How Many Reviews Does a Winston-Salem Shop Need? The Answer I Rush

A Winston-Salem client offered me extra money last spring to write his Google reviews for him, and he wasn’t the first one to ask.

I said no, the same way I said it to the other two, and not because I’m any kind of saint.

A made up review is the only thing on your Google listing that can’t be quietly repaired later. Everything else up there is a typo you fix on a Tuesday afternoon.

I won’t stand at your counter and type one in on a customer’s phone for her either. People do that. They’ve convinced themselves it’s fine.

Say no to both of those and you’re left with the question that shows up on nearly every sales call I take, usually while I’m packing my bag up.

How many do I need?

Forty? A hundred? What’s the guy on the other side of town sitting on?

I’ve got about thirty seconds for it by then, so I answer it badly and we move on to the next thing. Let me do it properly for once.

There isn’t a number

I know you want one. I’ve been asked for a target so many times that I understand exactly why, and I still can’t hand you one with a straight face.

Nobody outside Google knows how heavily the stars weigh against everything else it looks at, and anyone who gives you a figure to beat is guessing at you with real confidence.

The businesses I sampled here carry 133 reviews on average, at 4.5 stars, and that average is about as useful to you as the average height of everybody in your building.

It hides the place with a wall of them. It hides the place with none.

A man called me in the spring about a rebuild and spent the first ten minutes of it on a competitor’s star count, which he knew to the number, and which he could also quote me from back in February.

He had no idea what his own listing said his hours were. They’d been wrong since the clocks changed.

The question sitting underneath yours

Step back one and there’s a better question waiting. Have you got any at all?

82.1% of the businesses I sampled in Winston-Salem hold at least one Google review where the country runs at 88%, so a real slice of this town isn’t even in the race the caller thinks he’s losing.

Zero is a different animal from a low number, and I don’t think owners feel the difference until it’s pointed at.

A business with four reviews reads as new, or quiet, or careful. A business with none reads as a question mark, and a stranger picking between two names at nine at night doesn’t stop to work out which one you are.

I spend more of my audit time on reviews, where this city comes out 22 of 24, than on anything else I check, and the reason is a dull one. Clinics are the ones that break my heart, because the audit will be going along fine until I reach their stars. Reviews are the only thing I check that you can fix without touching your website.

The check itself is deliberately blunt. It doesn’t ask how many, and it doesn’t ask how recent, because the moment you start rewarding volume you end up punishing a good quiet business in a trade where customers hardly ever write anything down.

It asks one thing and takes a yes or a no. Has a single customer, ever, written this place up?

Blunt checks hand out results I am not proud of. One landscaper passed me on a technicality with a single ancient review holding the whole thing up.

Where the stars actually live

They aren’t on your website. They sit on your Google Business Profile. That’s the free listing Google keeps for your business, the one carrying your address, your hours and your phone number.

So a shop with no website at all can carry a wall of stars, and a beautiful website can carry none. I’ve seen both this year, in that order, in the same week.

It matters here more than it might elsewhere, because 79.3% of the businesses I sampled in Winston-Salem list a website at all against 83% across the country. For a fair number of your neighbors, that listing is the entire shop front.

How a business ends up on zero

Almost never because the work is bad. I want to be firm about that, because owners hear this subject and brace like they’re about to be told their service is the problem.

The ones sitting on zero are the ones who never ask. They’re busy, asking out loud feels like begging, and the customer who loved the job drives off thinking kind thoughts nobody else will ever get to read.

There’s a second group, smaller and sadder about it. They got a rough review years ago, took it personally in the way you take things personally when the business has your surname on the door, and quietly decided the whole system was rigged against people like them.

Have you asked anyone this month? Out loud, to a face, not a card propped up by the register?

I’ve written the long version of how to ask without feeling like a nuisance, and the short version is that it has to happen while she’s still in front of you, before the car door shuts.

What they’re worth in my grading

Reviews carry fifteen of the hundred points in my scoring, the same weight I hand the phone test, which surprises people who assumed a website report would be all website. Owners around here love to stop the moment that phone test comes back a pass, and I have heard every excuse for stopping there.

I set it there because the stars are the one piece of your reputation a customer reads before she ever reaches a page you paid a stranger to build.

They can’t finish the job on their own, mind you. She reads the stars, she taps through, and whatever she meets next is entirely your department.

Starting from nothing? I would build a page, then a form, then go and earn the reviews, in that order, and I would not swap the first two around.

The website half of that is the work I do for people around here. The review half isn’t something I can do for you at all, which is the bit nobody enjoys hearing on a sales call, and it’s the bit that costs nothing.

If you want to know what a stranger actually meets after she taps your stars, send me the address and I’ll go through the lot.

So, how many?

I still won’t give you a number, and now you know why I won’t.

The number I’d want, standing where you are, is a completely different one. How many people this year told you they’d leave you a review, meant every word of it, then got in the car and forgot?

You can’t count that one. Nobody can. What would you guess yours is?