How to get more Google reviews

Ask every customer, soon after the experience, with a direct link that opens the review box in one tap. That is most of it.

What stops businesses is not strategy but friction and timing — asking late, asking vaguely, or making the customer find you on Google themselves.

The moment is immediately after the thing that pleased them: the job finished, the order delivered, the problem solved. Satisfaction fades within hours and the intention to leave a review fades with it.

Concretely: a message the same day, a card handed over at the end of the job, a QR code on the receipt, a line in the order-confirmation email. Not a monthly newsletter.

A direct review link opens the Google review box with the star selector already on screen. Without one, the customer searches for you, finds the right listing among the similar ones, scrolls and clicks — four chances to abandon something they were doing as a favour.

For anything physical, a QR code beats a link nobody will type.

Offering anything in exchange — a discount, a free drink, an entry into a prize draw. Google prohibits incentivised reviews and the FTC rule covers it in the US. Writing reviews yourself or having staff do it is worse and is what the rule was written for.

Google also discourages asking only the customers you expect to be positive. Whether you follow that is a judgement call; that it is Google’s stated position is not.

A hundred reviews in a fortnight is the exact pattern platforms look for when detecting manipulation, and it leaves you with a profile that ages badly. Three a month, permanently, produces a profile whose newest review is always recent — which is what a reader checks first.