How to get 50 Google reviews without being weird about it

The reason is always the same, and it’s always said in the same slightly embarrassed voice: “I don’t want to be that guy.”

Fair enough. Nobody wants to be the bloke who hands you an iPad before you’ve got your wallet away. But here’s what’s actually happening while you’re being polite about it.

Your competitor up the road has 94 reviews. You’ve got seven, and the most recent one is from 2021. A customer looking at both of you doesn’t think “these two are equally good, one just asks more.” They think you’re smaller, newer, quieter, or possibly closed. They pick the other one, and neither of you ever knows it happened.

Being humble about reviews costs you money. Let’s fix it without turning you into someone you’d cross the road to avoid.

Why reviews matter twice

Most people know reviews affect whether customers choose you. Fewer realise they affect whether customers see you at all.

Google decides who shows up in the local map results using a handful of signals, and review quantity, review quality and review recency are three of them. We’ve written about the six things that decide where you show up, and reviews sit near the top of that list. So reviews are doing two jobs at once: getting you into the shortlist, then winning you the pick once you’re in it.

That double effect is why a business with 90 reviews pulls away from a business with nine so fast. It’s not twice the advantage. It compounds.

The three numbers that matter

Not all review profiles are equal. Three things get looked at, by both Google and humans:

How many. There’s no magic number, but there is a local one: roughly what your best competitor has. Go and look. That’s your target. If the top-ranking plumber in your area has 60, then 60 is the bar, and 80 wins.

How recent. This one gets ignored and it’s brutal. Forty reviews that stop in 2022 look worse to a customer than twelve that run through to last month. A stale profile reads as a business that’s slowed down, changed hands, or stopped caring. Recency signals you’re alive and busy. Aim to never let a month pass empty.

How specific. “Great service, highly recommend” is worth almost nothing. “Rang Tuesday about a leaking hot water cylinder, Dan was here Wednesday morning, sorted in an hour, cleaned up after himself” is worth a fortune, because it names the problem the next customer has, and it contains the words the next customer is typing into Google. Specific reviews sell, and they help you get found. We’ll come back to how you get those.

The actual reason you’re not asking

Let’s name it properly, because until you do, no script will help.

You think asking for a review is asking for a favour. So it feels like taking something from someone who has already paid you.

Flip it. A review is not a favour. It’s the last step of the job.

That customer had a problem. They were nervous about who to call, because picking a stranger for a job that matters is nerve-wracking, and they had no way of knowing if you’d be any good. Someone else’s review is what got them to ring you. Their review is what gets the next person to ring you, the next nervous person in the same position they were in three weeks ago.

You are not asking them to do you a favour. You are asking them to do for a stranger exactly what a stranger did for them.

Once you actually believe that, the ask stops being weird. Tone follows belief. That’s why scripts alone never fix this.

When to ask

Timing beats wording. Ask at the wrong moment and the best script in the world dies.

The right moment is the moment of relief. Not when you send the invoice. Not a fortnight later. The moment their problem stops being a problem and they can feel it.

For a plumber, that’s standing in the kitchen while the water’s running properly again. For a physio, it’s the appointment where they say “actually it’s heaps better.” For a bookkeeper, it’s when the GST return is filed and they exhale. For a groomer, it’s the handover, when the dog looks incredible and the owner does the voice.

You know this moment. It’s the one where they say “oh, that’s so much better.” That sentence is your cue. It is the single highest-conversion second in your entire customer relationship, and most businesses let it pass in silence.

What to say, word for word

Say it out loud, at the moment of relief. Then follow with a text.

In person:

“Glad that’s sorted. Can I ask a favour? Most of our work comes from people finding us on Google, and reviews are pretty much the whole thing. If you’ve got two minutes sometime today, it’d genuinely help. I’ll text you the link so you don’t have to go looking.”

Then, and this is the bit people miss, send the link before you drive away. Not that night. Not the next day. While you’re still in their driveway and they still feel grateful. Every hour you wait, the feeling fades and the odds halve.

The text:

“Thanks again for today, Sarah. Here’s that review link: [link]. If you get a sec, mentioning what the job actually was helps more than you’d think. It’s how the next person finds us. Cheers, Dave”

That last line is doing quiet, serious work. “Mentioning what the job actually was” is how you convert generic five-stars into specific ones full of the words your next customer is searching. You are, very gently, telling them what to write. Nobody minds. Most people are relieved. The hardest part of leaving a review is not knowing what to say.

If they don’t do it, one nudge, three or four days later, and then you let it go forever:

“No stress if you’re flat out, just bumping that review link up your messages in case it got buried. [link]”

One nudge. Never two. Two is where you become that guy.

Making it a system instead of a mood

Right now, asking for reviews probably depends on whether you remember and whether you feel like it. That’s why you’ve got seven. Systems beat moods.

Get the link, shorten it, save it. Your Google Business Profile has a “get more reviews” link that goes straight to the review box. Get it. Shorten it. Save it as a text shortcut on your phone so it’s three taps, not a hunt.

Attach the ask to something that already happens. The invoice. The job-complete text. The follow-up appointment reminder. Anything you already do without thinking. An ask bolted to an existing habit survives a busy fortnight. A standalone good intention doesn’t.

Count them monthly. Write the number on the same bit of paper where you write everything else. If the number didn’t move, that’s the month you know about it, not six months later when you notice a competitor has pulled away.

Ask everyone, not just the delighted. A quiet four-star from a perfectly satisfied customer is fine. Profiles that are 100% five-star with breathless wording actually read as suspicious. A few fours make the fives believable.

The bad review

You’ll get one. Everyone does. Here’s the thing nobody tells you: a bad review handled well converts better than no bad review at all, because it’s the only chance a stranger gets to see how you behave when something goes wrong.

Rules:

Reply within a day. Slow replies look like you’re hiding.

Don’t argue the facts, even when you’re right. You’re not writing to the reviewer. You’re writing to the two hundred people who’ll read it afterwards. Being right and sounding defensive loses you more work than the original complaint.

Short, human, take it offline.

“Hi Mark, sorry, that’s not how we like to leave a job. I’d genuinely like to sort it. I’ll give you a ring today, or you can get me on 09-XXX-XXXX. Dave”

That’s it. No paragraph explaining the delay. No “as we discussed.” Every reader of that reply thinks: if something goes wrong with this bloke, he’ll front up. That’s worth more than the star.

And don’t buy reviews. Not from a service, not from your mates, not from your mum. Google is good at spotting them, the penalty is your visibility, and one fake glowing review in a profile of real ones is usually obvious to a careful reader anyway.

What fifty reviews actually gets you

We worked with a building company in Mangawhai who went from not showing up at all to ranking second across the neighbouring towns. Reviews weren’t the only thing we changed. The website, the profile, the listings all mattered. But the reviews were the part that kept working after we’d finished the build, because every new one told Google the business was still active and told customers it was still good.

That’s the real prize. A website is a thing you build once. A review profile is a thing that compounds every month you feed it, and it belongs entirely to you.

Fifty reviews is roughly one a week for a year. That’s the whole trick. Not a campaign. Not a push. One ask, at the moment of relief, with the link sent before you drive away.