Las Vegas Has More Google Reviews Than Any City I Counted

You’re proud of the reviews. So you should be, and you’re also a bit tired of people like me hinting that they aren’t enough.

A guy who runs a Las Vegas detail shop out near Sahara told me exactly that once, and he made a better case for it than most people manage.

He had the reviews. Hundreds of them, five stars, going back years, every single one of them earned by hand in a parking lot in August.

I told him he was half right, which is the most irritating thing you can say to anybody. Then I went and pulled the numbers on his entire city to find out how right he was.

The average Las Vegas business in my sample carries 408 Google reviews at 4.6 stars. I put all 24 cities in order on that one, and Las Vegas was sitting at the top when everything stopped moving.

Not second. First.

Of course it’s Vegas

I don’t think that result is an accident, and I don’t think it says much about how hard anyone is trying. Think for a second about who actually walks through this town.

People fly in, spend money on exactly one thing, and go home three days later without any relationship to protect and nobody they’ll ever bump into at the grocery store. So a visitor rates you honestly on the ride back to the airport, and then she’s gone forever.

The locals feel it too. Rating a business here isn’t a favour anybody does you, it’s the ordinary end of a transaction, so asking for one stops feeling like begging.

And it isn’t a handful of giant operations dragging the average around, because 89.7% of Las Vegas businesses hold at least one Google review, against 88% nationally.

The habit is wide here, not only deep.

Whole trades run on that reflex. Heating companies finish first of every trade I audit for holding a review, and they ask while the heat is coming back on, before anyone packs the van.

What all that praise is buying you

More than most owners believe, and I say that as a man who spent years being sniffy about the whole business of asking.

Google’s own help page on local ranking says more reviews and better ratings can help where your business shows up, so every star sitting up there is quietly buying you position in the map results.

It also does a job that no advertisement has ever managed to do. A total stranger trusts 408 opinions from people she has never met considerably more than she trusts anything you could possibly say about yourself.

You can’t fake that and you can’t buy it. It took years of doing the work properly, and for most Las Vegas businesses it’s the single most valuable thing they own.

The only way in is to ask a customer out loud, while she is still pleased with you, and it stays awkward long after you would expect it to stop.

So what happens in the moment it finally works?

The questions a review can’t answer

She’s convinced. She likes you already, and now she wants the practical details before she commits to anything, which is where I’ve watched a hundred of these go quiet.

Do you cover Summerlin, or only the neighborhoods over near the strip? Are you open on a Sunday, and if so, until when?

What does this cost, near enough that she can stop wondering about it? And do you even do the exact thing she needs, or something adjacent to it that won’t quite solve her problem?

Four and a half stars answers none of that. Only your website does, and if your website won’t, she taps back to the map and opens the next business down the list, who may well be worse than you and better at explaining themselves.

I once opened the homepage a cleaning company’s stars were pointing at and ended up rebuilding the thing. The stars had done everything. The page had done nothing.

The four seconds after she taps

Let me follow her across onto your side of the fence, because the numbers get a lot less flattering once she gets there.

Start with the businesses that have nowhere to send her at all. 82.6% of Las Vegas businesses have a website, against 83% across the country.

Plenty of the businesses collecting all that beautiful praise have no room to walk a customer into. I find that harder to defend here than I would anywhere else, because these owners have already done the difficult half of the job.

I pulled 6,301 Las Vegas businesses into this sample and opened and audited 4,386 of their websites, so the gap between those two figures is a real crowd of business owners rather than a rounding error.

Of the sites that do exist, 77.5% pass a basic mobile check, a shade under the national 78%. Google runs that check on the phone version of your page, because the phone version is the one it decides what to do with.

She’s holding a phone too. She read every one of those reviews on it, and she is not about to start pinching and zooming around a shrunken desktop layout to find your opening hours.

Then the one that costs you actual money. 28.3% of Las Vegas homepages have a contact form on them, a hair over the national 28%.

Read that one twice. Most businesses in a city this good at earning trust will hand a completely sold customer a screen with nothing on it to fill in.

Why would you work that hard for the trust and then make her go find a phone?

Hospitality is worse at it, which matters in a town built on hospitality. Those sites look wonderful and hardly any of them give a guest somewhere to type.

Your barber shop is not sitting on 408 reviews

An average folds every trade in town into one line, and a few review-heavy operations can haul a number like that a long way up on their own.

Yours will read differently, and I’d never pretend to you otherwise. My working is open, though. Set the explorer on that report to Las Vegas, leave the trade menu on all industries, and every rate I’ve quoted comes back with the count of sites behind it, so you can see the size of the crowd each average came from before you take any of this personally.

Nor is 4.6 stars startling on its own. It’s a good average, and plenty of cities sit right about there.

What doesn’t move is the count. That part is real, and it took years of doing the work in front of people.

You’re renting the best thing you own

All 408 of them sit on a page you don’t own, which is the part I lose sleep over on behalf of clients who would rather not think about it.

Not one of them lives on your website.

Google decides how that panel looks, who gets shown it, and what sits beside it on the screen. They have redesigned it a dozen times already and they’ll do it again next year without asking your permission first.

Your reviews are the finest marketing you have, and you are a tenant on the ground they’re standing on. The one piece of this whole arrangement you actually control is the website at the end of that link, which in this city happens to be the piece getting the least attention from anybody.

That strikes me as backwards, and turning it around is most of the work I do around Las Vegas.

Go and do this on your phone, right now

Search your own business name. On your phone, not your laptop, because your laptop lies to you about how quickly everything loads.

Read your reviews the way a customer reads them, and feel a bit proud while you’re down there, because you earned every one of those.

Then tap the link through to your website and start counting the seconds out loud.

Did it fit the screen without any fighting? Could you contact yourself from the very first thing you saw, one thumb, no scrolling, no hunting through a menu?

If that little experiment made you wince, send me the address and I’ll run the rest of the checks properly. It costs nothing, and I’ll lead with whatever turns out to be worst.

You spent years earning those 408 reviews. Losing the customer in the four seconds after she finally believes them would be a rotten way to end the story.