Review velocity: why a steady trickle beats a burst

Two businesses each have forty reviews and a 4.8 rating. One collected them over eighteen months. The other collected them in three weeks after their agency ran a campaign, and has had none since.

These are not the same asset, and the difference is visible to anyone who scrolls, including the customer deciding between them.

What the pattern says about you

Reviews are a record with dates on it. Read as a sequence rather than a total, the dates say things the average cannot, and recency is one of the things Google's local algorithm reads from them. Repeat-visit trades such as cafes have the easiest version of this problem and are the most likely to ignore it.

• A steady trickle says a business that is trading consistently and has a habit of asking.
• A burst followed by silence says a campaign happened, once, some time ago.
• A long gap says something changed, and the reader will guess at what.
• Nothing in eight months, on a profile with sixty reviews, is the pattern most likely to make a careful customer hesitate.

Why campaigns underperform habits

A review push works like this: someone exports the customer list, sends four hundred emails, gets thirty reviews in a fortnight, and reports a success. Six weeks later the flow is zero, because the mechanism that produced them was an email blast rather than a process. The alternative is one request written into the job, which is all asking for a review really amounts to. It is also the kind of thing a monthly report should be showing you rather than a total.

There is a second problem with the campaign shape. You have now used your entire back catalogue. The customers from three years ago who might have reviewed you have been asked, and there is nobody left to ask except the people you serve from now on, which is what you should have been doing all along.

A campaign spends your review pipeline. A habit is one.

The arithmetic of a habit

This is worth doing on your own numbers, because it usually reframes the problem from ambitious to trivially achievable.

Those figures are an illustration with the assumptions stated, not a benchmark. Substitute your own job count and your own experience of how often people say yes. The conclusion tends to survive: the gap between businesses with forty reviews and businesses with four hundred is almost never demand. It is whether anybody asks.

Building the trickle

1. 01Pick one moment in the job where the request happens. The same moment every time, chosen because it is when the customer is most pleased rather than when your invoicing runs.
2. 02Give the person who did the work the link, saved as a text shortcut on their phone.
3. 03Ask everyone, in the same way. Screening for happy customers is separately against the rules and does not work anyway.
4. 04One reminder, two days later. Not three.
5. 05Count them weekly. Not the total, the number that arrived this week. That is the only number that tells you whether the habit is alive.

If you have had a long gap

Do not fix it by getting thirty in a fortnight. You will produce exactly the burst shape this post is about, and after a dormant period it looks worse rather than better. A burst also reads as bought to the customers you were trying to reassure, which is the ground fake review removal covers from the other side.

1. 01Start asking every current customer from today. This is the whole fix and it takes effect immediately.
2. 02Go back through recent jobs only, the last month or two, where the work is still fresh enough for someone to write about.
3. 03Leave the older list alone. A review of a job from two years ago is thin, and asking for one is how you get a review that says nothing.
4. 04Accept that it takes a few months. It does, and the result is durable in a way the fortnight is not.

The wording and timing of the ask are covered in how to ask for a review, and if you are wondering what number you are actually aiming at, this one works it out against your competitors rather than in the abstract.