Reviews
The three names a stranger checks before they ring anyone.
Reviews are the only proof most trades can offer a customer who has never met them. What that proof has to say is completely different for a roofer, a letting agent’s electrician and a decorator.
A rating is not a review strategy
Most trades treat reviews as a score to get above four and a half and then forget. The score does matter, but it is the least useful part. By the time somebody is reading your reviews they have already decided you are plausible; what they are doing now is looking for their own situation described by somebody who was in it.
Which means the content of the reviews decides more than the average. A landlord wants to see another landlord. Somebody with a leak at midnight wants to see somebody else’s midnight. A homeowner about to spend forty thousand pounds wants to read about the eleventh week of a build, not the first.
You have more influence over that than most people think, because what a review says is largely decided by what you ask and when you ask it.
What we actually do
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Ask at the right moment.
There is a window after a job when people are willing, and for most trades it is far shorter than they assume.
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Ask in a way that produces detail.
A prompt that mentions the job produces a review about the job. A bare link produces “great service, thanks”.
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Cover the customer types you need proof from.
If every review is domestic and you want commercial work, the reviews are arguing against you.
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Get them on the platforms that count.
For most trades that is Google first, then whichever trade directory your customers actually check.
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Handle the bad one properly.
A calm, specific reply to a poor review does more for a reader than the five-star ones above it.
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Keep them recent.
Recency does heavy lifting in local ranking and in reader confidence. Thirty reviews from four years ago read as a business that has stopped.
What the proof has to say changes by trade
A roofer needs somebody to say the price held after the scaffold went up. An electrician working for agents needs a letting agent by name. A decorator needs somebody to mention the state of the house at the end of each day, which is the thing customers are actually worried about.
The trade pages below say which reviews to go after, and how to ask so you get them.
The first ninety days
- Weeks 1–4
The ask built into how jobs finish, and the platforms sorted so the link goes somewhere sensible.
- Weeks 5–8
A steady flow arriving, with the gaps in customer type deliberately targeted.
- Weeks 9–12
Recent, specific and varied enough that a stranger can find themselves in them.
What good looks like
- Reviews arrive every month without anybody remembering to chase
- They describe the job rather than the service
- Every customer type you sell to is represented
- The most recent one is weeks old, not years
- Poor reviews have a reply worth reading
Questions we get asked
Can you write them? No. Fake reviews are against every platform’s terms and they read as fake to customers, which is worse than having fewer.
What if I get a bad one? Reply specifically and calmly. Readers weigh a good reply heavily, and a profile with only perfect reviews reads as managed.
How many do I need? Enough to be credible and recent enough to be current. Twenty recent beats a hundred old.
Which platform matters most? Google for almost every trade, because it feeds the map results as well as the reading.
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