How to get more Google reviews for a local business

Guide · Updated 27 August 2026 · Written by James

Most advice on this comes from companies selling review generation, which is why it skips the part where half the common tactics break Google's rules and get your reviews deleted. This covers seven ways to ask that work, how many reviews you actually need, what to say when one goes badly, and one popular shortcut worth avoiding.

Why reviews are worth the effort

Two separate things are going on, and the second one matters more than people expect.

The first is ranking. Reviews are one of the signals Google uses to order the map results, alongside how close you are to the person searching, whether your categories are right, and whether the profile is filled in properly. They are a factor among several, not a lever you pull.

The second is the one you feel immediately. When three businesses appear in the map results and one has 34 reviews at 4.8 while the others have 2 and none, the choice has already been made before anybody clicks anything. That effect does not need you to outrank anyone. It works on the position you already hold.

So the honest framing is this: reviews are one input into where you rank, and they change how you look to someone who is already deciding between you and the business listed above you.

How many you actually need

Fewer than the round numbers people fixate on. The target is not 100. The target is looking established next to whoever else appears when someone searches for what you do.

For most local trades and services in a place the size of Norwich, that is somewhere around 15 to 30. Look at the three businesses that come up above you and count theirs. That is your number, and it is usually smaller than you feared.

Recency counts for more than volume. Ten reviews from this year read better than sixty that stop in 2021, because a profile that went quiet three years ago raises a question about whether the business did too. A steady trickle beats a burst, and a burst of twenty in a week looks like exactly what it is.

The rules most businesses break

This is the part the review generation companies leave out. Google's policies here are specific, and breaking them gets reviews filtered or removed, and in bad cases gets the profile suspended.

• No incentives. You cannot offer anything in exchange for a review. Not a discount, not a prize draw entry, not a free coffee. This is the most commonly broken rule by a distance, and it applies even when you would happily accept a bad review in return.
• No gating. Asking only the customers you know are pleased, or screening people through a "how did we do?" step and only sending the happy ones to Google, is against the policy. You ask everyone or you ask nobody.
• No buying them. Obvious, and also detected. Accounts that exist to post reviews get identified in batches, and everything they touched goes with them.
• Staff and family are not customers. Reviews from your own people, and especially from the same device or network, tend to get filtered quietly. You will not be told. They simply will not appear.

The pattern that draws attention is a sudden run of five star reviews from accounts with no other history. If you have been trading for years with four reviews and thirty arrive in a fortnight, that is the shape Google is looking for.

The seven ways to ask, best first

Almost all of the difficulty here is friction and timing, not persuasion. Nobody refuses because they hate you. They mean to do it, then the moment passes and the message sits unopened.

These are ordered by how well they work in practice, which is a judgement rather than a measurement. The first two do most of the work. The rest are worth setting up because they cost nothing once they exist and they catch the people the first two miss.

1. Ask in person, then text the link

This is the one that works, and everything below is a way of approximating it when you are not in the room.

Ask at the moment the work is done, not a week later in a newsletter. The window where someone is pleased with you and thinking about you is short and it closes fast. If you have just finished and they said thank you, that is the moment.

Then send the link within the hour, while they still remember agreeing to it. Asking out loud first is what makes the message land, because the person has already said yes to something and is expecting it.

2. A QR code where you take payment

Point a QR code at your short review link, print it, and put it where the transaction ends: beside the card machine, on the counter, on the back of the menu, on the treatment room door.

Any free QR generator will do, and you do not need a paid one. Encode the g.page/r/… link directly rather than using a service that redirects, because those links stop working when the free tier ends and you will not notice until the code has been dead for months.

One thing worth knowing: codes on something people take away work better than codes they are meant to scan in front of you. Standing at a counter scanning a code while someone watches is awkward, and most people will not. On a receipt, a bag insert or a leaflet in the hand, it gets scanned later when they have a minute.

3. A card you hand over

For trades and anyone who finishes a job and leaves, a small printed card does the work the counter does for a shop. QR code on one side, the short link written out underneath it so people without a working camera app can still type it, and one line saying what you would like.

Hand it over rather than leaving it on the side, and say the sentence as you do. A card given with a request is a reminder. A card left on a worktop is rubbish.

4. An automated follow-up message

If you already use booking or invoicing software, it can almost certainly send a message on a delay after a job is marked complete, and this turns asking from something you remember to do into something that happens.

Three rules for setting it up. Send it 24 to 48 hours after the work finishes, not immediately, because a message that arrives while you are still packing the van reads as automated. Send one reminder at most, and only if there has been no review, five to seven days later. And send it to everyone, because filtering the list to the customers you think are happy is the gating rule again, just with software doing it.

If you have no such system, a recurring calendar reminder to send the messages by hand on a Friday afternoon is not as good, and it is much better than nothing.

5. Van and window stickers

A small sticker with a QR code on the van, the door or the window is close to free once the artwork exists, and it works slowly. Nobody scans it the day it goes on. It quietly catches the person who has been meaning to write something for a fortnight.

Treat this as a layer rather than a tactic. It will not produce reviews on its own and it costs almost nothing to have.

6. Your email signature and invoice footer

One line at the bottom of every email and every invoice you send: a short sentence and the link. Ten minutes to set up, then it runs forever without you.

The yield is low per send and the volume is high, which is exactly the profile you want from something you never think about again.

7. A careful ask to past customers

If you are starting from two reviews, there is a backlog of people who would happily have left one had you asked at the time. You can go back to them, with one important condition.

Spread it out. Sending forty messages on a Tuesday produces exactly the pattern in the chart above, which is the one that gets a profile looked at. Send a handful a week over a couple of months. It feels slow and it is the difference between reviews that stay up and reviews that quietly disappear.

Start with the most recent, because they remember you. Anyone from more than a year ago is unlikely to write anything and may not recall the job well enough to be specific, which is the part that makes a review worth reading.

Whichever of these you use, ask everybody rather than only the ones you feel confident about. That is not just the rule from the section above, it is also how you end up with a profile that reads as real.

What to do about a bad review

Reply to it, and understand who the reply is for. It is not for the person who wrote it. They have said their piece and are unlikely to change their mind. It is for the next person reading, who is deciding whether to call you.

Keep it short and factual. Acknowledge the specific thing, say what you did or would do, and stop. Do not relitigate the job in public, do not correct their account of events line by line, and do not sound wounded. A calm three line reply under an angry paragraph does more for you than winning the argument ever could.

Do not chase removal unless the review genuinely breaks a policy, meaning it is spam, abusive, or plainly not about your business. Being unfair is not against the rules, and reporting it will usually go nowhere.

One poor review sitting among good ones is not the problem it feels like. A profile with nothing but five stars reads as managed. A 4.7 with one visible disagreement handled well reads as a real business.

Reply to the good ones too

Most businesses only reply when something has gone wrong, which means every reply on the profile sits under a complaint. Someone scrolling sees a wall of apologies and nothing else.

A single line under a good review is enough. Thank them, mention the specific job, stop. It takes seconds, it gives the profile a pulse, and it changes what the replies collectively look like from damage control to a business that pays attention.

Why review stars on your own website are not the answer

There is an obvious sounding shortcut here: add review markup to your own site so star ratings show up under your listing in search results. Plenty of small business sites do it, and quite a few agencies sell it.

Google does not allow it. Review and rating markup about your own business, placed on your own site, is self serving and specifically excluded from the rich results it would otherwise produce. Sites that use it anyway either see the stars never appear, or pick up a manual action against the structured data.

This site has none of it, deliberately. The reviews on our homepage are plain text with the name attached, and that is all they will ever be. Anyone can check the source.

The thing that actually puts stars in front of people is the Google Business Profile, where the reviews already live and where the map results display them without you marking anything up. Effort spent getting reviews onto the profile does the job that the markup pretends to.

Where we sit, for transparency

Review requests going out steadily are part of the growth plan, along with keeping the Business Profile current, because the profile is usually doing more work for a local business than the website is. It is covered further in the local SEO page.

What we do not do is generate reviews for you, because the only ways to do that at volume are the four in the list above. We set up the asking so it happens as a matter of course, and the reviews come from your customers or they do not come.

If reviews are strong and the phone still is not ringing, the problem is somewhere else, and this guide on why a website gets no enquiries is the better starting point. For an example of the wider job, the Soma Wellbeing Centre rebuild is a Norwich business where the listing and the site needed fixing together. There are more answers in our FAQ.