Ask every customer on the day you finish, by text, with your direct review link in the message. Nothing else moves the number as much. A tradie doing 15 jobs a week who asks every single time typically picks up three to five new reviews a month, which is the difference between 12 reviews a year and 50.
Most service businesses in the Bay of Plenty are not short of happy customers. They are short of a system that asks. The gap between a business with 14 reviews and the one above it with 140 is almost never the quality of the work.
How to get Google reviews without being annoying
Ask once, at the right moment, with a link that takes one tap. Then send one reminder and stop. That is the whole method, and the reason it does not annoy anyone is that you are asking a person who just watched you do a good job, at the moment they feel like saying thanks.
The details that actually matter:
- Same day, not next week. Goodwill has a short half-life. By Friday, Tuesday’s hot water cylinder is just a bill.
- Text beats email for trades. A text gets read in minutes. An email gets read when they are at a desk, and tradies’ customers are often not at a desk.
- One tap to the review box. Get your short review link out of Google Business Profile (“Ask for reviews” gives you a
g.page/r/link) and paste that straight into the message. Never make someone search for your business. - From the person who did the work. “Mitch here” outperforms “Customer Care Team” every time.
- One reminder, three days later, then leave it. Two messages is a follow-up. Four is harassment.
- Say what the review helps with. “It helps other locals find us” is true and it gives them a reason.
- Never offer anything for it. No discounts, no draws, no free filter change. Incentivised reviews breach Google’s review policies and can get the whole lot removed.
Here is what we typically see across the different ways of asking. These are our own numbers from client campaigns, not a published benchmark, so treat them as a guide.
| How you ask | Reviews per 20 jobs, typically | Why it lands there |
|---|---|---|
| Verbal ask on site, no link | 0 to 1 | They mean it, then they get on with their day |
| Business card with a QR code | 1 to 2 | Better, but the card ends up in the ute |
| Email with the review link | 2 to 4 | Works, but competes with everything else in the inbox |
| Same-day text with the direct link | 4 to 7 | Read within minutes, one tap, no thinking |
| Same-day text plus one reminder | 5 to 9 | The reminder alone usually adds a third again |
The other half of the job is asking every time, not just when you remember. Manual asking survives about two good weeks. That is why we automate the trigger rather than relying on anyone’s memory, and it is the same follow-up plumbing we use for rebooking campaigns.
How does Google reviews work for business?
Reviews sit on your Google Business Profile, show up in Google Maps and in the three-result local pack, and feed into where you rank there. Google’s own guidance says local results are based on relevance, distance and prominence, and that “Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking” (Google Business Profile Help, “Improve your local ranking on Google”, as at July 2026). Reviews are one of the few prominence signals you directly control.
A few mechanics worth knowing:
- Anyone with a Google account can review you. There is no approval step and no way to screen a review before it goes live.
- You cannot delete a review. You can reply to it, and you can report it if it breaches policy.
- Your star average is a plain average of every live review, shown to one decimal place. There is no weighting for recency.
- Reviews with no text still count towards your average and your count.
- None of it works without a verified profile, which is where a lot of businesses stall. If yours is not sorted, start with setting up your Google Business Profile properly.
Reviews on their own are not a strategy though. They are one input into local visibility, alongside your categories, service areas, photos, and the pages on your site that match how people search. We treat all of that as one job under digital marketing in Tauranga rather than a review count in isolation.
JunkBoss is the clearest example of why. They came to us with 350+ Google reviews and over 1,000 happy customers, and were still losing same-day jobs to bigger brands with worse reviews, because none of that reputation showed up in search. Once the profile, the location pages and the schema were rebuilt around it, those reviews turned into top-3 local rankings across the Bay of Plenty. The reviews were already the asset. They just were not connected to anything.
Reviews you never ask for cost you nothing and earn you nothing. Reviews you ask for on the day, every day, compound.
The SMS and email templates we use
Short, plain, from a person, with the link in the first message. Copy these and swap the brackets.
Same-day text, sent when the job is marked complete:
Hi [first name], Mitch here from [business]. Thanks for having us out today. If you were happy with how it went, would you mind leaving us a quick Google review? It takes about 30 seconds and it really helps other locals find us: [review link]. Cheers.
Reminder, three days later, only if they have not left one:
Hi [first name], no stress if you have been flat out. Just popping the review link back through in case you get a spare minute: [review link]. Appreciate it. [Your name], [business].
Email version, for jobs where you deal with the office rather than the person on site. Subject line: “Quick favour, [business]?”
Hi [first name],
Thanks again for the work at [address or job description] last week. Everything went smoothly from our end and I hope you are happy with it.
If you have a couple of minutes, a Google review would mean a lot. It is the main way people around [town] decide who to call, so it genuinely helps us: [review link]
If anything was not right, reply to this email instead and I will sort it.
Cheers, [Your name], [business]
That last line matters more than it looks. It gives an unhappy customer a private door to walk through, which is not the same thing as filtering who gets asked. Everyone still gets the link.
What to strip out: any mention of five stars, any incentive, any “please leave us a 5 star review” wording, and anything that reads like it came from a system. Do not send at 7am or after 8pm.
The trigger is the part to automate. ServiceM8 can fire a text the moment you mark a job complete, so the ask goes out while you are still packing the van. If you would rather it ran alongside your rebooking and reactivation messages, that is what our email and SMS follow-up work does, and a marketing CRM like GoHighLevel can fire the review request off the pipeline stage instead. Here is what each route costs in NZD.
| How you run it | Setup cost | Ongoing |
|---|---|---|
| Ask by hand, job by job | Free | 10 to 15 minutes of your day, and it stops when you get busy |
| Automated from your job software | Free if you already pay for it | Included in your subscription |
| Built and managed with us | Quoted once we know your list size and job software | Small monthly platform cost, plus SMS sends that typically run 7c to 15c a message |
For most operators, the middle option is the honest answer and I will tell you that on a call. You come to the third one when you want the review ask sitting inside a wider follow-up system that also brings past customers back.
Can I turn off Google reviews for my business?
No. There is no setting to disable reviews on a Google Business Profile. Your only options are to reply, to report a review that breaches Google’s policies, or to remove your profile entirely, which also removes you from Maps and the local pack and costs you far more than any single bad review.
Reporting works only on policy grounds: spam or fake engagement, off-topic content, a conflict of interest, harassment, or content about the wrong business. A review that is simply harsh or unfair is hard to shift, and “we disagree with it” is not a ground. Report it, then reply anyway, because everyone else reading can see you did.
The real defence is volume, and it is just arithmetic. Twelve five-star reviews average 5.0. One 1-star drops that to 4.7. With 200 five-star reviews, the same 1-star leaves you at 5.0 and looks like what it usually is, one person having a bad day. Businesses that ask constantly are the ones a bad review cannot dent.
Should you ever buy Google reviews?
No, and not just for the obvious reason. Bought reviews are fake engagement under Google’s prohibited and restricted content policies for user contributed content, which means removal and, at worst, a suspended profile (Google Maps user contributed content policy, as at July 2026). You can lose the genuine reviews sitting next to them.
There is a legal side too. Fake or paid-for reviews presented as real customer feedback are a misleading representation about your business, which is what the Fair Trading Act 1986 prohibits and what the Commerce Commission enforces (Commerce Commission guidance on misleading advertising and online reviews, as at July 2026). Getting your mates and your staff to leave reviews is the same problem with a friendlier face. Google calls that a conflict of interest and treats it accordingly.
Customers spot them anyway. Five reviews in one afternoon, all first names, all generic, all praising “great service and very professional”, after two years of nothing.
Every dollar spent on fake reviews would do more work as a system that asks real customers. You already have the customers. The asking is the missing bit.
If you want the review ask running automatically off every completed job, along with the follow-up messages that bring past customers back, that is what our email and SMS follow-up service is built for. It is a one-off setup plus a small monthly platform cost, and the setup depends on how big your list is and what software you already run. Book a free 15-minute call and I will look at your current profile, tell you what to fix first, and give you a straight number for the rest.
