How to ask customers for Google reviews

Before you start

• A verified business profile
• Your direct review link

The steps

1. 1

   Step 1: Get your review link

   From your business profile — it opens the review form directly rather than making the customer search.

2. 2

   Step 2: Shorten it

   Any URL shortener. A long link in a text message looks like spam.

3. 3

   Step 3: Ask in person first

   At the moment the job is finished and the customer is pleased. This is the single highest-conversion moment.

4. 4

   Step 4: Follow with a message

   Same day, with the link, and one sentence saying what a review helps with.

5. 5

   Step 5: Respond to every review

   Briefly, including the difficult ones. A calm reply to a bad review persuades more than the review dissuades.

6. 6

   Step 6: Keep it steady

   A trickle over months reads as a real business; twelve in one week reads as a campaign.

What will get you suspended

• Incentivising reviews with a discount or entry into a draw
• Gating — only asking customers who already said something positive
• Writing them yourself or asking staff to
• Buying them, which is the fastest route to suspension

Why recency beats volume

Eight reviews from the last six months read better than twenty from four years ago, both to a customer and in local ranking. Consistency matters more than any burst.

What to do about an unfair review

Reply once, calmly, with the facts and an offer to resolve it offline. You are writing for everyone who reads it later, not for the reviewer. Report it only if it breaches policy — it is not from a customer, it contains personal attacks, or it is plainly about a different business. Reviews are rarely removed on the grounds of being unfair, and a measured public reply persuades far more readers than a removal would have.

The background behind this

Local SEO when customers do not come to your address covers the reasoning in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who wrote this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.