How to get Google reviews, and what to do about a bad one

Why a handful of reviews beats a perfect score

When somebody searches for a business near them, the map results come with a star rating and a number beside it. That number does more work than people realise. A business with eleven reviews averaging four stars will usually be called before one with two reviews averaging five, because volume reads as evidence and a lone perfect score reads as friends and family.

This matters more in Uganda than in places with mature review cultures, because so few businesses here have any reviews at all. In most trades and most areas, ten genuine reviews would put you ahead of everybody. That is an unusually cheap advantage, and it is available to a salon, a garage or a hardware shop as easily as to a hotel.

The only method that works

Ask, in person, at the moment the customer is happiest. That is when the job is finished and they are pleased, not three days later by text message. People genuinely want to help a business they liked; they simply never think of it unless asked.

Then make it one tap. Google gives every verified profile a short review link - find it in your Business Profile under the option to ask for reviews. Save that link as a message on WhatsApp so you can send it in two seconds. A customer who has to search for your business, find the right listing and scroll to the review button will not finish.

Build it into how a job closes rather than treating it as something to remember occasionally. Tell your staff the same. Two or three requests a day, made properly, is fifty reviews in a year, which in most Ugandan categories is more than every competitor combined.

What you must not do

Do not buy reviews. There are people who will sell them, and it is more detectable than buyers assume - the accounts are recycled, the timing is wrong, the language is wrong. When it is caught, the penalty is not the removal of the purchased reviews. It is the removal of all of them, and sometimes the suspension of the listing, which costs you the genuine ones you worked for.

Do not write them yourself or ask staff and family to. Same risk, and customers are better at spotting them than you would think.

Do not offer a discount or a free item in exchange for a review. This one catches honest businesses out, because it feels harmless. It breaches Google policy, and reviews obtained that way can be stripped. You may ask for a review. You may not pay for one, in cash or in kind.

Do not ask customers to leave a review while sitting in your shop on your wifi, in a batch. A cluster of reviews from one connection in one afternoon is a pattern these systems look for.

Answering a bad review

Everyone gets one eventually. The instinct is to argue or to ignore it, and both are worse than the review itself. Prospects read the replies more carefully than the reviews - a calm, specific answer to a complaint persuades more people than an unbroken run of five stars, because it shows what you are like when something goes wrong.

Reply within a day or two. Thank them for saying so. Address the specific thing rather than issuing a general apology - if the wait was long, say why and what you have changed. Offer to put it right and give a way to reach you directly. Keep it short and never say anything you would not want a hundred future customers to read, because that is exactly who will read it.

Then, if they were right, actually fix it. A complaint that appears twice is a problem with your business rather than with a customer.

When a review is fake or malicious

Sometimes a review is from a competitor, or a person you have never served, or it contains abuse. You can report it to Google for removal, and reviews that break the rules - no genuine experience, offensive content, personal information, obvious spam - are sometimes taken down.

Be realistic about it. Removal requests often fail, and there is no telephone number to escalate to. Report it, then reply publicly and factually: say that you have no record of this transaction and invite them to contact you with details so you can look into it. That reply is what other readers see, and it does most of the work regardless of whether the review is ever removed.

The strongest protection is volume. One unfair review among four is devastating. One among forty is invisible, and that is entirely within your control.