Key 3 — They didn’t trust you: Reviews, and who gets hired

It is not a reputation problem. Most trades firms leaking here are well liked; they simply have no habit of asking. The reviews they do have arrived in a burst three years ago from customers who volunteered them, and have sat there ageing since. Meanwhile the firm two towns over asks every customer, every time, and now looks — on the only page anyone reads — like the safer choice.

The thresholds customers apply are specific: 68% require at least a four-star rating before they will consider a business, 74% give more weight to reviews from the last three months, and 32% expect a reply within 24 hours.² Recency is the one owners underestimate. A five-star review from 2023 is nearly invisible.

Only 35% of small businesses have a Google Business Profile at all,³ and 84% of consumers use Google to find business reviews.⁴ The front door is free, and most of the street has not opened theirs.

• Whether the Google listing is claimed, complete and accurate: Services, areas, hours, and photographs that are not six years old.
• Review count, average rating and the date of the most recent review, set beside the strongest rival in the same trade and the same area.
• What proportion of reviews have a reply, and how quickly replies go out.
• Whether the business asks at all — and if so, when, how, and by whom.
• Whether the details on the listing match the website, the van and every directory you appear in.

Brookfield Plumbing & Heating Ltd of Northwich is illustrative: The firm does not exist and the figures are constructed to reconcile. Its listing was claimed in 2019 and has 27 reviews at 4.3 stars. The most recent is seven months old. The strongest local rival has 118 at 4.8 and adds one most weeks.

That is not a gap of 91 reviews. It is a gap of one habit, held for two years. Brookfield completes around 970 jobs a year and asks none of those customers for a review. If it asked every one, and even one in ten wrote something, that would be roughly 97 reviews in a year — the gap closed inside twelve months using nothing but the work already being done. The difference on the listing is the difference in the habit, not in the work.

Every completed job ends the same way: The engineer, standing in front of the finished work, sends a text with a direct review link before getting back in the van. Reviews arrive weekly rather than annually, and the rating drifts up because recent customers are happy customers. Every review gets a reply within a day — brief thanks for the good ones, a calm factual account for the bad ones, because the reply is written for the next reader, not the reviewer. The listing carries recent photographs of real jobs. Nobody has to remember any of it, because it is part of finishing a job.

Create the short review link for your Google listing, save it as a text template on every engineer’s phone, and send it from the doorstep on the next ten jobs. Ten recent reviews will move that listing further than anything you could buy this month.