How To Get More Reviews

Reviews are the cheapest marketing asset available and most businesses have between nine and thirty of them, which is roughly what you accumulate by accident.

They matter in three places at once. They lift your position in local search. They lift conversion on every page they appear on. And they are increasingly what AI search engines read when someone asks which business to use.

That is three levers pulled by one activity, and the activity is asking.

The reason you do not have enough

You do not ask. Or you ask once, by email, a week after the job, with a link buried in a paragraph.

Happy customers will leave a review. They will not go and find where to do it. The entire gap between businesses with forty reviews and businesses with four hundred is the friction between the ask and the click.

Ask at the peak

There is a moment on every job where the customer is happiest. It is usually right at handover, or the moment the thing they were worried about turns out fine.

That is when you ask, in person or on the phone, not in an email three weeks later when the feeling has faded and the job has become a memory.

The email exists to give them the link. The ask happens face to face.

Make it one tap

Send the direct review link. Not your profile. Not a page with options. The link that opens the review box.

Every extra step loses people. A QR code on the invoice, a link in the SMS, the same link in the follow-up email. Same destination, three chances.

Say what to write about

"Leave us a review" gets you "great service, highly recommended," which is worth almost nothing to the next reader and nothing at all to a search engine.

"If you get a minute, it helps most if you mention the suburb and what we actually did" gets you a review that names a location and a service. That review does work. It is the one that gets your business surfaced when someone searches that service in that suburb, and it is the one an AI engine quotes.

You are not writing it for them. You are telling them what is useful.

Build it into the process

The businesses with hundreds of reviews are not more likeable. They have a step in their workflow that triggers the ask, every time, without anyone deciding to do it.

Make it part of the job completion. Whoever closes the job sends the message. It goes on the checklist. It stops depending on someone remembering.

Respond to every one

Reply to the good ones briefly and specifically. Reply to the bad ones properly.

A negative review with a calm, specific, non-defensive response often converts better than no negative reviews at all, because it shows a real business handling a real problem. A wall of five stars with no responses reads as either fake or absent.

Do not argue. Do not explain at length. Acknowledge, state what you did about it, and offer to take it offline.

The one rule

Never write one. Never edit one. Never ask a staff member or a friend to leave one.

Beyond the obvious problem with it, fake reviews are increasingly detectable and the damage when they surface is worse than the entire benefit of having them. This is one of the few places in marketing where the shortcut is genuinely not worth it.