How To Get More Google Reviews As A Contractor
You have more happy customers than reviews. Probably far more. The problem isn't the work, it's the asking — and asking is the one part of this that can be systematised completely.
Almost every contractor we talk to is sitting on the same imbalance: hundreds of satisfied customers, and a review count in the low double figures. Meanwhile a competitor two towns over with visibly worse workmanship has 180 reviews and is taking the calls.
That gap isn't about quality. It's about the fact that asking for reviews is awkward, easy to forget, and always the last thing on your mind when you're packing the van.
Why reviews matter more than contractors think
Two separate effects, and the second is the one people underrate.
They convince the customer
Obvious, but worth stating: a homeowner deciding who to let into their house checks the star rating and the review count first. Recency matters too — forty reviews from 2021 reads worse than twenty from this year.
They move you up the map pack
This is the compounding one. Review quantity, quality and recency are among the strongest signals in Google's local ranking. More reviews lift your position, a higher position puts you in front of more people, more people means more jobs, and more jobs means more reviews. It's the closest thing to a flywheel in local marketing, and it's covered in more depth in how to rank in the map pack.
The timing rule
There is one thing that matters more than the wording of your request, and it's when you send it.
Ask too early — before they've properly seen the finished work — and you get nothing. Ask a week later and the moment has passed. The window is roughly one to three hours after the job is complete, when they've seen the result and you're still fresh in their mind.
For larger jobs, a remodel or a roof replacement, push it to the next day — after they've lived with it for an evening and the relief has set in.
How to ask (and what to say)
By text, always. Email review requests get opened at a fraction of the rate and are far more work to act on from a phone.
Keep it short, personal, and give them one tap to act on:
Hi Sarah — Dave here from Donovan Plumbing. Glad we got that sorted for you today. If you've got 30 seconds, a quick Google review really helps a small local business like ours: [link]
Three things that make this work: it names them, it references the specific job, and the link goes directly to the review box rather than to your profile page where they'd have to hunt for it.
Protecting your rating when a job goes wrong
Sometimes a job doesn't go well. The instinct is to skip asking that customer for a review — which is understandable, and also a missed opportunity to fix the relationship.
A better approach is to ask everyone, but ask how it went first. If the answer is positive, they go straight through to Google. If it isn't, they land on a private feedback form that comes to you instead — so you hear about the problem while you can still put it right, rather than reading about it publicly a week later.
What not to do
- Don't offer incentives. Discounts or prize draws in exchange for reviews violate Google's policies and can get your reviews stripped or your profile penalised.
- Don't buy reviews. Detection is better than people assume, and the penalty is severe. It's also obvious to customers — a burst of vague five-stars in one week fools nobody.
- Don't ask only your happy customers by hand-picking them. Ask everyone, and route the unhappy ones privately. That's the legitimate version of the same instinct.
- Don't leave negative reviews unanswered. A calm, specific public reply is read by every future customer and does more good than the bad review does harm.
- Don't send the request from a random number. It should come from the number they already have as yours.
What a realistic ramp looks like
If you complete forty jobs a month and ask every one of them, a 20–30% response rate — normal for a well-timed text with a direct link — gives you eight to twelve reviews a month. That's a hundred-plus a year, from work you were already doing.
The trades that benefit fastest are the high-volume ones: cleaning companies, pest control, lawn and landscaping and HVAC, where you touch a lot of customers each week.
Automate it or it won't happen
This is the honest conclusion. Every contractor who tries to do this manually stops within a month, because the moment you're meant to send the text is the moment you're loading the van for the next job.
Tie the request to a trigger — job marked complete — and it happens every time without anybody remembering. That's how the review funnel works in the package, and it's included at $297 a month alongside everything else.