If you are a home services company with any interest at all in generating organic (unpaid) traffic from Google, you likely know that reviews are important. A real challenge for home service business owners, though, is figuring out exactly how to get more Google reviews.
In this article, we’ll walk through five super-effective, yet under-utlized, tactics for driving more reviews for your home services business.
Contents
- Why getting reviews is important for home services businesses
- How to get reviews for your home services business
- How to put these tips into action to simplify review collection
Why getting reviews is important for home services businesses
Let’s imagine you have a small business that focuses on kitchen remodeling and you want to grow traffic and leads from SEO. You run some queries around kitchen remodeling and realize you’re behind in rankings and reviews:
As a small business owner, you can hire a vendor to execute several tasks:
- Create local landing pages and blog content.
- Build links from authoritative third-party websites.
- Build citations and clean up existing citations.
- Audit and address technical on-site issues.
- Audit and make recommendations for optimizing your Google Business Profile.
A vendor can share suggestions with you on how to effectively ask for reviews, and there are tools to help with the process, but you can’t really outsource this process entirely.
You, the service provider, have to commit to making the collection of reviews a priority for your business.
📍Are your listings outdated? Get an instant audit with our free business listings grader!
How to get reviews for your home services business
There are a few tactics related to collecting reviews that are worth doing and that are relatively common among home service providers particularly, such as:
- Asking for reviews in person on the job
- Adding a reviews page to your website
- Adding a link to review button in the footer of your site
And there are some—such as asking for reviews on social media—which may be worth doing but may not have as much value for a home services company as say a restaurant.
All of that said there are five specific tactics that are:
- Scalable across several jobs/customers
- Tied to direct and immediate action around writing a review
- Generally underutilized by home services companies in particular
Executing these five items can help you grab those extra reviews to jump over existing competitors in your market, and creating systems around them can help you build a “review moat” so that current and new competitors will have a difficult time “catching” you in Google reviews and outranking you in Google Maps listings.
1. Use review cards with a QR code
Three characteristics of successful tactics for growing Google reviews are:
- Simple for the customer
- Timely (right at the completion of a job the customer is satisfied with)
- Tied to a clear incentive
Number three here can be a bit tricky since Google explicitly does not allow for direct incentives such as payment or product/services:
Thus, if you want to stay on the right side of Google’s guidelines here, your “incentives” need to be more psychological. You can communicate to your customers:
- How positive Google reviews help your small business.
- How the individual technician/employee benefits when you leave a positive Google review.
Below is a great example that checks each of the three boxes mentioned above:
How did we get 465 Google reviews with nearly a 5 Star rating in 24 months?!
Easy. Systems.
1- We provide and excellent service. Can’t skimp on this part.
2- Great customer service experience. Before every service our tech arrives, greets the customer, and asks if there are… pic.twitter.com/YON1a8aO2I
— Casey McDaniel – Pest Control Guy (@pestctrlguy) March 4, 2024
The QR code offers any customer with a phone handy a quick and simple way to leave a review. The technician controls the timing, so in the example of our kitchen remodeling company, we could ask for the review as soon as service is complete.
And finally, the incentive is there for the customer: Tip a tech. The customer is able to “tip” the technician without going into their own pocket. The “incentive” is that they’re able to do something kind for the person who just worked on their home, without any cost other than a few seconds of their time.
One thing to note: While it is against Google’s guidelines to offer free services or discounts in exchange for a review it does happen. The downside risk could be having your Google Business Profile suspended or banned. So it’s something to be aware of as you may see a competitor with an impossible number of reviews, and it may be the case that they’re offering a smaller service or a specific discount in exchange for reviews and just haven’t been caught.
👀 Free guide >> 20 Ways to Make Your Website More Visible on Google
2. Send SMS text follow ups
SMS text follow-ups are another great example of a tactic that is:
- Very simple and convenient for the customer
- Timely (and automated)
And, even in a really brief message, you can quickly communicate an incentive for the customer (helping out a small business).
When you craft these messages, think about the things about your business that your repeat customers or customers who refer you to other people really love about you. If you are a family-owned business, active in the community, offer great customer service, do next-level craftsmanship, etc.–find a way to emphasize those points in your brief message, and call out how much of a help to a small business getting more traffic and leads from Google can mean to you.
(But, of course, it’s a text message, so keep it short and follow general SMS marketing best practices).
There are a lot of tools and software options to help you manage this if you’re a home services company. If you’re already using a CRM there are SMS integrations, review collection tools focus on this specifically, or your developers may be able to use a service like Zapier to create a custom integration to send these sorts of messages.
3. Try review request email blasts
If you own and operate a home services company, you’re likely wearing a lot of hats. You and/or your marketing team may not have been actively looking to get more Google reviews over time.
We often find, though, that even if you are a services business that hasn’t been focused on collecting Google reviews, you may have been focused on collecting emails. Whether it’s in a CMS or just a spreadsheet, you probably have email information for a lot of former customers.
While this tactic doesn’t meet the “timeliness” criteria we set out above, it does give you a scalable way to make it simple and convenient for your customers to leave you a review.
As with a text message, you have a chance to quickly communicate an incentive (helping a local small business) to your customers when encouraging them to leave a review.
📫 Get ready-to-customize review request emails in our free guide >> The Complete Email Marketing Toolkit: Free Email Templates, Subject Lines & Tips
4. Invest in review request mailers
Sending a mailer to previous customers with a QR code is another way to make it quick and convenient (if not timely) for former customers to leave a Google review.
Here again: You have an opportunity to quickly message the value of the review for your small business, offering former customers a chance to help a local business in exchange for a few minutes of their time.
There are a lot of affordable options with templates already built for this very purpose:
Again, you can orchestrate this as a “blast” to former customers if you haven’t started working to get more Google reviews, and you can also build it in as a part of your follow-up process with existing customers as soon as a job is complete.
5. Make review request leave-behinds
Similarly, when a job is complete and you’ve left your invoice, job description, or any maintenance notes for the customer you can insert a request for a review there.
As with the other tactics you want to be sure to include:
- A QR code.
- A shortened/simple URL for the customer to visit if they’re not comfortable or interested in using a QR code.
- Messaging as to how the review will help your small business (incentive).
This method is timely, simple, and convenient for the customer, and gives you a chance to message the incentive (helping out a small business).
Again you can purchase review request templates to use as leave-behinds, or if you or someone on your marketing team want to be a bit more hands-on, you can try something like Canva’s review request templates:
How to implement review request systems for your home services business
In this article, I’ve walked through five under-utilized tactics that work for home services companies to get more Google reviews.
Some—like an email blast or a mail campaign to former customers—can work as one-off activities to help you “catch up” on getting reviews if you haven’t in the past. Those one-off tactics can be valuable as we saw with the initial kitchen renovations near me example I started with, the difference between being number one in your area and being two, three, or lower can sometimes be a handful of reviews.
But if you want to consistently rank for more competitive terms, you may need hundreds (or even thousands!) of reviews:
Even if getting a few emails would jump you ahead of competitors in terms of review volume, by getting more and adding reviews from customers consistently you can widen your lead, rank for surrounding towns, and put your company in a position to stave off new competitors (like millennials buying boomer businesses) who push hard to get lots of Google reviews.
To get consistent Google reviews from customers, you’ll need to think in terms of your process and system for collecting these reviews. Specifically, you can ask yourself:
- From the first interaction to the completion of a job, when and how are customers asked to leave a Google review?
- How easy is it for them to do at each of those touchpoints?
- What’s communicated to them as the “why” for leaving a review?
- How are you tracking the percentage of customers who leave a review when asked?
This can help you design the right mix of tactics for collecting Google reviews. While getting Google reviews is great, you also have to ensure:
- You’re not annoying customers who would otherwise refer you or work with you again by being too pushy or redundant in asking for Google reviews.
- You’re not putting your Google Business Profile (which is likely a major asset for your business) at risk in asking for more reviews in a way that violates Google’s guidelines.
- You’re not asking for Google reviews in a way that puts undue burden on the customer to complete the task, or you’re not effectively communicating the “why” of leaving a review.
Start getting reviews for your home services business today
The great thing about implementing processes like this in your business is that–short of some tooling to do things like send emails and SMS messages—you can set everything up without engaging a vendor or spending a ton of money. With a little bit of time and process optimization, you can build a pipeline of Google reviews that help you grow and protect your organic traffic and leads.
