Ask every customer, on the day the job ends, the same way every time. That is most of it, and the rest of this page is the detail that makes it work. Reviews are the part of local search a customer reads most closely, and the part owners most often leave to chance: a few arrive on their own, a burst comes in when someone remembers to ask, then nothing for months. Here is how to ask, how to get reviews that are positive without fishing for them, what makes a review worth having, the pace that reads as real, and where the line sits between asking for reviews and faking them. The line matters, because crossing it now costs more than the reviews were ever worth.
How to ask#
Send the ask the day the work finishes, while the customer still remembers what you did and how it felt. Use one channel and stick with it: a text from your business number, or an email from your own address. Put the direct review link from your Business Profile in it, so one tap opens the review box. A link to your website, or an instruction to “find us on Google”, loses most people before they start.
Keep the ask short and in your own words. Thank them for the job, say a review helps the next customer decide, and give the link. That’s it.
How to get reviews that are positive#
There is only one honest lever on the stars: the work, and asking at the moment the customer is happiest with it. What you cannot do is ask only the customers you expect to be happy. Google’s review policy forbids selectively asking for positive reviews, and the FTC’s guidance for businesses says the same. So ask everyone, and let the work do the sorting.
What you can do is fix the experience the reviews describe. If the same complaint keeps coming up, a late arrival or a surprise on the invoice, that is free advice about the business, and fixing it raises the average faster than any wording of the ask.
What makes a good review#
The useful review is specific. It names the job, the problem, and how it turned out, sometimes the town and the person who did the work, in the customer’s own words. “Great service, five stars” tells the next reader almost nothing. Compare a made-up but typical one for a plumber: “Our water heater quit on a Sunday and they had a new one in by Monday noon.” That tells the next reader exactly what they want to know. A photo of the finished job helps more.
You can make the specific kind more likely without scripting it. Asking “would you mention what we did and how it went?” is fair. Telling a customer what to say, or what rating to give, is not.
The cadence#
Steady beats a lot. A review after every job, every week, reads as what it is: a working business with real customers. Twenty reviews in one month and none the next year reads as a campaign, to customers and to the automated systems Google says it runs to catch fake reviews. Recency matters to readers too: a stack of reviews that all stop two years ago raises the question of what happened since.
The only reliable way to keep the pace is to make the ask automatic, sent when the job closes rather than when someone remembers. That is what our review campaigns set up.
Real reviews and fake ones#
A real review comes from a real customer, about a real job, in their own words, with nothing given in exchange for it. Everything else is fake, and that includes more than most owners think:
- Reviews written by you, your staff, or your family without saying so.
- Reviews bought from a service, or traded with another business.
- Reviews written for a customer to post under their name.
- A discount, gift, or entry in a drawing in exchange for a review. Google’s policy forbids incentives for reviews, positive or not.
This is no longer just a platform rule. The Federal Trade Commission’s rule on consumer reviews, in force since October 2024, bans fake reviews, buying them, incentives tied to a positive review, undisclosed reviews from insiders, and using threats to get bad reviews taken down, and it carries civil penalties. Google, for its part, removes reviews that break its policy and can restrict the profile they were posted to.
Replying, including to the bad ones#
Reply to every review. A thank-you under a good one shows a reader that someone is paying attention. Under a bad one, reply once, calmly, with the honest version of events and no private details about the customer. Future customers read the reply as closely as the complaint, and a plain answer next to an angry review often does more good than the review did harm.
Do not threaten a reviewer with a lawsuit to get a review removed, and do not put a clause in your contracts forbidding honest reviews: the FTC rule covers the first, and the federal Consumer Review Fairness Act voids the second.
The same habit works on Facebook, where reviews are now called recommendations. Reviews are one of four pieces of local search, covered in how to do local SEO. If you would rather hand the asking to a system that never forgets, that is our review campaigns service.