You have just come through school holidays and two event weekends. More people have passed through your business in the last month than in any month since summer, and most of them left without leaving a review, because nobody asked them.
That matters more than it used to. Reviews are no longer just reassurance for the next human. They are one of the main things Google and AI assistants read when deciding whether to recommend you at all. A business with recent, detailed, specific reviews gets surfaced. A business with fourteen reviews from 2023 does not, regardless of how good it is.
Recency counts as much as volume. A profile with steady reviews arriving every month reads as an active, current business. A profile with a burst of reviews two years ago reads as a business that may not exist any more, and it is treated accordingly.
1. Ask in person, on the day. The single highest converting review request is a human asking a happy customer while they are still on site. Everything else is a distant second.
2. Make the ask specific. Not please leave a review. Ask them to mention the thing they liked. Specific reviews contain the words future customers search for, and they are the ones an AI assistant can quote.
3. Reply to every one. Short, warm, specific, in your own voice. Replies are visible activity and they are read by the next person deciding between you and a competitor.
4. Put the good ones to work. A strong review is a social post, a website quote, a line in your Google Update. It is content you did not have to write and it carries more weight than anything you say about yourself.
Your Google review link: Get the short link from your Business Profile, turn it into a QR code, and put it on the counter, the receipt and the checkout email. Friction is the only reason most people do not follow through.
A weekly ten minute slot: Reply to everything that came in, and note any repeated compliment. Repeated compliments are your marketing message, discovered rather than invented.
1. Create a QR code for your Google review link and put it somewhere physical
2. Ask ten customers in person this week, specifically
3. Reply to every review currently sitting unanswered
4. Turn your three best recent reviews into social posts
5. Note the compliment that comes up most and put those words on your website
Most operators think of reviews as something that happens to them. They are something you build, at a predictable rate, by asking. The businesses with hundreds of reviews are rarely better. They are just the ones who ask every day.
Summer bookings are being decided right now by people reading reviews written by strangers. Everything you collect this week is working for you through the entire booking window. Ask, reply, and reuse.
Not sure how your reviews compare locally? If you want this looked at properly, book a strategy call.
Call 0477 435 422
Hundreds of people have been through your business in the last month. Almost none of them left a review, and the reason is not that they were unhappy. It is that nobody asked.
Six things to fix that before the summer booking window closes.
1. Ask with your mouth, not an email
An automated follow up gets ignored. A person saying if you enjoyed today, a review really does help us, works. It feels awkward the first few times and then it stops feeling like anything. It is the highest return thirty seconds in your business.
2. Tell them what to mention
A review that says lovely place is worth very little. A review that says the fire was lit when we arrived and the walk to the beach took four minutes contains the exact words the next customer is searching for. Ask people to mention the specific thing they liked, and you are shaping the search terms you appear for.
3. Remove the friction entirely
Most people who intend to leave a review never find the form. A QR code on the counter, on the receipt, in the checkout email, printed on a card in the room. Every step you remove multiplies the number who follow through.
4. Reply to the good ones too
Everybody replies to complaints and nobody replies to praise, which is backwards. A short specific reply to a five star review is read by every future customer scrolling that page, and it shows a business that is present. It also takes twenty seconds.
5. Understand who is reading them now
It is not only people. When someone asks an AI assistant where to stay in Yallingup, the answer is assembled partly from reviews. Recent, detailed, specific reviews give a machine something to quote. A thin or stale review profile gives it nothing, and you are left out of an answer you never knew was being written.
6. Let your customers write your marketing
Read the last twenty reviews and find the compliment that keeps repeating. That sentence, in their words, belongs on your homepage and in your captions. You have been trying to work out how to describe your business. Your customers already did it, more convincingly than you will.
Your action for the week
Make a QR code for your Google review link, put it somewhere customers physically stand, and ask ten people out loud this week. Then reply to every review sitting unanswered on your profile.
Weekly South West Visibility Ideas is a series for tourism, accommodation, and hospitality operators across the South West of Western Australia.
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