Two contractors finish roughly the same number of jobs in a month. One has three new reviews to show for it. The other has fifteen. The difference almost never comes down to who did better work. It comes down to one of them asking for a review at the exact right moment, and the other asking whenever they happened to remember, which is usually too late to matter.
The Ask Window Is Shorter Than You Think
A customer's satisfaction is highest in the hour or two right after a job wraps up: the mess is cleaned up, the problem is solved, the relief is fresh. Wait three days and that same customer has moved on mentally; the job that felt urgent to review now feels like old news competing with everything else in their inbox. The request that goes out same-day, ideally within a couple of hours of the crew leaving, gets answered at a meaningfully higher rate than the one that goes out a week later during a batch of “catch up on admin” time.
The Wording Matters More Than the Platform
A generic “please leave us a review” with a bare link reads like a mass blast, because it usually is one, and it ignores Google's own guidance on getting more reviews, which favors genuine, specific asks over anything that looks automated. A message that references the actual job: the address, the specific work done, the technician's first name, reads like it came from a person who was just there, because it did. That small bit of specificity is often the difference between a text that gets deleted and one that gets a response.
One Follow-Up, Never Two
It's tempting to send a second reminder to anyone who didn't respond to the first request. In practice, this tends to annoy the customers who were never going to leave a review anyway, without meaningfully increasing the number who do. One well-timed, well-worded request outperforms a request-and-nag sequence, both in response rate and in how the business is remembered.
Why This Compounds Into SEO, Not Just Reputation
Review count and review recency are both signals Google weighs in local ranking, particularly in the map pack. A steady trickle of new reviews reads as an active, trusted business; a stagnant review count that hasn't moved in months reads the opposite way, even if the star rating is high. Getting the timing right on review requests isn't just a reputation exercise. It's one of the more overlooked levers in actually improving local search visibility.
- Send the request within hours, not days, of the job finishing.
- Reference the actual job in the message. It reads as personal because it is.
- Ask once. A second reminder does more harm than good.