Reviews are content, not a score
The star rating is the part everyone watches, and it is the least interesting thing about a review. What matters more is the text.
When someone writes "they replaced our panel in Levittown and were done in a day," that review now contains your service and your town in a customer's own words. That is a relevance signal you could not write yourself without it sounding fake, and it is exactly the kind of source an AI answer engine quotes when someone asks it to recommend a contractor.
Ten reviews naming specific work beat thirty saying "great service, highly recommend."
The ask has to happen at the right moment
The gap between "would definitely leave a review" and actually leaving one is about a day and a half. Ask a week later by email and most people mean to and never do.
The moment that works is while you are still there. Job done, homeowner happy, tools going back in the truck. That is when you ask, out loud, and then send the link before you pull off the street.
Text works better than email for this trade. It gets opened, the link is one tap, and the phone is already in their hand.
Give them something to write about
"Would you mind leaving us a review" produces "great job, very professional." It is a fine review and it does nothing for you.
Asking slightly differently changes the text. Something along the lines of: if you have a minute, it helps a lot if you mention what we did and what town you are in, since that is how people nearby find us.
That is not coaching a review or telling anyone what to say. It is telling them what is useful, and most customers are glad to know. The reviews come back naming the panel upgrade, the patio, the town, and that is the whole difference.
Where the rules actually are
A few lines that are worth not crossing, because the penalties are real:
- No incentives. Not a discount, not a gift card, not a drawing. This violates Google's policy and can get reviews removed or the profile actioned.
- No gating. Surveying customers first and only sending the review link to the happy ones is against the rules, however common it is.
- Do not write them, and do not let a vendor write them. Fake reviews get detected, and the damage lands on you rather than the vendor.
- Do not bulk request. Forty reviews in a week after two years of nothing looks exactly like what it looks like. Steady beats spiky.
The legitimate version works well enough that there is no reason to go near any of this.
Responses are indexed, so write them like it
Your reply to a review is public text attached to your business. It gets crawled. Most contractors either ignore reviews entirely or paste the same thank you under all of them.
A response that mentions the work and the town naturally adds relevance the same way the review does. And on a negative review, the response is not for the person who wrote it. It is for the next customer reading it, who is watching how you handle being criticized.
Do not put it all on Google
Google is the one that moves the map pack, so it comes first. But a business with sixty Google reviews and nothing anywhere else has a concentration problem, and AI answer engines pull from a wider set of sources than the map pack does.
Worth having a real presence on at least a couple of others. Which ones depends on the trade. The point is that consensus across several platforms reads differently to a retrieval system than a single strong profile.
Related
Where reviews do the most work: Google Business Profile for contractors. The broader picture: SEO for contractors.