Getting Google reviews without being weird about it

A cabinetmaker we work with had four reviews. Four, over about three years of very good work, in a trade where the person before you and the person after you both get chosen off a phone screen. He wasn't shy and he wasn't precious about it. He just hated the moment of asking, so he never quite got around to it, and every time he thought about it the job was already three weeks in the rear view.

He's now got somewhere north of thirty. Nothing changed about the work. What changed was when he asked.

That's most of this post, honestly. The templates and the QR codes and the clever wording are worth something, but they're worth a lot less than the timing, and the timing is the part nobody talks about because it isn't a tactic you can sell.

The window is smaller than you think

There's a moment on almost every job where the customer is as pleased as they're ever going to be. The bench goes in and it's exactly right. The blocked drain clears. The dog comes back looking like a dog again. That feeling has a half-life of maybe a day, and it's basically gone by the time your invoice lands, which is precisely when most businesses send their review request.

Our cabinetmaker started asking while he was packing up the ute. Face to face, thirty seconds, no preamble: "If you're happy with it, a quick Google review makes a big difference to me." Then he'd send the link that night while it was still in their head.

Face to face gets you a yes. The link gets you the review. You need both, and the gap between them wants to be hours, not weeks.

Make it one tap or don't bother

The single most common way this fails is asking someone to find you.

You send "leave us a Google review", they open Maps, type your business name, get the other business with the similar name two suburbs over, give up, and go back to their evening. You've spent your one ask on nothing.

Google gives you a short review link straight out of your profile that opens the review box directly. Put it in the SMS. Not the homepage, not the Google Maps listing, the review box itself. A QR code on the back of the invoice works for the ones who'd rather not deal with a text.

While you're in there, the rest of your profile is doing the ranking work alongside the reviews, which we went through in the map pack piece. Reviews are one input among several, not the whole game.

Recent beats plentiful

Twelve reviews from this year read better to a customer, and count for more, than forty that stop in 2021. A profile that goes quiet looks like a business that's gone quiet, and people do read the dates.

Which means the goal isn't a campaign. It's a habit. One ask per completed job, forever, is a completely different outcome to a big push in March that nobody repeats. The push feels productive and the habit is the thing that works, which is annoying but there it is.

Don't screen who you ask

This is the bit where businesses get themselves in trouble, usually with good intentions.

The tempting system is to ask everyone how it went first, then send the review link only to the happy ones. It's called review gating, and Google's contribution policies treat that kind of manipulation as fake engagement. Profiles do get their reviews stripped over it.

Offering a discount or a coupon for a review is a bigger problem again. In Australia that lands you in front of the ACCC, whose guidance on online reviews for products and services is worth ten minutes of any owner's time. Incentivised reviews without disclosure, filtered reviews, reviews written by staff or family, all of it can be misleading conduct under Australian Consumer Law. The fines are real and the reputational side is worse.

Ask everyone. Some of them will say something you'd rather they didn't. That's fine, and it's actually useful, which brings me to the part most people skip.

The replies are read by the next customer

Your existing reviews aren't really for the people who wrote them. They're for the person deciding whether to ring you tomorrow, and that person reads how you handle the bad one far more carefully than they read the five-star ones.

A short, unbothered reply to a two-star review does more for you than three more five-stars. No defensiveness, no essay, no "we take all feedback seriously". What happened, what you did about it, done. I've watched customers quote a bad review back to a business on a first call and then book anyway, because the reply told them what they wanted to know.

Reply to the good ones too. It takes a minute and it signals the place is being run by someone who's paying attention.

Where this sits in the list

If you're weighing this against the website work, reviews come first for most local businesses. They cost nothing, they move faster than anything on your site, and they change how every other channel performs, including the search results your site does rank in. That's the same argument as the order of operations I banged on about last week.

Then, once the asks are habitual, the site has to hold up its end when someone clicks through from the profile to check you out properly. If you'd like to know whether it does, we'll take a look for free, or you can read what an audit actually covers first.