How contractors get Google reviews

Twenty jobs a year — how do you build reviews

The arithmetic here is nothing like other trades. A restaurant can ask a hundred times a day and land two. You get twenty chances a year, so every one you miss is five percent of the year. Which means this cannot ride on remembering to mention it. It has to be a fixed step in how you close out a job.

The good news: reviews convert far better in this trade. Someone who just spent twenty thousand on their kitchen will write at length in a way a coffee customer never will — it is the biggest purchase they made this year, and they want to tell people whether it was worth it. Twenty jobs done properly produce a dozen or more long, specific reviews, and that brings in more work than a hundred “great food” lines do for a restaurant.

The moment to ask

This trade has the shortest window of any: the moment you drive away, the job is over in the client’s mind.

• On the last day, right after you walk the job with them. “Have a look at these three spots — all done the way we agreed.” They look, they nod, they are pleased. That second is your highest-converting moment of the entire job.
• Never say “leave us a review when you get a chance”. A chance never arrives. The day after you finish, they are cleaning up and moving furniture back. It does not make the list.
• Do not wait for the final payment. At that moment they are thinking about money, not workmanship. Same as with auto repair: the two moments are minutes apart and the results are not comparable.
• If it did not land on site, send a photo the next morning. “Here it is finished — any problems, call me any time.” With the ask attached. A photo works far better than text: they see it and the satisfaction comes straight back.

Three lines you can use as-is

Clients in this trade have little time for polish. All three are short.

• “If you are happy with the work, would you say so on Google? Word of mouth is how we get the next job.”
  “How we get the next job” is simply true, and the client knows it is true. That is why it works.
• “If the timeline and the price felt fair to you, one line helps — it saves the next person from picking badly.”
  Naming “timeline” and “price” out loud tells them what to write about, and those are exactly the two things the next client wants to know.
• “I have sent you the photos. If you have a minute for a line on Google, I would like to use this one as a reference job.”
  Gives the client a sense of taking part, which is easier to agree to than a plain favour.

Three traps specific to contractors

• Only asking on the jobs that went perfectly. Almost no job in this trade goes perfectly — there is always a rework or a delay. Wait for perfect and you will not get one review all year. A job with a bump that you handled well produces the most persuasive review of all, because it proves you deal with problems.
• Letting the client “write it later”. Timescales here are long. A week after you leave they have forgotten the details; two weeks and they are unsure of your name. On the day, or the morning after.
• Putting only your phone number on the card. Most trades cards have a mobile and nothing else. When the client wants to say something good, there is nowhere to do it, and the goodwill evaporates. Print a code on the back — it costs almost nothing.

The two most common bad reviews

• “Quoted two weeks, took five.” The number one complaint in this trade. In your reply, do not list the reasons — materials, weather, the client changing the plan. Every one may be true, and the reader sees only “this outfit makes excuses”. Concede the time first: “Two weeks was the plan and we finished in week five. That is on us.” Then give a concrete change: “Our contracts now set out each stage with dates, and what happens if we run over.” Turn it into a policy.
• “The price kept going up.” Same shape as the auto repair version: the issue is process, not the amount. Do not explain that the wall turned out to be hollow. Concede the communication failure: “When we found the extra work we should have stopped, shown you the site, and got your go-ahead before continuing.” Then the policy: “Anything over five percent of contract is now confirmed in writing first.” The next client reading this cares about one thing only: whether it will happen to them.

Where you can be in thirty days

If you finish two or three jobs a month and ask at the walkthrough on every single one, you land one to two a month. That sounds like nothing, but it is a dozen to twenty a year — and in this trade twenty long, specific reviews are enough to hold your position in local search.

One more thing that works unusually well here: upload the finished photos to your Google Business Profile so they sit alongside the reviews. This is a business decided by the eye, and one before-and-after does more than ten lines of text. Put the code on the back of your card and on the final invoice — make it with the Google review QR code generator. If you are just starting out and still in single digits, see from 0 to 50 Google reviews in 90 days. For the full handling of the timeline and price complaints, see You got a one-star note. Now what?