The short answer for this one is yes. People will always perceive your business online through two avenues: your message and the aesthetic of that message. Whether they familiarize themselves with your business through online ads with compelling imagery and powerful messaging, or your website with well-crafted content and a solid, modern design, the way you market yourself carries a significant impact on your potential customers’ perception of your value. Reviews sit right alongside both of those avenues as a third, and arguably more trusted, source of that perception.
Since many business owners spend a generous amount of time developing great websites and putting together top creatives for ad campaigns, it makes sense to curate the other side of their online representation, their reputation, just as deliberately. Customer reviews gathered through Google, Yelp, Facebook, and other industry-specific websites reflect a company’s online reputation better than almost any other source, because they come from people with no financial stake in convincing anyone else to buy.
How People Perceive Online Reviews
We polled 250 people on a survey platform and asked the following questions:
- On a scale of 1-10, how important are reviews to you when selecting the services of a local business?
- For review websites where the rating is 0.0-5.0 including fractions, what is the minimum rating someone should have to be a viable choice?
- What is the number of reviews a business should have to appear legitimate?
The results intrigued us. We anticipated the answers would land around 8.00 on a scale of 1-10 for importance, 4.20 as a minimum rating, and 15 reviews as the number required to seem legitimate. Here is what the actual results looked like, broken out by average, median, and mode:
- Average (which can suffer from outlier responses): 6.66 for importance, 3.75 as a minimum rating, 26.39 as the number of reviews required.
- Median (the middle response once ranked in order): 8.00 for importance, 4.00 as a minimum rating, 10.00 as the number of reviews required.
- Mode (the single most common response): 7.00 for importance, 3.80 as a minimum rating, 10.00 as the number of reviews required.
Weighting these results at 50 percent median, 25 percent mode, and 25 percent average produces a solid working basis: 7.415 for importance, 3.8875 as a minimum rating, and 14.10 as the number of reviews expected. At the very least, most small businesses should work toward a rating above 3.9 stars and at least 14 reviews. None of this matters in isolation, however, if your competition has stronger numbers than you do. If that is your situation, you will want to push further toward a higher volume and a higher average rating just to reach parity.
What Has Changed About Review Compliance Since This Data Was Gathered
The regulatory environment around reviews has tightened considerably. The Federal Trade Commission finalized a rule prohibiting businesses from writing, buying, or otherwise procuring fake reviews and testimonials, and from suppressing genuine negative reviews through legal threats or selective removal. Any review-generation program you run today needs to be built around genuine feedback from real customers, with no compensation tied to leaving a positive review and no discouragement of negative feedback in the process.
Google has also become more aggressive about detecting and removing reviews it flags as policy violations, including reviews it suspects were incentivized, posted from an unrelated location, or part of a coordinated campaign. We cover the mechanics of this shift in more detail in our analysis of why Google is removing 5-star reviews, since a legitimate review strategy today has to account for the possibility that a portion of earned reviews will not survive Google’s own filtering.
If Reviews Are So Critical, How Can Businesses More Easily Gather Them?
One method is to partner with a vendor that has systems in place to automate the process, which typically only requires providing a list of customer emails to get started. We break down several additional tactics beyond email automation in our guide to five additional ways of bringing in reviews to your Google listings. Here is how the core email-based process works.
Boost Your Email Game With Automation
At Market My Market, we use this exact process to generate reviews on behalf of clients, and it is something you can implement yourself. A few prerequisites make the process work:
- Prepare a template with simple, clean graphics to make it appealing.
- Make the email read like a genuine, third-party inquiry about the customer’s experience rather than a direct solicitation for a review.
- Track which emails go unopened and build automated follow-up for those contacts.
- Maintain a consistent timeline for sending follow-up emails rather than a one-and-done attempt.
The Template and the Campaign
A simple, appealing template works particularly well for reviews destined for Google and Yelp. Both platforms prohibit “pre-check sentiment,” meaning you cannot pre-screen a customer’s satisfaction level via email before directing only the happy ones toward leaving a public review. Setting up a dedicated subdomain for these emails helps avoid the feeling of a direct solicitation. We have found that people respond more consistently to a message asking “how was your experience with X company?” from a separate address than to the company’s own email asking about itself. Give customers an easy way to share negative feedback with you directly rather than a review website, which keeps a dissatisfied experience from becoming a public one while still surfacing the concern internally.
The Timeline and the Results
A staggered follow-up sequence, rather than a single email, consistently produces better response rates. If a customer has not responded by the end of that sequence, waiting another month before trying again tends to work better than repeated immediate follow-ups. Since adopting a system like this, we have sent out thousands of emails on behalf of clients, generating a 13 percent email conversion rate on average, with some clients seeing conversion rates as high as 38 percent. Average review volume across all platforms increased by 69 percent for participating clients, with one client seeing a 217 percent increase within two months. In total, this approach has generated over 3,000 reviews with an average rating of 4.6 across all clients.
Reviews Are Only One Piece of a Local Visibility Strategy
Reviews influence more than just a potential customer’s first impression. They factor directly into local search rankings, and a Google Business Profile with a healthy volume of recent, genuine reviews tends to outperform a comparable competitor with a thinner review history. If you have not audited the rest of your local presence recently, our local SEO audit guide covers the other signals worth checking alongside your review volume.
Interested in Generating More Reviews for Your Business?
Don’t miss out on the boost that online reviews can give your overall digital presence. At Market My Market, we can help you set up an automated, compliant process to acquire helpful reviews from your customers. We can also evaluate your overall marketing strategy to ensure it is catering to all your business needs. Ready to get started? Contact us for a free quote.
Frequently Asked Questions About Generating Business Reviews
Is it legal to offer an incentive for a customer to leave a review?
Offering compensation specifically tied to leaving a positive review, or to leaving any review at all in some cases, violates both FTC rules and most review platforms’ own policies. A compliant approach asks for honest feedback without conditioning any reward on the content or existence of the review itself.
How many reviews does a local business need to appear credible?
Our survey data points to roughly 14 reviews as a reasonable baseline for appearing legitimate to potential customers, paired with a rating above 3.9 stars. That said, the right number depends heavily on what your specific competitors have, since the comparison that matters most is relative, not absolute.
Why is Google removing some of my legitimate 5-star reviews?
Google’s spam detection systems sometimes flag genuine reviews as suspicious, particularly when a business receives a cluster of reviews in a short period or when a reviewer’s account shows other unrelated red flags. Spacing out review requests naturally and avoiding mass campaigns that generate reviews all at once can reduce how often this happens.
Should I respond to negative reviews publicly?
Yes, a calm, professional public response to a negative review shows other potential customers how your business handles conflict, which often matters more to them than the negative review itself. Attempting to have a truthful negative review removed through legal threats is both against most platforms’ policies and against FTC rules.
Do reviews actually affect local search rankings?
Yes, review volume, recency, and rating are widely understood to factor into local search visibility, particularly within Google’s map results. A steady stream of new, genuine reviews signals an active, trustworthy business in a way that a large batch of old reviews with no recent activity does not.
MMM Author Ryan Klein
The ongoing digital revolution is transforming the way that all businesses interact with clients and customers. Consumers rely heavily on digital channels for researching products and services and expect to make buying choices with the swipe of a finger. For organizations that want to remain competitive, having a defined digital marketing strategy and execution plan is essential for successful outcomes. With a demonstrated history of creating and implementing strategic digital marketing initiatives that drive growth, I am committed to delivering real, measurable results for my clients.