How Do I Get More Google Reviews for My Trade Business?

Reviews are the closest thing a local trade has to a free advertising budget, and most businesses collect them by accident. They get one when a customer is unusually delighted, or unusually annoyed, and nothing in between. That produces a thin profile with a gap in the middle and a couple of angry outliers, which is worse than no profile at all.

Collecting them deliberately is not complicated. It is a habit, one link, and knowing when to ask. Here is how the businesses we work with actually do it.

Why they matter more than the star count suggests

Everybody knows reviews persuade people. What gets missed is that they also rank you. Google uses review quantity, recency and whether you reply as signals in the map results, so a steady drip of new ones lifts you above a competitor sitting on the same total from three years ago.

That gives a small business a genuine lever. You cannot outspend a national on advertising, but you can very easily out-collect the other plasterer in town who has eleven reviews and has never replied to any of them.

The moment to ask

There is a window, and it is short. The customer is happiest at the point they first see the finished work, which for most trades is the moment you are packing the van. An hour later they are back in their day, and by the following week the feeling has faded into ordinary satisfaction.

So ask then, face to face, out loud. Not by email three days later. The follow-up message is for people who said yes and forgot, not for the initial ask.

Make it take ten seconds

Every extra step loses roughly half the people. Telling somebody to search for you and find the review button will get you almost nothing, because they will try, get confused, and give up.

• Get your short review link from the Google Business Profile app. It goes straight to the review box with the stars already on screen.
• Save it as a text message you can send with two taps while you are still outside the house.
• Put a QR code of it on the back of your invoice, your business card and the van.
• Put it in your email signature.
• Put it on your website, on the page people land on after you finish, if you have one.

Sending the link within a minute of asking, while you are still standing there, roughly doubles the number you get. That is the whole trick.

Build it into the job, not your memory

The businesses that collect reviews consistently are not more disciplined than everybody else, they have just attached the ask to something that already happens. The last line of the handover. A step on the job sheet. The same text that confirms the invoice has gone.

If it depends on you remembering at the end of a long day, it will happen when work is quiet and stop when work is busy, which is exactly backwards.

Replying is half the value

An unanswered review page reads as absent. A page where the owner replies to everything reads as a business that is paying attention, and it is the reply to the difficult one that does the most work, because it is the only place a reader can see how you behave when something goes wrong.

Three rules. Use your own words, not a template that repeats across every reply, because readers notice and so does Google. Never argue in public, even when you are right. Take the detail offline with a line offering to sort it out directly.

There is no deadline. Anybody telling you to reply within a set number of hours has made that up. Doing them all on a Friday afternoon is fine.

What not to do

1. Do not buy them. They read as bought, they can get the listing suspended, and the suspension takes a business down at the worst possible moment.
2. Do not offer a discount for one. Against the rules, and it changes what the review is.
3. Do not ask everybody at once. Twenty reviews in a week after two years of silence looks exactly like what it looks like. A steady handful a month is both safer and better for ranking.
4. Do not screen for happy customers only. Asking only the people you expect to be positive is against the rules and, more practically, it means you never hear the thing that is quietly costing you work.

Where the website fits

Two places, and both are small. First, the review link belongs somewhere obvious on the site so a customer who wants to leave one can. Second, and more valuable, the reviews belong on the site as words, in a section people read before they ring.

What we will not do is print a star average or a review count in the page code as a rating claim. Search engines treat that as a claim about the business and we only put things on a page that we can stand behind, so we quote real reviews as text and let the Google listing carry the number. That is a deliberate choice and it applies to every site we build.

You can see the pattern on Pure Luxe Cleaning and Rinse Revive, both of which lean on what customers actually said rather than on a number.

A realistic target

Ask every satisfied customer, send the link on the spot, and reply to everything. For most trades that lands somewhere around five to ten new reviews a month without any effort beyond the asking, and within a year it is the difference between being the third map result and the first.

It costs nothing. It just has to be a habit rather than a project.

Common questions

Written by Harry Taylor, co-founder of SH Studios. He designs the sites and works with the businesses that use them.