Do reviews affect local SEO?

Yes, for local search. Google has consistently indicated that review count, review score and review recency influence local pack rankings, alongside relevance, distance and general prominence.

What does not influence rankings is a review widget on your own website. It affects conversion, not position.

Count and score are the two most commonly cited. Recency matters because a profile whose newest review is two years old signals a business that may no longer be operating the same way. Keyword content in reviews appears to have some effect for local relevance, though not one you can or should engineer.

Responding to reviews is recommended by Google. Whether it directly moves rankings is unclear; it visibly affects how a profile reads to a human, which is the more defensible reason to do it.

Conflating two different things. Reviews on your Google Business Profile influence how you rank in local search. Reviews displayed on your website influence whether someone who arrives decides to contact you. Both matter and they are not substitutes — a widget cannot improve a ranking and a strong profile cannot convert a bad landing page.

The second mistake is chasing volume in bursts. A sudden spike is the pattern platforms look for when detecting manipulation, and it decays into the same stale profile a few months later.

Ask every customer, not the ones you expect to be positive. Ask soon, while the experience is recent. Reply to everything, briefly. Keep the profile itself complete — hours, categories, photos, services — because that is prominence and it is within your control.

On your own site, reviews are conversion material rather than a ranking factor. They are also content, and a page that shows what customers actually say tends to hold attention longer than one that asserts it.