Google your own trade, in your own town, on your own phone. Go on — I’ll wait.
There’s the map pack: three businesses in a little box above everything else. The one sitting on top has forty-three reviews. You’ve got three. And before either of you has answered a phone, written a quote, or proved you can do the work, the stranger holding the phone has mostly decided. “Forty-three” reads as lots of people trusted this and were glad they did. “Three” reads as I’d be taking a chance.
That gap is quietly costing you the calls you never hear about — the ones that went to the firm with the longer list. And here’s the part nobody selling you a reviews widget will say out loud: the widget can’t close it. A widget displays the reviews you already have, prettily, on your website. It has never, on its own, produced a single new one. You can pay a monthly subscription to frame an empty wall.
I wrote a piece this week about what actually closes the gap. It isn’t a tool you buy — it’s a system you run, and it has about six weeks of work folded into it. The one-click review link that lives everywhere without anyone having to think about it. The exact moment you ask — which is the single highest-leverage decision in the whole thing, and the easiest one to get wrong. Then the follow-up text, the card propped against the card machine, the one line you teach whoever else stands in front of the customer, and the habit of replying to every review that lands, good or bad.
A burst of reviews that stops in week two doesn’t close the gap. A steady trickle that never stops does.
Six weeks isn’t padding. It’s how long it takes for the asks to stop being something you remember to do and start being something the business just does — the card stays by the till, the line becomes muscle memory, the follow-up goes out without anyone deciding to send it. By week six it isn’t a campaign any more. It’s how the place runs. And that’s the point at which forty-three stops being the competitor’s number and starts being yours.
Read it here → The Google Review Gap
Tony Cooper
We Build Stores
tony.cooper@webuildstores.co.uk
07963 242210
P.S. If you want to know exactly how wide your own gap is before you do anything about it, reply with the name of your business and I’ll look you up, count both numbers, and tell you where I’d start closing it. No charge for the count — it takes me two minutes and it’s usually the part that stings enough to get you moving.
