Look Under Your Name in the San Francisco Results Tonight

Tuesday night, about nine, a San Francisco kitchen somewhere up off Irving.

A woman is leaning on the counter, phone held up in front of her, looking at a cupboard door that hasn’t shut straight since June. She’s tired. She wants this dealt with before the weekend.

She isn’t comparing quotes, either. She’s picking one, and she’ll be finished inside a minute.

You’re somewhere on that screen, and so is every competitor you’ve ever been mildly annoyed by at a chamber breakfast.

What she does in that minute takes about five minutes to copy, because she’s quicker at it than you are and she isn’t being careful. Take your own phone off the counter and follow along, five steps, nothing to install and nothing to buy.

One. Run her search and don’t tap anything

Type your trade and your neighborhood into Google the way she’d type it, in her words rather than the ones on your business cards.

You’ll get a little block of businesses sitting under a map, and every row in it carries the same four things: a name, a run of stars, a count in brackets, and a line about whether the place is open right now.

Read it the way she reads it, which is fast and slightly bored and nothing at all like the way you look at your own listing.

So where are you? Not where you’d like to be. Where are you tonight, on that screen, against the two businesses boxing you in on either side?

Two. Look at what sits under your name

Every row on that block has one of two things underneath it. A little line of gold with a count beside it, or a gap.

The gap says nothing bad about your work, and a stranger scrolling past at nine at night has no way of knowing that. It just makes you the one row she has no reason to trust yet, parked between two businesses that a hundred strangers have already vouched for in writing.

83.2% of the businesses I sampled across San Francisco hold at least one Google review, 21 of 24 when I put the cities in order, and the softest number this city posts anywhere I looked.

Ten checks go into the grade for this city, and the stars are the only one that stung.

I counted that one twice, because I’d assumed a town this online would be the last place on earth where anyone forgot to ask. The sample runs to 6,320 businesses and 4,595 of their sites went through the audit, and the report doesn’t hide its working: set the explorer to this city on its own, no trade chosen, and each check comes back with its own sample size attached.

Gold or a gap. That’s step two, and it takes four seconds.

Which one did you get? I ask that of every owner who sits down with me, and the ones who go quiet are almost always the ones who assumed their listing was someone else’s job.

Three. Open your own listing and read it cold

Tap your name and look at what she actually gets. The photos, the hours, whether the phone number on it is the one you pick up.

Then look at the review count and try to remember the last time that number moved, because owners are terrible at this and I include myself in that.

I once told a client his listing was in good shape without checking it, and the newest thing on it was a review from a man who’d since sold the business and moved to Oregon.

The businesses here who do ask aren’t limping along on two kind words, by the way. They’re carrying an average of 117 reviews, at 4.6 stars, which tells me the habit snowballs once someone starts it.

A pile of stars doesn’t fix anything else, mind you. Nearly every furniture store I sampled holds reviews, and they told me nothing about what happens once she taps through.

When did you last ask? Not a card by the register, and not a line in an email signature. Ask, out loud, a person whose kitchen you were standing in.

Four. Send three messages before Friday

Open your phone and scroll back through this year until you find three customers who were pleased with the work and said as much at the time.

Text them separately, one at a time, in your own words. Not a campaign, not a newsletter, three messages that sound like a person rather than a marketing department.

Hi Dana, it’s Patrick. Glad the heater’s behaving itself. If you’ve got a minute this week, a quick Google review would help me out more than you’d think, and here’s the link.

Then paste the link. Your listing hands you one, and if you can’t find it, whoever set your profile up can send it over in about a minute.

Would three people say yes to that? I’d bet two of them do it before the weekend is out, and two is the whole distance between a gap and a gold row on that screen.

The ask is the part everyone flinches at, and I’ve never understood it, because the worst answer you can possibly get back is a polite no.

Five. Follow your own row to the front door

Last one, and it needs your thumb rather than your opinion. Tap through from your listing to your website, on cell data, standing away from your desk.

She likes you already. Now she has to tell you so at nine at night, without ringing a stranger and doing the small talk that a phone call drags along with it.

Her thumb is fine. Pool company pages were the problem when I ran that trade, and the same few things go wrong here.

How many taps did it take you? Mine took three the first time I tried it on my own site, and I’d been telling clients about this for a year.

25.6% of the homepages I opened in this city give her a way to do that, and the rest send her back to the keypad. Nationally it’s 28%, so the whole country is bad at this and San Francisco is worse than the country.

None of that is a matter of taste. What makes a page easy to use is well understood by now, and giving her a way to speak up comes first.

An hour fixes it, and nobody has to redesign anything or send you a quote for the privilege. A form goes on the homepage of every site I put together for a business in this city, and not one client has ever come back and told me they regretted having it.

What five minutes can’t see

Those five minutes graded the outside of your business, from the sidewalk, without ever coming in the door. So does my report, if I’m honest about what it is.

Add up the ten weighted checks behind the grade and San Francisco comes out on 72 out of 100. Not one of the ten knows whether your phone rang on Tuesday.

A business can pass every check I run and still be quietly losing money all year. A business with no website whatsoever can be booked solid into November on word of mouth and a good reputation on one street.

So read the review number as one habit this city hasn’t picked up, not as a judgment on anybody’s work. It happens to be the habit with the most gold attached to it, and the only one that costs nothing but nerve.

Now come and argue with me

You might be sitting there thinking your trade is the exception. That your customers are corporate, or embarrassed, or under an agreement that stops them praising anybody in public.

Maybe you’re right. I’ve heard that case made well twice and badly about forty times, and I’d still like to hear yours, because if an entire trade in this city honestly cannot ask its customers for anything in public, an audit has no way of knowing that and I’d rather be corrected than confident.

Is that your situation, or is it the story you tell yourself on the drive home? Those two feel identical from the inside, which is exactly why I ask people to run the search instead of describing their business to me.

So make the case. Send me your site through the audit form and tell me why the row above yours has stars and you can’t get any.

Send the three texts first, though. Then argue with me on Friday, with two new reviews under your name and a much weaker case than you have tonight.