How to Get More Google Reviews (and Why They Decide Whether Anyone Calls You)

Three businesses side by side and five seconds to decide

Someone searching for “plumber Brno” or “laptop repair Královo Pole” does not get one result. They get a map and, underneath it, three businesses side by side. They know nothing about any of them, so they decide on what they can see at a glance: the stars, the number of reviews, the date of the most recent one and the first two sentences of text.

At that moment it does not matter how well your service page is written. What matters is whether the customer can see proof that you have already done this job for someone — and whether that proof is fresh.

This article is not about why reviews matter. It is about the practical side: where to get the link, when and how to ask for a review, where the line sits beyond which you are breaking the rules, and what to do when a review disappears or an undeserved one-star lands.

What reviews actually do

In its help pages on local search, Google describes three ranking factors: relevance, distance and so-called prominence. Review count and rating belong to the third.

That does not mean rankings can be bought with stars — nobody can promise you a specific position, and nobody should. It means reviews work in two places at once: they influence who gets shown your profile at all, and they decide which of the businesses shown a person picks. The second effect is more certain and shows up sooner. That is why it makes sense to treat reviews as part of sales, not as an SEO trick.

How many you need: measure the bar against three competitors

There is no general number. But you can measure it in ten minutes:

1. Type into Google the query a customer would use to find you — typically “service + city” or “service + neighbourhood”.
2. Open the three businesses that appear above you in the map listing.
3. Note three figures for each: review count, average rating and the date of the latest review.

That third figure is usually more telling than the first two. A profile with a hundred and eighty reviews where the latest arrived two years ago reads differently from one with twenty-five where the latest came last week. Freshness is also the only part you can influence straight away — catching up on count takes months, changing the date of the latest review takes this week.

And a few notes on how people, rather than algorithms, read reviews:

• Nothing but five stars with a one-word “Recommended” looks suspicious. A few four-star reviews with concrete detail (“they arrived an hour late but finished the repair the same day”) come across as more credible.
• A review with a photo from an account that has other ratings too carries more weight than an anonymous one-liner.
• Zero reviews is worse than a single three-star. An empty profile does not say “we are new”, it says “nobody found us interesting”.

A link people can actually click

The most common reason a business has no reviews is mundane: it has no link to hand. “Leave us a Google review” means five steps for the customer — search for the business, identify the right profile, scroll to the reviews, sign in, find the button. They will not take them.

There are two ways to get a link that leads straight into the review form:

• From your business profile management. Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is now managed directly in Search and Maps — the standalone app no longer exists. Sign in with the account that owns the profile, search for your business and find the option to share a review link in the management panel. Google generates a short address pointing straight at the form.
• Via the Place ID. When you need to build the link manually — for an invoice template or an SMS gateway, say — find your location’s identifier in the Place ID Finder in the Google Maps Platform documentation and drop it into the address https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=YOUR_PLACE_ID.

Then have a QR code generated from that link and put it where the customer actually is:

• on the handover protocol and the delivery note,
• on a business-card-sized card the technician leaves behind after the job,
• in the footer of the email that carries the invoice (Fakturoid, iDoklad and most other invoicing tools let you edit the covering email text),
• on an NFC tag or a counter stand, if you have premises.

One practical limitation: writing a Google review requires a Google account. Some customers do not mind, others do — and that second group is missing from your profile. That is why it pays to have listings on Firmy.cz and Mapy.cz alongside it; where exactly it is worth being listed and where it is a waste of time is covered in Firmy.cz, Mapy.cz, directories: where a small business should be listed.

When to ask: the moment the customer says “thanks”

The best moment is when someone is happy and still with you. Three weeks later it is just another chore for them.

The principle is the same across fields: tie the request to completion of the work, not to invoicing. The invoice is the moment the customer pays. Attaching a request for praise to it reads awkwardly, even if you do not mean it that way.

How to ask without it being awkward

Briefly, concretely, with a link and no pressure. This trio works: what happened → what you want from the customer → how long it will take them.

“Thank you, the boiler is up and running and the inspection is in the protocol. If today made sense to you, a short Google review would help us a lot — it takes two minutes: [link]. Feel free to mention what could have gone better, too.”

That last sentence matters more than it looks. Without it you get five stars with no text; with it you start collecting reviews that describe something — and those are exactly the ones that convince the next customer.

What not to do: do not send a prepared text for the customer to copy or paste. Clusters of similar wording are among the things Google removes from profiles, and anyone reading three of them in a row will spot it too. And do not hand customers your company tablet or phone — several reviews from one device is a classic route to all of them disappearing at once.

Setting all of this up — the link, a QR code on the protocol, three sentences for the technicians and reply templates — is an afternoon’s work. If you do not have the capacity or you are unsure about the wording, it is part of content creation and management; an initial analysis beforehand will show whether your bottleneck is the profile or the website people land on from it.

Where the line is: Google’s rules and Czech law

Most guides skim over this part, and it is where businesses run into trouble most often.

• No reward for a review. A discount, a gift, a prize draw or “five stars = free coffee” all break Google’s rules for user contributions. Google removes incentivised reviews and, if it happens repeatedly, may restrict the whole profile.
• No sorting of customers. The practice of asking about satisfaction first and sending the Google link only to the happy ones has its own name — review gating — and it is prohibited. Ask everyone, or nobody.
• Not from family and employees. That is a conflict of interest under Google’s rules. And it is the first thing a competitor notices when they want to cause you trouble.
• Bought reviews are an unfair commercial practice. Since January 2023 Czech law has implemented rules derived from the European directive (known as Omnibus): publishing fake consumer reviews and commissioning them are both prohibited. Anyone publishing reviews must also state whether and how they verify that the reviews come from real customers. Supervision falls to ČOI (the Czech Trade Inspection Authority).

That last obligation applies to your own website too, not just to platforms. If you put testimonials on your site, you must be able to say where they came from and how you verified them.

The risk with bought reviews does not start with a fine. It starts with the filters cleaning out your profile one day without you knowing why — and taking with them the honest reviews you collected in the meantime.

When a review disappears — or a one-star lands

The vanished review. Google does not publish the details of its filters, but its rules make it possible to work out what is asking for removal: several reviews from one device or one network, accounts with no history whatsoever, texts containing a phone number or a link, and a sudden batch of reviews after months of silence. A steady flow from different phones has a far better survival rate than a one-off campaign before the season.

The unfair review. You cannot delete other people’s reviews. You can report them, but Google only removes those that break the rules — profanity, advertising, a review clearly meant for a different business, a conflict of interest. “It is untrue” or “it damages us” is not a reason in itself, and a large share of reports will not succeed.

The reply matters more than deletion. The owner’s reply is displayed publicly under the review and the author is notified about it. But the main reader is the next customer, the one still deciding. Stick to four steps: thank them for the feedback, state the facts calmly, offer a specific solution, move the discussion to the phone or email. Never give the customer’s name, address or details of the job — that is a personal data leak, and in the reader’s eyes you lose even when you are right.

Reply to positive reviews too; two sentences will do. A profile where the owner has not replied to anything for years looks abandoned.

The reviews themselves cost nothing. What you pay is time: a few hundred crowns of materials for cards or a tag, and above all a regular few minutes a week for replies and keeping an eye on the profile. Without that second part the process grinds to a halt within two months.

Reviews get you to the phone. The rest has to follow.

Google reviews decide that a customer will call you or click through to your website. Once they land there, they have to find the same thing — in a usable form. Three follow-ups that make sense:

• Bring them onto the website properly. Copied-and-pasted stars on the home page convince nobody; how to turn testimonials into something people believe is covered in Testimonials on your website: how to make customers believe them.
• Connect them to your service pages. Feedback about a specific job belongs on the page for that service, not in a general gallery — the structure of such a page is covered in How to write a service page that brings in enquiries.
• Do not copy ratings into structured data. For review snippets Google requires ratings to come directly from users of your website. An average collected on Google cannot be marked up as structured data on your own site.

And then there is the other half of the work: reviews settle why people pick you. For them to find you at all, the rest of local search has to be in order — profile categories, address and opening hours, content targeted at your city. That is covered in Local SEO for a small business. One without the other misses the mark.

What to do this week

1. Open the three competitors ranking above you and note each one’s review count, average rating and date of the latest review.
2. Find the review link in your profile management and save it somewhere you can find it within three seconds.
3. Have a QR code made from it and put it on the handover protocol or on a card for technicians.
4. Agree with the people who hand over the work on one sentence they will say as they do it. One sentence, not a paragraph.
5. Reply to every review you have that is still unanswered — including the ones that are years old.

Five steps, one afternoon. You will see the difference in the date of your latest review, and that is exactly the figure a customer looks at first on the map.