Improve online reviews
Work out which review problem you have before asking anyone for one
Too few reviews, reviews that are all three years old, a poor average, a burst followed by silence, or negatives nobody answered. Five different problems, five different responses — and none of them involve buying, gating or writing a review.
Differential diagnosis
Five review problems that need five different responses
Almost everyone arriving here says the same sentence: we need more reviews. In about half of those cases volume is not the problem, and adding reviews will not fix what the reader is actually reacting to.
Open your profile in a private window, next to the two competitors who appear beside you, and work out which of these five you are looking at.
- There are simply too few to read.
- Below a handful of reviews a reader has nothing to weigh, and a single unhappy customer sets the entire impression. The tell is that competitors beside you have several times your count. The fix is a steady process rather than a push, because a sudden pile arriving at once creates the next problem on this list.
- The reviews are old.
- Forty reviews and nothing since two summers ago reads as a business that may have closed or changed hands. Recency does more work in a reader's head than total volume, and it is the pattern most businesses ignore because the count on the profile still looks respectable.
- The average is dragging.
- Sitting on four point one beside a competitor on four point eight, and the gap is doing the deciding. Usually this is a small number of bad experiences that were never answered, sitting in a total too small to absorb them. It resolves through steady genuine arrival plus visible replies, not through removal requests.
- A burst, then eight months of silence.
- The signature of a campaign rather than a process. Thirty reviews in a fortnight, all short, several posted within minutes of each other, then nothing. Readers notice the clustering and discount it, and the business is back where it started once the burst ages. Consistency is the goal and it comes from where you ask, not how hard.
- The negatives are unanswered and the positives have no words.
- The two reviews with real detail are the angry ones, and nobody has replied to either. Meanwhile the good reviews are bare star ratings. A reader takes the detailed account seriously and skims past the rest, so the profile reads considerably worse than the average suggests. This one is fixable this week, at no cost.
The line
What we will and will not do to your review profile
Every shortcut available in this category is a breach of the terms of the platform your visibility depends on. Several of them are sold as software features.
What we will do
- Ask every genuine customer, through a route the platform permits, at the point they are most likely to say yes
- Build the request into a step of your process that already happens, rather than running it as a campaign
- Give every customer an easy private route to raise a problem, offered to everyone rather than used to filter who is asked publicly
- Reply to every review, in your voice, without a template
- Report review volume, recency, average and response rate by location
- Report a genuinely fake or policy-breaching review through the platform's own process, and accept its decision
What we will never do
- Buy reviews, or work with any service that sells them
- Offer a discount, entry, gift, credit or any other incentive in exchange for a review
- Gate the request so that only customers who say they are happy are invited to post publicly
- Write a review, or draft one for a customer to paste
- Attempt to suppress, bury or hide a genuine negative review rather than answering it
- Promise a particular average rating, review count or removal outcome
The process
Build asking into the job, not into a campaign
Businesses that maintain a steady flow of reviews are not asking harder than everyone else. They are asking at a fixed moment that already exists in their workflow.
Pick the moment, precisely
Not "after the job". The moment the customer expresses relief or thanks — the engineer packing up, the appointment confirmation, the handover call, the day the claim settles. Reviews come from a feeling that has a short half-life, and asking two weeks later is asking a different person.
You get: One named moment per service line
Decide who asks and how
The person the customer dealt with, in the channel that conversation already happens in. A text from the technician who did the work outperforms an email from an address the customer has never seen, and it takes no additional system to send.
You get: An owner and a channel for each moment
Make the link trivially short
A direct review link, tested on a phone, that lands on the review box rather than the profile. Every extra tap loses people, and asking someone to search for you and scroll is where most well-intentioned processes quietly fail.
You get: A tested short link per location
Give complaints a separate, open door
Every customer gets both: an invitation to review publicly and an easy way to raise a problem directly. Offered to everyone, not used to decide who is asked. That distinction is the difference between a service recovery process and gating.
You get: A published complaint route offered to all customers
Reply to everything, in your own words
Within a few days. Specific enough that a reader can tell a human wrote it. For negatives: acknowledge, correct anything factually wrong without arguing, and move the detail to a private channel. Never identify a customer or disclose anything about their circumstances.
You get: A response standard and a named owner
Measure recency, not just count
Track reviews per month, days since the last one, average by location and response rate. Watch for the burst-and-silence pattern returning, which is the sign the process has slipped back into being a campaign.
You get: A monthly review health report per location
The reply that does the work
What a good response to a bad review contains
You are not writing to the reviewer. You are writing to the next hundred people who will read that review while deciding whether to contact you, and they are reading your reply more carefully than the review itself.
- An acknowledgement that something went wrong for this person, without conceding facts you know to be untrue
- A correction of anything materially inaccurate, stated once, calmly, with no argument attached
- Enough specificity that a reader can tell it was written about this incident rather than pasted
- What has changed as a result, if anything genuinely has
- A direct route to a named person to continue it privately
- No reference to the customer's identity, circumstances, treatment, case or anything else that was told to you in confidence
- No defensiveness, no sarcasm, and nothing that reads as though it was written the same hour the review appeared
Why this is worth the effort
Reviews are doing two jobs at once
The first job is visibility. Google describes prominence as part of how local results are ranked and names review count and score as contributing to it, which makes review behaviour part of whether you appear in the map results at all.
The second job is persuasion, and it happens after the visibility has already worked. Someone who has found you is deciding between you and the two businesses beside you, and reviews are usually the last thing they read before choosing. That decision is made on recency, on detail, and on how you handled the complaints — not on the average alone.
Those two jobs pull in the same direction, which is unusual and useful. A steady process that asks genuine customers at the right moment improves both at once. A burst campaign flatters one metric briefly and does nothing for the reader who is actually deciding.
It is also worth putting the reviews to work somewhere other than the platform. Most websites relegate them to a carousel on the homepage, when the useful place for a specific, detailed review is beside the service it describes, where someone is deciding whether to enquire.
Questions
What owners ask about reviews
Can you get a bad review removed?
Only if it breaches the platform's policy — spam, a review of a different business, personal attacks, conflict of interest, or content that is prohibited under their published rules. In those cases we report it through the platform's own process and it is their decision, not ours.
A genuine review from a real customer who had a bad experience will not be removed, and it should not be. The productive response is a calm, specific reply and enough recent, honest reviews around it that one bad week does not define the profile.
Why can we not offer a small discount for a review?
Because it breaches the terms of the platforms you rely on. Google's review policies prohibit offering incentives in exchange for reviews, and other major platforms take a similar position. The risk is not just the individual review — profiles that show a pattern of incentivised reviews can lose them in bulk, and the profile itself can be affected.
It also degrades the asset you are trying to build. Incentivised reviews tend to be short, generic and simultaneous, which is exactly the pattern a careful reader notices and discounts.
What is review gating and why is it a problem?
Gating is asking customers a private satisfaction question first and only inviting the happy ones to post publicly. It is sold as a feature by a lot of review software and it breaches the policies of the major platforms, because it deliberately distorts the public record.
The legitimate version is close in spirit and different in practice: ask everyone for a public review, and separately give every customer an easy private route to raise a problem. You are not selecting who gets asked, you are making sure complaints have somewhere to go.
How many reviews do we actually need?
Enough that a reader stops counting and starts reading, and recent enough that the business looks open. In most local categories that means being roughly in line with the competitors appearing next to you, with a steady arrival rather than a large historic pile.
Recency usually matters more than total. A profile whose newest review is two years old reads as neglected regardless of how many sit beneath it.
Should we reply to every review, even the five-star ones?
Yes, and briefly. A short, specific, non-templated reply signals that a person is paying attention, and prospective customers read the replies as closely as the reviews.
The rule that matters is variation. Ten identical "Thanks for your feedback!" replies in a row read worse than no replies at all, because they show the process is automated and nobody is actually reading.
Find out which review problem is costing you enquiries
We will look at your profile beside the competitors who appear next to you, tell you whether the issue is volume, recency, average or response, and set out a process your team can run without us.
If we don't deliver the work we agreed to deliver for reasons within our control, you don't pay for the undelivered work. Read our guarantee
Related
Where to go next
- reputation managementWhere the asking process and the response workflow get built.
- local search visibilityReview behaviour feeds the local results as well as the buyer.
- putting proof on the website itselfReviews do more work on your own pages than most sites allow them to.
- the Maps ranking diagnosis
- a site that is not converting the visits it gets
- the standards behind this work
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal