Almost every tradesman I speak to knows reviews matter and has about eleven of them. Not because customers were unhappy, because asking is awkward and you are already driving to the next job. The fix is not discipline. It is making the ask happen without you.
01The stakes Why reviews decide who gets rung.
A customer choosing a trade has almost nothing else to go on. They cannot judge your work, they have not met you, and every website says the same things about quality and reliability. So they use the only evidence available: what other people said.
Two firms side by side in the map results, one with 12 reviews and one with 60, get very different numbers of calls. The work might be identical. The gap is entirely administrative. One of them asks every time and the other means to.
Recency counts as much as volume. Forty reviews that stop in 2023 read as a business that has gone quiet. A steady trickle reads as one that is busy.
02The mechanism How it works.
- The job gets signed off You mark it done, a tap on your phone, in the van, before you drive off. That is the only thing you have to remember, and it is the only thing the system needs.
- The customer gets asked while they are still pleased Within the hour, not next week. Timing is most of it. A customer asked the same day they got a working boiler back says yes far more often than one asked on Friday about a job from a fortnight ago.
- One tap to the right place The message links straight to your Google profile, on the phone they are already holding. Every extra step between asking and posting loses people, so there are none.
- A reminder if nothing happens One, a couple of days later, then it stops. Most reviews that arrive at all arrive after the reminder, because the first message caught somebody mid-school-run.
03The bit people skip Everyone you have already worked for.
Here is the step that makes the difference, and almost nobody does it: the customers you have already done work for are worth more than the ones you have not met yet.
You have years of them. Phone numbers in your handset, names in a notebook, jobs in your accounts. Most of them were happy. Not one of them was ever asked, because at the time there was no system to ask with.
So the first thing I ask a new client for is that list. We text it, once, politely. That is what takes a profile from five reviews to fifty in a couple of months rather than a couple of years, and it is the reason the map-pack side of this moves faster than the website side.
04The price What it costs.
Included, not an add-on. £297 a month covers this alongside the website, missed-call text-back, lead follow-up, one inbox and the business number. The full list is here.
05The awkward ones Common questions.
01 Is it against Google rules to ask for reviews?
Asking is fine and always has been. What is not allowed is offering anything in exchange, or filtering so only happy customers can reach the review page. This asks everybody and links everybody to the same place.
02 What if somebody leaves a bad one?
Some will, and a profile with forty reviews and one three-star reads as more honest than forty perfect ones. What matters is that you reply properly and in public. A well-handled complaint is often more persuasive than the praise around it.
03 How many reviews do I actually need?
Enough to not look new next to whoever is above you in the map results. Go and look at the top three for your trade in your town. That number is your target, and it is usually less frightening than people expect.
04 Will you write the reviews for me?
No, and nobody honest will. Fake reviews get profiles suspended, and Google has got much better at spotting them. The whole point of this is that it makes real ones easy to collect, at the volume you would get if you remembered to ask every single time.
05 Do reviews actually help my ranking, or just my image?
Both, and the ranking half is the part people miss. Review count and how recently they arrived both feed into which businesses show in the three map results, and those three take most of the calls in every trade I have looked at.
If you want to know how many reviews you'd need to get into the top three for your trade and your town, I'll look before the call. Twenty minutes, and you'll know what the firms above you have got. Book a call. Tell me what's going on.