Why Google Reviews Are Your Most Powerful Growth Tool

You have probably been collecting reviews for a while now. Maybe you are up to forty of them, and you’re actually quite proud of that number.

And that is usually where any thought about your reviews stops. They remain a scoreboard, just a number sitting near the top of your profile that either looks good or doesn’t.

But that score, that quantity of reviews? That’s the smallest part of what they could be doing for you.

Because reviews are the only part of your Google Business Profile written by somebody who is not you. The categories, the description, the photos, the hours: that is all your own account of yourself. Reviews are somebody else’s. Which is exactly why Google loves them.

The short answer

Google counts reviews as part of how well-known your business is, and openly admits that more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking. But your star rating isn’t everything! In fact, it’s the words inside your reviews describing what you actually do, in the language real customers use when they search, that matter more.

Do Google reviews affect my ranking, or just my reputation?

Both, and that comes directly from Google. Its local ranking guidance pointedly names three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Prominence is described as how well-known your business is, and Google lists your review count among the things it is based on.

If you read our piece on how inconsistent business info costs you customers, those three will already be familiar!

Google’s own wording is unusually direct for Google: more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking. Not might, but can.

Reviews are different from everything else on that list, though. You can’t write them.

While you can choose your own categories, upload your own photos, or do routine maintenance to ensure your open hours are accurate (as you should), you can’t sit down on a Tuesday morning and just “produce” prominence, because prominence is other people talking about you.

Why does a 4.8 with 200 reviews beat a 5.0 with five?

Because a five-star average that comes from just five reviews is, well, that’s not a lot of people! Google’s score is a plain average of every rating published on your profile, so with only a handful of reviews it can swing really wildly. Prominence also counts how many you have, not only how good they are.

The math here makes this obvious. Let’s look at what one unhappy customer does to each of these two shops.

Say Shop One has five reviews, all five stars. The average is 5.0.

One customer has a bad day and leaves a single 1-star review. The average changes to 4.33.

Now Shop Two: two hundred reviews, averaging 4.8. They get that exact same 1-star review. Their average is now 4.78.

It’s still that one annoyed person giving a really low rating to both businesses, but Shop One lost two thirds of a star, while Shop Two lost two hundredths.

Fact is, volume is what makes your rating mean anything (and is what stops one bad review from defining you!).

And just as a heads up: if you’ve received or given a review before just to see that the store’s average doesn’t change? That’s because scores don’t update the second it’s posted. Google says it can take up to two weeks.

What are the words inside your reviews actually doing?

Describing your business in language you would never use about yourself. Your own profile says “café”. Your reviews say “music is soft enough to take a call” and “the only place near Phrom Phong with real oat milk”. These things people are saying about your business tend to be observations that give way more insight to what your “café” is truly like.

Google kind of assumes that your business description is marketing copy. You wrote it, probably polished it, and everyone else creating their profile did the same thing: they built it in a way that makes their business look as good as possible. But reviews? These are unpaid, unprompted, usually more specific descriptions of what it is actually like to be your customer.

How often should new reviews arrive?

There is no published number for this and you should treat any specific figure with suspicion, but general reasoning lends to the fact that a steady supply of reviews over longer periods of time make more of an impact than an avalanche of them in a short period.

If in just this week you heard from 10 people that “Jake” from Sales is really unpleasant to work with, that makes a pretty strong impression. Then spread across the coming year, you hear from 10 other people that he’s a pretty swell guy.

Somehow to this day, you still don’t personally know “Jake”, but what are you more inclined to believe? That he’s a terrible person who’s faked being nice for the last year? Or that he had a terrible week at the start of the year, and is usually quite nice?

That’s why freshness and consistency both matter. A review from last week tells a customer you are still open, still good, and still run by the same people. A review from 2023 tells them almost nothing, because three years have passed since then and there’s no way the person in 2023 knows that!

We have written about this before, and it applies to reviews just as much as it applies to posts.

What if people game the system? Luckily, Google prohibits offering anything in exchange for reviews: free items, discounts, a lucky draw, all of it counts as fake engagement…and that can directly get your profile penalized.

So how do you actually get more of them?

Ask the people who are visibly happy, ask at the moment they are happiest, and make it effortless! Remember, don’t offer anything in exchange. And if you want reviews that mention specifics, directly ask about that specific thing rather than telling them what to write.

That’s because telling somebody what to say usually results in reviews that seem like they were…dictated. Experienced readers can tell immediately whether a review looks fake or doesn’t.

But an effective way of getting an authentic review is just to prompt their memory. Ask them how they found the specific thing they came in for, before you mention reviews at all, and they’ll likely keep that thought in their mind. What they then choose to write will still come from them, but you’ve nudged them to think about a specific point of your business.

If making a direct request makes you feel awkward or even a bit cringey, there are some effective ways you can get reviews without asking anybody directly. Whichever the case, remember that doing it steadily is just as important…freshness and consistency, folks!

And once reviews do start arriving regularly, replying to them is equally important, if not more so. That isn’t always easy, especially if you’re a larger business that gets dozens of reviews by the day, so if keeping up by hand is not realistic, you might be interested in learning about what a review management tool can do for you.

The new review habit you should start building now

Don’t start out immediately with sweeping goals like 100 reviews in a month. Rather, start by reading the ones you already have.

Go through your last twenty or so and write down every specific thing a customer mentions that your own profile does not: a menu item, a service, a landmark, the parking, maybe the fact that you open early.

Given those are things written by people visiting and paying you, you should see if you can add any of that information as an attribute or new section in your business description

Then with that out of the way, try your hand at requesting a review from one happy customer this week. Just one. Two if you’re feeling brave. Just don’t forget that asking is going to have to be a consistent weekly practice!