Every tradie I talk to says the same thing. "Everyone's happy, I just never get around to asking." Then their competitor with worse work and 120 reviews gets the call.
Reviews aren't a reflection of how good you are. They're a reflection of whether you have a system. Here's the one that works.
Timing beats wording
Ask within 24 hours of finishing. Not a week later. The job is still fresh, they're still grateful, and they haven't moved on to the next thing in their life.
The best moment is right after they say something nice. They tell you it looks great, you say thanks, and you ask then. That's the whole trick. People who have just complimented you out loud are dramatically more likely to write it down.
Text, don't email
Emails get opened maybe a fifth of the time. Texts get read in minutes, and the phone they're reading it on is the phone they'd leave the review from. One tap, they're on your profile.
Keep it short and human. Something like:
No paragraph of thanks. No "we value your feedback". Nobody talks like that and it reads like a robot sent it.
The follow-up is where the reviews actually come from
This is the part everyone skips. One ask gets you somewhere around a 10 to 15 percent response. Two gentle follow-ups roughly doubles it.
People aren't ignoring you. They read it on the job site, meant to do it later, and forgot. A nudge three days on and one more a week after that catches most of them.
- Day 0: the ask, right after the job.
- Day 3: short nudge. "No stress if you're flat out, just bumping this up."
- Day 10: last one, then stop.
- Never a fourth. That's when you become the business that pesters people.
Make the link go straight to the box
Don't send them to your profile and hope. Google gives you a direct review link that opens the star box with the keyboard already up. In your Business Profile, hit "Ask for reviews" and copy that link. Every extra tap between the text and the stars loses people.
Things not to do
- Don't offer anything for a review. Discounts, free jobs, a raffle entry. It's against Google's policy and the reviews get wiped when they catch it.
- Don't filter. Asking only the customers you think are happy is called review gating and Google bans it explicitly.
- Don't buy them. They get detected, deleted, and the profile gets flagged.
- Don't ask the same person twice. Obvious, but automated systems do it constantly if nobody's checking.
Start with the backlog
You've probably got two years of finished jobs sitting in your phone or your invoicing software. Most of those people would still leave you a review today. Work through them slowly, ten or twenty a week, not all at once. Fifty reviews landing on a Tuesday looks fake to Google and to people.
Done properly that backlog alone can take a profile from five reviews to fifty over a couple of months. It's the fastest free win most trade businesses have sitting there.
Don't want to chase reviews yourself? Our review management asks every customer at the right moment, with your direct link, and replies to what comes in.