So should I stop asking for reviews?

Keep asking, but change what you ask for. A review that says 'great service, very professional' is worth almost nothing to an assistant trying to work out what you do and where. A review naming the job and the town is worth a great deal, and it costs the same to request.

Isn't asking customers to mention a service in their review manipulative?

Asking someone to write a review you dictate would be. Asking 'would you mind mentioning which job we did and where you're based' is prompting for detail, not for sentiment. The opinion stays theirs, which is the part that has to be untouched.

23 reviews beat hundreds, if the reviews say the right things

Review count is a weak lever on its own, because every competitor is already pulling it. What moves visibility is what the reviews say: the company name, the city, and the specific service named in the body of the review. One client went from 11 reviews to 23 and outranks businesses in the same area holding hundreds.

If good Google reviews were all it took, all your competition would already be there.

I say a version of that on nearly every call, because almost every owner I speak to believes their review count is the thing holding them back. It rarely is. Your competitors have been collecting reviews for a decade and so have you. Everybody pulling the same lever means the lever has stopped being a differentiator.

Here’s the case that changed how I ask for them.

11 to 23

Mr Fresh Carpet Care in Fairfield, California went from 11 Google reviews to 23 over the course of the work I did with him. He’s happy to be named, so I can be specific.

Twenty-three is not a lot of reviews. Carpet cleaners in that same area are sitting on hundreds.

He outranks them.

Not because of the twelve extra reviews. Twelve reviews is noise at that scale, and if volume were the mechanism he’d still be nowhere. It’s because of what those reviews say.

What a useful review contains

Three things, and most reviews contain none of them:

Your company name, written out in the body rather than left implied by the page it sits on. “Mr Fresh did a brilliant job” is a different piece of text to “Great service, very happy.”

Where the job happened. “They came out to us in Fairfield” tells a system something a five-star rating never will.

And the service itself. Carpet cleaning, water damage, upholstery, whichever job it was. Named, in the customer’s own words.

A review carrying all three is a small, credible, third-party sentence saying this named business does this named job in this named place. That’s precisely the sentence an assistant is trying to assemble when somebody asks it who’s good locally. You’ve written it for them, and a customer signed it.

A review saying “10/10 highly recommend” is a rating with some letters attached. It helps your star average. It tells a model nothing.

How to ask without writing it for them

This is the bit people get wrong, and the wrong version is worse than not asking.

Don’t send a template. Don’t suggest wording. What you’re asking for is detail, not sentiment, and the two are easy to keep separate:

“If you’ve got a minute for a Google review, it really helps. If you can mention which job we did and roughly where you are, even better, that’s the bit that helps people find us.”

That’s it. The opinion is entirely theirs, including a bad one. You’ve just asked them to be specific, which most people are happy to do because it’s easier than thinking of something to say.

Ask on the day. Ask the person who was pleased, at the moment they were pleased, which for most service businesses is standing in their hallway looking at the work.

Why this is my favourite lever

Because it’s available to everyone, it costs nothing, and it’s almost entirely unworked.

Most local businesses are either not asking at all, or asking in a way that produces sentiment with no detail. Both are fixable this week. And unlike most of what I do, you don’t need a developer, a budget or a vendor to do it. You need to change one sentence in how you ask.

The next twelve reviews you collect can carry your name, your town and your service, or they can say “great job thanks”. Same effort. Very different asset.

One caution

None of this works if the underlying job was mediocre. Specific reviews from unhappy customers are specific in the wrong direction, and they’ll be read just as carefully.

The lever is only useful to businesses doing work worth describing. Which, fortunately, is most of the ones who bother reading this far.