Getting more Google reviews, the way that is allowed
Reviews are the cheapest marketing a small business has and the only one that cannot be bought honestly. Which is exactly why the method matters more than the effort.
Start with the rule, because breaking it is expensive
You cannot pay for reviews, you cannot offer a discount in exchange for one, and you cannot ask only the customers you expect to be happy. Google’s policies prohibit incentivised and fake reviews, and the Competition and Markets Authority has powers to act on fake and misleading reviews under consumer protection law. The downside is not a telling-off, it is a suspended listing or a fine, and a suspended listing is worse for a local business than having no reviews at all.
Everything below is the version that works and is allowed: asking everybody, at the right moment, with the least possible friction.
The three things that decide whether you get one
- When you ask. There is a short window after a good experience where somebody will do you a favour. For a meal, that evening. For a job completed, the same day, while the relief is still fresh. A week later the answer is yes and the action never happens.
- How much work it is. Every tap costs you people. A direct link straight to the review box beats "look us up on Google" by an order of magnitude. Google provides a short link for exactly this; put it in the thank-you message, in the email receipt, and on a card in the bag.
- Who asks. A request from the person who did the work, named, outperforms an automated message from a brand. If the system can send it in the name of the member of staff who served them, that is worth doing.
Where the software helps
Only in the plumbing, and that is enough. The order or booking system knows the job finished at eight; it can send one message at nine with a direct link, in the right person’s name, and never ask the same customer twice. Nothing clever, just consistent, which is precisely what nobody manages by hand on a busy week.
It can also tell you which members of staff, which days and which services produce the happiest customers, which is useful information you are currently throwing away.
Answering them, which is half the value
Reply to all of them, briefly. On a bad one: thank them, state the specific thing you have changed, offer to sort it off the public page. Never argue, never explain at length, never respond to a one-star review with a paragraph about how unusual it is. Everybody who reads it afterwards is not judging the complaint, they are judging you.
A steady trickle of recent reviews with calm replies is a stronger signal than a wall of five stars from two years ago, both to a customer reading them and, in Google’s own account of local ranking, to the prominence that decides whether you appear at all.
The asking can be built into whatever takes the order or the booking: online ordering, booking systems or CRM and pipelines. Why the listing itself matters so much is in your Google listing is doing more work than your homepage.