Brand & Local SEO, 4 min read
Reviews are the storefront now
Customers walk past your business in the search results. What they see there is your window display.
A high street business knows what its window looks like. A local trade often has no idea what its equivalent is, because the window is a search result and nobody stands in front of it.
That result is your star rating, your review count, the recency of the last one, and whether anybody replied. A prospect reads all four in about two seconds and decides whether to keep scrolling.
Review count matters more than most owners expect, and recency matters more than count. Forty reviews with the newest from two years ago reads worse than twelve that are current. It suggests you were good once.
This is why asking has to be systematic rather than heroic. Not a push, not a campaign: a request that goes out after every completed job, forever, without anyone deciding to send it.
The other half is the part you can measure. Google publishes exactly how it grades a page through PageSpeed Insights (performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO), and those grades feed the ranking you are trying to win. We run that audit against your site and against whoever is currently outranking you, keep the numbers on the record, and re-run them after every build. It is the one part of this work where you do not have to take anybody's word for it, including ours.
