Asking for reviews without breaking the rules

Of the three things that decide whether your business shows up on the map, two you can fix in an afternoon. The category takes a minute. The photos go up today. We covered that in what decides whether you show up.

The third one does not work like that. Prominence is built on reviews, and somebody else writes those.

That is why most businesses in the county stop halfway: the profile ends up complete and tidy, and they still have two reviews from a year and a half ago.

Asking for reviews is allowed. What is not allowed

Google lets you ask, and its policy says so with no fine print. You can ask your customers in person, by text, or with a sign on the counter.

Two things you cannot do, and both are common around here.

The first is paying for them. No discounts, no raffles, no free coffee, no "leave me five stars and I'll knock something off the oil change". Google prohibits it and removes them when it catches it.

The second is screening first and asking after. Sending a survey and then asking for the review only from the people who answered happy is called gating, and it is prohibited too. Either you ask everyone or you ask nobody.

Bought reviews are obvious anyway. Five land in two days, all from accounts with no photo, all four words long.

The moment matters more than the message

You ask for the review when the job has just gone well and the person is still standing in front of you. Not three days later by email.

A plumber who finishes at eleven and says "if it helped, would you leave me a review? It takes a minute" gets more than any reminder campaign.

Make it one tap, not a search

Nobody is going to open Google, look up your business and scroll down to the button. If that is the work, the review does not get written.

Google gives you a short link that opens the review box directly. It is in your dashboard, under "Ask for reviews". That link is what goes in the text message, on the invoice and in the QR code on the counter.

A bad review does not get deleted

This is the hard part to accept. A legitimate negative review cannot be taken down. You can report it when it breaks the policy, for insults, spam, or somebody who was never your customer. But if the person was there and left unhappy, it stays.

What you can do is answer it. And here is the part almost nobody gets: you are not writing that reply for the person who complained. You are writing it for the next person who reads it.

A one-star review with a calm reply that admits what happened and says what was done sells. One with no reply leaves the reader with the only version available, which is the angry customer's.

Answer in the language they wrote in

If they write in Spanish, answer in Spanish. If they write in English, answer in English.

It sounds obvious and almost nobody does it. In Brazoria County, where 32% of the population is Hispanic (U.S. Census Bureau), a profile with replies in both languages tells whoever is looking that they will be taken care of there. You cannot fake that with a line in the description.

This is monthly work

Ten reviews from 2023 are worth less than four from this quarter. Google looks at how many there are and at when they arrived.

Asking after every job and answering all of them inside the same week is unglamorous, and of everything you can do to a profile it moves the most. It is in our monthly local SEO plan, and that is not an accident.

The next article is about the town: why showing up in Lake Jackson and showing up in Clute are two different jobs.