ReviewsThe rating is the first thing a stranger reads about you
Before the photos, before the address, before a single word you wrote — a number out of five and the count beside it. It is the most-read sentence your business publishes and almost nobody is editing it.
Reviews are also a ranking input, which is the part that gets the attention. The larger effect is simpler: two shops, equally close, and one of them is a 4.8.
How it is run
Monitor, respond, report, ask
Not a campaign. A loop that runs for as long as the business does, because reviews arrive whether or not anybody is watching for them.
Monitor
Every new review on the profile is picked up, not just the ones that upset somebody enough to forward them. That matters most for the three-star review left on a Tuesday afternoon that nobody would have mentioned and that sits there permanently, in public, unanswered.
Respond
Every review gets a reply — the good ones too, which is the half most businesses skip. A reply is not written for the person who left the review. They have gone. It is written for the next stranger reading the profile, who is deciding whether this is a business that pays attention.
Report what breaks the rules
Some reviews are not reviews: they are from a competitor, they name the wrong business, they are a complaint about a different branch, or they contain something Google's own content policy forbids. Those get reported through the proper channel with the reason set out. Google does not remove everything reported, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest, but the ones that do qualify are worth pursuing.
Ask, properly
The legitimate way to get more reviews is to ask every customer, at the moment the work is done, without filtering out the ones likely to be unhappy. That last part is not a nicety — steering only satisfied customers toward the review form is review gating, and it is against Google's policy.
Response strategy
What gets written back
Every reply is written for the next reader, not the last one. That single reframing changes almost every decision below.
The five star with no words
Still gets a reply, and a short one. Two sentences naming what they came in for. It is the cheapest way to put a keyword-relevant, human sentence on the profile, and a wall of answered five-star reviews reads very differently from a wall of unanswered ones.
The three star
The most useful review you will get and the one most often ignored. Somebody liked you enough not to be angry and had one specific complaint. Answer the complaint, say what changed, and leave it there. Future readers weigh this one heavily because it is obviously honest.
The one star that is fair
Acknowledge it, apologise once, say what you have done, and offer a way to sort it offline. No excuses, no history of the evening, no arguing about what really happened. The reply is read by people who were not there and who will side with whoever sounds calmer.
The one star that is not fair
Reply anyway, and reply shortest of all. State the facts once, plainly, without sarcasm, and stop. Then report it if it breaches policy. A visibly unfair review with a measured reply underneath it does surprisingly little damage; the same review with a furious reply does a great deal.
The one that names a staff member
Handled privately first. A public reply that discusses an individual employee, in either direction, is a problem — praise included, since it invites the next reviewer to compare. Thank the reviewer, keep the name out of the response.
The one that is really about something else
Parking, a delivery firm, a landlord, the weather. Answer the part that is about you, say plainly which part is not, and offer the thing you can actually do. Readers can tell the difference and will discount the rest themselves.
Timing
Speed does most of the work
A reply two days later reads as attention. The same reply five weeks later reads as damage control.
The single biggest difference between a profile that handles a bad review well and one that does not is how long the review sat there alone. An unanswered complaint is the only account of what happened. An answered one is a disagreement between two parties, and a reader who can see both will usually split the difference — which, from a one-star review, is a large recovery for a couple of paragraphs of work.
This is also the part that is hardest to keep up in-house, and for a reason that has nothing to do with willingness. Bad reviews arrive at the worst moment of an already bad week, and the reply that gets written at that moment is the one that should not be published. Putting a day and somebody else between the review and the response is most of the value here.
Boundaries
Four things we will not do
Each of these is sold as a service by somebody. Each of them puts the review history you already have at risk to add to it.
Buying reviews
Paid, incentivised and traded reviews all breach Google's policy, and the accounts that supply them are the most heavily detected thing on the platform. The downside is not a warning — it is the whole review history going.
Writing them ourselves
A review written by the business, by us, or by anyone who was not a customer is fake. There is no version of this that is a grey area, and a business whose profile we manage should never have to wonder which of its reviews are real.
Review gating
Surveying customers first and only sending the happy ones to Google is explicitly against Google's policy, even though the software to do it is sold openly. Ask everybody or ask nobody.
Mass-reporting negative reviews
Reporting a review because it is critical, rather than because it breaks a rule, wastes everyone's time and trains Google to ignore your reports. Reports are used where there is an actual policy breach to point at.
Find out what your reviews currently say
The free audit covers the review history as it stands: how many, how recent, how many went unanswered, and what the unanswered ones are telling people.