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How do I ask for reviews without breaking Google's rules?

Ask every customer, the same way, with the same link, right after the job closes out. Google's rules say you can't pay for reviews or offer anything of value for one, and you can't discourage bad ones or pick out only the customers you expect to be happy. Ask everyone and let the reviews land where they land.

What Google's rules forbid

Two things. First, anything of value traded for a review: money, a discount, a free service call, a drawing for a prize. Second, anything that shapes who gets asked, which Google describes as discouraging negative reviews or picking out positive ones.

Both are in Google's content policy for reviews, and both get reviews removed when they're found. The first one people know about. The second one catches honest businesses that thought they were being careful.

The polite mistake

The survey that asks how did we do, sends the happy answers to your Google listing and routes the unhappy ones to a private form, is the exact thing the rule describes. It's sold as reputation management and it's a violation, however good the intentions were.

The fix is one line: send the same link to everyone. If a job went badly, you already know, and a call about it does more than keeping the customer away from your listing. A bad review you answered well is worth more to the next prospect than a bad review you dodged, and the dodge is the part that breaks a rule.

What to send

Get your review link from your Business Profile, under the option for getting more reviews. It's short, it's permanent, and it opens the review box directly instead of dropping somebody on a search page.

Ask right after the work is finished, while the driveway still looks new. Ask a question rather than for a favor: what job did we do, and how did it go. That gets a sentence about the work and the town, which is worth more than a bare star.

Email tends to get answered for this, and a text works when that's how you've been talking all along. Pick one, use it every time, and don't send four reminders.

What not to bother with

Don't write the review for them, and don't hand them a phrase to include. Somebody tested coaching keywords into reviews over months and found no improvement in the map, and a review that reads like it was dictated does damage with the person reading it.

Don't buy them either. Bought reviews get removed, they're easy to spot from the outside, and the profile they came from is a liability sitting on your listing.

One customer's before and after

A concrete coating company

River Falls, Wisconsin. Same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site.

more often on Google
3,864 to 22,885
5.9x
more visits from Google
106 to 284
2.7x
Towns they show up in
Wisconsin and Minnesota
27

What this means for you

Copy your review link out of your Business Profile today and paste it into whatever message you already send when a job wraps up. Then make asking part of closing the job, the same as the final walkthrough, so it happens on every job instead of on the ones somebody remembers.

Bindingstone's lead system sends that ask on every finished job, with your own review link in it, so it happens the same way every time without anyone adding a task to their day.

Ready to show up in every town you work in?

Your site can be live in about ten days. After that, the towns you drive to can find you.