We Got 173 Google Reviews in 2 Years. Here’s Exactly How

We went from just 18 Google reviews to 191 in two years, and it wasn’t because we got lucky.

In this episode, I break down the exact systems, habits, follow-up process, and team expectations that helped us consistently generate more reviews for our local service business.

We’ll cover:

• When and how we ask customers for reviews
• The follow-up process that actually gets responses
• How to make asking for reviews effortless

• The mistakes that slowed us down
• Why reviews matter for trust, conversions, and local SEO

Whether you run a window cleaning company, home service business, or local agency, this strategy can help you build a stronger reputation and win more customers.

Subscribe for more real-world lessons on growing a service business.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to Clean for Profit. My name is Colby. Thanks for hopping on today, guys. Um, you know, we're probably 26 or 27 episodes in now of uh posting an episode every single week. And I just wanted to start this by saying that I'm so grateful for those of you that have been listening the whole time or or darn close to it. And for for those of you that are new, welcome. This has been really cool. Um, recording this podcast consistently. A ton of you have reached out um to say hello, to ask for advice, and uh a couple of coaching opportunities have come up for me. So I've just I've been super grateful by the audience that we've built so far. Um, it's still quite small, and I'm really grateful for that um at this point, to be totally honest with you. Uh it's just been a great opportunity. So I just wanted to take a second to say thank you. Um, we're gonna keep it, I won't say short today, um, but uh I just wanted to talk about um three ways that we've gotten to where we are with our Google Business Profile review count for Sierra window cleaning. Um and I wanted to start by just kind of telling you the story of my business from just really quick, really high level. Um, but yeah, guys, we're gonna keep it not too short, but semi-brief today because it's my wife and I's um seventh anniversary in two days. Um and we're going up into the mountains to uh about out by Tahoe to have a really nice date tonight. So I'm super excited. Mom and dad are watching the the kids, um, which is something that we don't get super often, so we're really excited for that. But listen, guys, um, there's three ways that I've tried to get reviews. So I set up my Google Business Profile about seven years ago, and when I did that, I knew vaguely that getting reviews on your GPP was important. Um I didn't realize how crucial it was to the growth of your business, especially from an organic ranking standpoint, like showing up in search results when people in your market are looking for the services that you offer, whether it's gutter cleaning, window cleaning, Christmas light installation, whatever it is. There's a lot of things that matter. A lot of that just lives on your website, but a huge part of showing up as a relevant business is having other people speak positively about your services on a regular basis through posting to your Google Business Profile reviews. So I wasn't aware of how important that was when I started, and honestly, my review count was more of a vanity metric than anything else. So I would ask like here or there for a review. But I mean, let me tell you, when I when it was rare, when I say that it was rare, when I asked, it was exceedingly rare. Like maybe a half a dozen times a year, I would ask my absolute favorite clients for a review, and then maybe I would text them the link to the Google Business Profile after that as a follow-up. But that's all I did for the longest time, and it got me about 18 reviews in five years, roughly. So um, we were kind of sludging along better than nothing, but like barely making it happen. Um, and in the last two years, we've gone from that like 18-ish reviews to now 191 five-star only reviews that will, you know, that'll be hitting 200 plus five-star reviews for our window cleaning business in the next two to three weeks, most likely. Um, we're getting like three to four reviews a week relatively consistently now. Um, so the things that have changed, like that's the first thing I tried is just asking casually, not really being too serious about it. And you know, it's better than not doing anything, but it's certainly far from optimal. So there's two other things that I've tried. One of those two has been incredibly successful, and the other one, if I build systems around it, would, you know, be incredibly successful as well. Um, so the first one, um, the one that I just alluded to that that could be done better are Google Tap cards. So I don't know if you've heard of them. I don't think I have one on me right now, but um, there's these cards that have these things, I believe they're called NFC tags, um, that basically you can tap against a phone that's unlocked and it uh like pushes a little pop-up notification to that phone that you can then click and it'll take you to a specific link. So those tap cards are really good because it's literally like a credit card that you can present to your clients and have them tap their phone against, and it'll take them right to your review page. So that's really good for getting reviews on the spot because it's immediate. You're requesting it directly. And if the client says, Yeah, totally, I'll totally do that, um, you know, they have a little bit of a commitment to do it, so they feel like they should should do it, should follow through. Um that's worked incredibly well for us. I mean, I'd say three or four out of five people that we ask that say they will leave a review and that you know, tap that we do the card tab with end up leaving a review. So it's very consistent and so it's solid. Um, I think a really good approach, especially if you have technicians in the field, would be to get several of these and have each of your technicians have one of these tap cards on them and incentivize them, you know, 10, 15, 20 bucks per review, something like that, to get reviews from clients, um, literally before they leave the job. Um, and I think one great way to do that is to have it done when you're done, but before you leave, if that makes sense. So um, for example, when we go to do a window cleaning job, we clean the exterior windows and then the interior windows in that order typically, unless the client specifies that they prefer otherwise. After um, after that service is done, but before we take payment, we do exterior and interior walk arounds just to make sure that we didn't leave anything, drop anything, drop any towels, etc., just to make sure that we're dotting our I's and crossing our T's in terms of quality. So I think a really good way to implement more consistent tap card usage would be to do something like right before when you're done cleaning the windows, but before you do those walk arounds, to go contact the client and say, hey, we're wrapped up here. We're just gonna get a couple of like gear checks and walk-arounds done. That'll just take a minute or two, we'll be right back. But in the meantime, would you like would you mind leaving a five-star review for us on Google? Um, and then they can tap the card and literally do it in the four to five minutes that you're gone. I think that'd be a really effective way to do it because it creates this like time pressure sort of to like have it done. Um not by you like prompting and pushing or anything, but just by the mere nature of like, hey, uh, I'm gonna do a five-minute, six-minute exterior walk around. Here I go. Can you do this in the meantime? Uh, and then we'll figure out payment. I don't think that's a bad way to do it. And if you can be consistent, I think tap cards are extremely impactful. That's the thing, though, is that you need to be consistent, um, which is fine. And you know, I don't want to sound like lazy, but um, I have enough stuff, and so do my technicians to remember to do, to be honest with you. So I'm not saying that this is bad, it it isn't, it's great, and it can be super effective. Um, but I think it is it's important to take like willpower and consistency off your plate with this because you can do it with literally zero effort 100% of the time, instead. Um, you don't need to ask because you can do what we've done, which has been the main reason why we've gotten to 191, almost 200 reviews over the last two years, and it's because we have automated this completely. So here's how we set it up in our business, and for the cleaning businesses that work with us, by the way. Um, we have a CRM, we use Jobber. It doesn't matter what CRM you use because we've built back end systems that you can plug into pretty much any CRM. Um, but what it happens in our case is when we set a job to complete and mark it as paid. Um there is a program called Zapier that is like listening to our CRM. And as soon as that invoice gets set to paid, Zapier grabs their information, grabs their client data, and moves it into GHL, Go High Level. Um, and then it goes through a workflow. It goes through several workflows, but I'm just gonna talk about the review automation workflow, which what it does is it imports their information into Go High Level. It waits 12 hours. Um, so you can set that to whatever time you want. I like 12 hours because it gives me enough time to um set filters to exclude that client from uh from this automation. So you can add a tag to the client if it wasn't a good experience, or if you just frankly, you know, I one out of every 50 or so clients, um, we don't want to ask them for a review. Not necessarily because we didn't do a good job. Um, but like if something, you know, if something came up, or if we don't want to hear back from that client, um, you know, you're gonna run into that, um, regardless of how high quality your work is. And every now and then you're gonna, you know, the mistakes will come up and maybe you don't want to ask for a review. Um, so we like to have that timer so that we can wait and add a tag to suppress the review request if we need to. Um, but anyways, after that timer, it sends an SMS, a text message that says, Hey, first name of client. Thanks so much for working with us. Um, we just wanted to check in to see if there was anything else that we could do for you. Don't forget our work is guaranteed. By the way, if you could leave us a review on Google, we would really appreciate it. And then it has our website.com forward slash review. Um so they can click right into that link. When they click that link, it takes them to a page on our website that has all of our review page links. So for us, that's Facebook, Yelp, and Google. Um, but honestly, I just I put Yelp and Google on there mainly because we're just trying to rack up those two right now. We're just sort of trying to focus on one at a time or two at a time. It might help to have all of them up there and just give people as much choice as they can take. But we've found, at least for us, that if we just put what our highest priorities are in terms of where we want our review count to be, um, that's usually the most effective. People don't get overwhelmed by the amount of choices they have, etc. Um, and then it goes on to another timer, it waits two more days, and then it sends them one last text requesting a review. So there's two prompts to leave a review, and it links to, yeah, like I said, it links to that page on our website. And those links on our website, when they click that, like when they click the Google button, for example, it links to the leave a review panel. And this is a boring but very important distinction I wanted to make. It does not lead, it does not link to the business page, it takes you right to the review panel. So when the page opens, it's literally an open text box with the stars up top. So you click five and then you write your review and you hit submit. That's all the client needs to do after they click into the review link on our website, which is texted to them automatically. Um, so it's extremely frictionless. I know that, like, you know, I'm 31. Um, most of you listening to this are probably under, you know, 40. Um, so listen, I you know, most of your clients are gonna be boomers um or close to it. And if they are, which they almost certainly will be, um most are going most of them are going to give up before they even get to the review panel. Because if you just send them a link to your Google profile, for example, they have to navigate to the review profile, or to your profile, find the reviews tab, click reviews, realize and notice the leave a review button, click that, and then they get to that review panel. So there's like two or three clicks that need to happen between deciding they want to do it and actually doing it. For us, it's like you navigate to our page, you click the platform you want to leave a review on, and if you click Yelp or if you click Google, it leads you right to an empty panel that you can put that review into and hit submit done clean. Um, super frictionless. And and it makes it you want this process to be dead simple. Um, because if people appreciated your service, they want to talk about it, but they also don't want a chore. And the reason they hired you in the first place is to get rid of a major chore that they would ever otherwise have to do themselves. Um, so the other thing is like, yeah, so that's the first thing is like you want it to be dead simple, not only for the client, but for you. Like, I haven't directly asked a client via our tap card or anything like that to leave a review in many months. And listen, if I made that a systematized process in the business, sure, we would get more reviews for absolutely. Um, but I don't have to because I don't think about it anymore. Um, and I think for me at least, as a business owner, the more things that I take 100% off of my plate in terms of remembering that I have to do it, um, the better my life becomes. And the more money I can make with less effort per dollar. Um, and this has been great for us, man, because in our market, there's not really anybody else with more reviews. You know, there's there's more major cities that are like half in our market, half not, with other companies that have more reviews for us for sure. But in our primary city where we're trying to target, um we outrank in terms of review count the the closest competitor by 20 or 25 reviews, something like that. Um, and you know, uh, you know, God willing, we will continue to. Um, it's not a race to you know a thousand reviews or whatever, but it certainly helps, you know, when you're showing up in um in a search result alongside four or five other companies, and you have the most reviews that speaks for itself to a certain degree. Um, I had somebody two weeks ago that um requested an estimate, and it's like we're not the cheapest in town, and pretty much everybody that hires us knows that. Um, but I did this estimate, pitched it like how I would pitch any other one. Like, I wasn't I I wasn't charging more for this this client or anything, but he said something really like he said, like, that's more than we were expecting. We're not gonna get other estimates. We've seen your reviews and we know we want to work with you, um, which is a major green flag for a client, just so you know, in case no one's ever said anything like that to you. That's that's what you want to that's what you want to aim for in terms of the clients that you land, because you want clients that know that you're not the cheapest and want to work with you honestly, partially because of that. Um, because you're justified in not being the cheapest because you're good. Um, you're not just gonna splash and dash, um, as Luke the window cleaner would say. So yeah, guys, make it dead simple for you and for the client. It needs to be super easy for them to leave a review, and it needs to be it needs to cost you no effort. So go with tap cards, you know, if you've got like 20 bucks or whatever, because you can get them really cheap, and it's a good way to get some momentum. But eventually you do want to automate this. Um, and that's that's why part of what we do for all of our clients um at our agency is get them set up with this review prospecting system because you set it, you forget it, and the reviews stack up. All you have to do is go get work and do good work worth leaving reviews over, and the requests take care of themselves. Um, we do a very similar workflow for rebooking as well, by the way. Um, you know, we've we've made over 10 grand this year so far just in automated text rebooking follow-ups. Um, and that it's it's a very similar workflow, except the timers are six months and 12 months or whatever you want the frequency to be. And that's been extremely lucrative and helpful. So um, anyways, I just wanted to talk about how we got how we got to this point. You know, a a huge part of of this is just that we've also gotten a lot of business, so that's been great. But, you know, after you start getting, frankly, when you start getting any business, what you want to do as soon as possible is maximize the quality and lifetime value of the business that you are getting. So, um, you know, if you can if you land a client and clean their windows and it's a $350 clean, um, but you get them on a retention strategy that's gonna hit them up in six months or 12 months, the suddenly, even if they just have you back once, the LTV of that client has doubled. And if they leave a five-star review, that ends up, you know, leading to your review count going up and that somebody reads and it resonates with them. Um, that's a ton of like indirect value that's added from each client, um, just as a result of you setting up these really simple automations and taking it off of your plate to have to remember to request a review from every single person. Um, and that just has crazy downstream effects for your business. Um, and it has it has for ours, that's for sure. Um, so we wouldn't have gotten to where we are in terms of review count nearly this quickly without just making sure it was automated, because we've had hundreds of review requests go out to our clients that I wouldn't have otherwise made, if I'm just being totally honest. Like my discipline and my interest, and honestly, just my mood at the job. Um, like those things were all factors on whether or not I was requesting a review, and they shouldn't be. Um, they really shouldn't be. Unless you have a disastrous job that you really need to suppress a review request for, you should be requesting reviews from every single one of your clients because it's going to maximize the value for your business and the satisfaction of your customers and the trust that the public has in you when they're shopping for your services. So, anyways, um just wanted to wrap up again, say thank you so much for listening, you guys. Um, I'm really grateful to have um been able to make this content for you. And I've started to see some of your comments on on YouTube, and some of you have been reaching out to me as well, um, which I just really appreciate. Um, I hear every single one of you, I appreciate you. And I hope this has been helpful in some way. Um, I've been doing this for just shy of 10 years now, and it's felt really fulfilling to be able to share what I've learned um and share what I'm learning as I'm learning it. I mean, if you guys have watched any of my previous episodes, you know that I have a lot to learn still. Um, and so the fact that you guys are listening to to my dumbass uh learn through making mistakes time and time again, um, I really appreciate. I don't actually think I'm a dumbass. I just uh I I like uh like being uh self derogatory a little bit. But seriously, you guys, um, I love you guys. I appreciate you guys listening. This has been Clean for Profit, and you know when I'll see you next. It's next week. Have a good one, everybody.