A prospect types your trade followed by your town. Three listings appear, with stars and a number of reviews. They click the one with the most reviews and the best rating, not necessarily the first. Your site has not even entered the equation yet.
Why Google rewards the best-rated businesses
Google ranks local listings on three criteria: relevance, distance and prominence. Prominence is exactly what your reviews reflect. The more you have, the more recent they are, the better you are rated, the more Google treats you as a reliable business worth recommending.
Practical tip: after every job delivered, send a text message with the direct link to your Google review form. A satisfied customer who replies within 24 hours is far more likely to leave a review than one chased three weeks later.
What a customer checks before picking up the phone
- The total number of reviews, as proof that you are an established business
- The average rating, rarely below 4 stars to trigger contact
- The date of the most recent reviews, to check you are still active
- Your replies to reviews, positive and negative alike
- The photographs attached to reviews, often more credible than your own
A negative review is not a disaster if you answer it well: stay factual, propose a concrete solution, avoid any defensive justification. Your Google listing and your reviews belong to the same ecosystem. If you have not yet optimised the listing itself, our guide to Google Business Profile for small companies explains how to structure it before you even concentrate on collecting reviews.
Rule worth remembering: answer every negative review within 48 hours. Past that point, your reply looks forced. Under it, it shows you genuinely follow your business.
To get more reviews without hounding your customers, the official guidance on the Google Business Profile help page insists on one point: never offer anything in exchange for a review, on pain of removal. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey confirms every year that most consumers consult online reviews before choosing a local business. The simplest lever remains asking at the right moment, just after a job well done.
Reviews are only one piece of the local SEO puzzle. For the whole strategy, our complete local SEO guide for small companies shows you how to structure your local presence from A to Z, reviews included.