Knowledge base / Local search
Reviews, without gaming them.
Asking properly beats every shortcut, and the shortcuts carry a real risk to the listing you depend on. This is the method, including what to do when the review is fair and bad.
Key takeaways
- When is the best time to ask? At the moment the customer is most pleased, which is usually right after the work is finished and checked, not days later in a batch email.
- How should I ask? In person or by a short personal message, with a direct link to the review form. Make it one tap. Every extra step between the ask and the form loses most of the people who meant to.
- Can I offer a discount for a review? No. Incentivised reviews are against Google’s policies, and the risk lands on your listing rather than on whoever advised it. It is also the pattern most likely to be reported by a competitor.
- What do I do about a bad review? Answer it quickly, in public, without arguing. The reply is read by everyone deciding whether to call you, and a calm reply to a fair complaint does more good than the complaint did harm.
Why do reviews carry so much weight?
They feed prominence, which is one of the three factors deciding the map pack. They also decide which of three listings a person taps once they see it, which is the part that turns a ranking into a phone call.
The second job is the one owners undervalue. Moving from third to first in the pack is worth little if the first listing has nine reviews from 2023 and the third has sixty recent ones. People read before they tap.
How do I ask so people actually do it?
- Ask at the peak. The moment the work is done, checked and they are visibly pleased. Satisfaction decays fast, and a request three days later lands on a different person.
- Ask in person first, then send the link. A verbal ask followed by a text with the direct link converts far better than either alone.
- Make it one tap. Use the short review link from your Business Profile dashboard. Anything that requires searching for your business loses most of the people who intended to help.
- Ask for something specific. "If you could mention the leak repair and how quickly we got out to you" produces a review that is useful to the next reader. "Leave us a review" produces "Great service".
- Make it somebody's job. The businesses that accumulate reviews steadily are the ones where asking is part of closing the job, not a thing the owner remembers on a quiet Friday.
What should I never do, and what does it risk?
Three shortcuts come up repeatedly, and the cost of each lands on your listing rather than on the person who suggested it.
Buying reviews. Detection has improved and the reviews get removed, sometimes with the listing. The pattern is also obvious to a reader: ten five-star reviews in one week from accounts with no other activity.
Incentives. Discounts, entries into a draw, a free coffee. Against the policies regardless of how it is worded, and a competitor can report it from the review text itself when a customer helpfully mentions the discount.
Gating. Sending happy customers to the public form and unhappy ones to a private feedback page. It is explicitly disallowed, it is built into several review-management products, and plenty of businesses are doing it without knowing.
The common thread is that all three put the free asset your local visibility rests on at risk, to save a few weeks of asking properly.
Answering the bad one
A fair bad review answered well is worth more than its absence, because it is the only proof a reader has that the good ones are real.
Answer within a day or two. Thank them for the specifics. Say what went wrong in plain words without blaming them. Say what you have changed, if you have changed something. Offer to take it offline and give a direct way to reach you. Then stop, whatever they reply.
What loses customers in public is not the complaint. It is a defensive reply, a reply that argues about the facts, or a reply that reveals something about the customer they did not share. Every person reading it is deciding whether this is what happens if something goes wrong on their job.
Review questions
Only if it breaks the policies: it is spam, it names an unrelated business, it contains abuse or personal details, or it comes from someone who was never a customer. Being unfair is not grounds for removal. You can flag it, and you should expect to be answering it rather than deleting it.
Yes, briefly and specifically. A reply that names the job and says something real reads very differently from fourteen copies of 'Thanks for your feedback!'. The replies are public writing about your business, and people do read them.
Ask the ones you have genuinely served well, which is most of them. What to avoid is filtering: asking only the delighted and routing the unhappy somewhere private is known as review gating and it is against the policies. Ask broadly and answer honestly.
There is no number, and a steady trickle is worth more than a large total that stopped two years ago. Recency is what a reader checks: a profile whose newest review is from 2024 reads as a business that has gone quiet, whatever the average says.
Worth having where your customers actually look, and not worth chasing across twenty sites. For most local service businesses the Business Profile carries the weight, with one or two trade-specific platforms behind it.
You can, and you will be recognisable if you let it write them unedited. We draft with AI and a human edits every one, which is the same standard we apply to everything we publish. A reply that does not mention the specific job is worse than no reply.
Reviews are half of prominence. The website is the other half.
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