials go beside that person. If a customer is choosing whom to see or whom to hire, the board certification or the twenty years belongs on that person's section, not on a separate page they will never open.
• A certification goes beside the service it certifies. If you are certified for one kind of work, say so on the page that sells that work, and if the certifying body publishes how its credential should be described, use that wording, word for word.
• Accounts you serve belong on the page a business buyer reads: wholesale, catering, commercial, corporate orders. A restaurant owner deciding on a supplier wants to know who else trusts you. A walk-in customer mostly does not.

Make it checkable

The difference between a claim and a credential is whether a stranger can confirm it. Three habits do most of the work:

One more comes straight from the FTC's guides:

A small one we liked: if you paid a fee to be certified, you do not need to announce the fee. The guides' own example says customers expect that kind of certification to cost money, so there is nothing to disclose.

Ask before you borrow

Some recognition belongs partly to someone else, and a short question saves an awkward email later.

Keep one number true

This one is easy to slip into and easy to fix. A business opens in a particular year. Then the website says "over thirty years" on one page, "celebrating twenty-five years" on another, and a banner from an anniversary nobody took down. Each was true when it was written.

A founding year never goes out of date. A count of years goes out of date every January. Use "Since 1994" everywhere and let the reader do the arithmetic, and the problem cannot come back.

The same goes for anything else with a number in it: staff counts, "serving X customers," how many locations. Pick the version you can keep current, or give it a date.