How do I get more Google reviews?

Ask every customer automatically, the moment the job finishes, and make the ask one tap. That single change produces more reviews than anything else available, because most good businesses sitting on a handful of reviews got there for one reason: nobody asked while the goodwill was still fresh.

When exactly should the ask go out?

At completion, inside the hour, and from the person the customer just dealt with.

Goodwill has a short half-life. A customer standing in a driveway looking at finished work is as willing as they'll ever be. The same customer weeks later has moved on, and the request now reads as a chore somebody has added to their week.

Timing is the whole reason to automate it. Asking when you remember means asking after the good jobs you happened to be thinking about, which is rarely and unevenly. Wiring the request to job completion means it goes out every time, including on the Friday afternoons nobody would have remembered.

Real estate agents have a harder version of this, because the moment of maximum goodwill and the end of the transaction are the same day, and that day is chaotic. The ask has to be queued before closing rather than improvised at it, or it doesn't happen at all.

What does the ask have to look like?

Short, and one tap from finished.

• Text first, email second. Text gets read. Email sometimes does. Sending both, spaced apart, catches people who answer different things.
• A direct link to the review form. Not to the profile, not to a landing page, not to a page offering four platforms.
• The customer's name and the job, so it reads as a message rather than a broadcast.
• One sentence of instruction. Anything longer reads like a survey and gets closed.
• One reminder, days later, once. A second nudge picks up a real share of the people who meant to and forgot. A third annoys them.

What fails is the business card saying "find us on Google" and the line at the bottom of an invoice. Both put the work on the customer, and the customer won't do the work.

It also helps to ask people to mention what was done and where. Not as a script to copy. A customer writing the actual job and the actual town into a review tells a search engine something the profile can't claim about itself.

Is it against the rules to screen out the bad ones first?

Yes, if screening means what it usually means.

Sending a survey, then showing the Google link only to the people who answered positively and hiding it from everybody else, is review gating. Google's policy prohibits it, it's detectable, and it's a known reason for listings being penalised.

The compliant version isn't complicated. Everybody gets asked, and everybody gets the same route to a public review. Alongside it, the business offers a private way to raise a problem, such as a reply to the text or a direct line to the owner, so somebody unhappy has somewhere to go that's faster than a public post. A customer who takes the private route and still chooses to post publicly is entirely within their rights, and nothing in the system stops them.

The difference is whether the public option is ever withheld. If it's withheld, it's gating.

Metcalf Media builds it the compliant way for every client and turns down the other version, because a penalised listing costs more than any review it ever saved.

Can I offer something in return?

No. Discounts, gift cards, entry into a draw, a free add-on next time, all of it's against platform policy, whether or not the review has to be positive.

Incentivised reviews are increasingly well detected, and the penalty lands on the listing rather than on the reviewer. Employees writing reviews, family members writing reviews and agencies writing reviews sit in the same category and carry the same risk.

Metcalf Media's own Google profile is 5.0 from 12 ratings. Twelve isn't a large number and it's not presented as one. Each of them came from asking somebody who had actually been worked with, which is the same mechanism recommended to clients and the reason it can be recommended honestly.

How fast should they arrive?

Steadily. A trickle every week beats a burst every year, and the burst is the pattern that gets filtered.

Volume is judged locally rather than nationally. Every town has its own map pack, so the comparison is against the other businesses answering that same search. In a town the size of Skiatook that can be a short list, and a handful of real reviews moves things noticeably. In Tulsa it takes considerably more.

Set the target against the competitors actually appearing above you rather than against a round number, then keep the mechanism running, because the count is a moving comparison and not a finish line. Review generation built as a system rather than a campaign is the difference between reaching a number and holding a position.

What do I do about a review that's untrue?

Reply once, calmly, and report it separately.

The reply isn't written for the reviewer. It's written for everybody who reads it afterwards while deciding whether to call, and those people weigh the tone more than the facts. A short, specific, unemotional answer that states what happened and offers to sort it out does more good than any argument, and arguing in public costs more business than the original review did.

Reviews that break policy, such as one from a competitor, one from somebody who was never a customer, or personal abuse, can be reported for removal. The process is slow and inconsistent, and it's worth doing anyway.

The structural defense is volume. One angry review sitting among a handful is a catastrophe. The same review sitting among hundreds is a customer having a bad day, and everybody reading it can tell the difference.