Review Rules Most Businesses Break Without Knowing

Rules nobody read

A card by the till offers a free coffee for a review. An email after each appointment asks happy customers to post on Google and sends unhappy ones to a private form.

When the listing was new, the manager asked staff and a few relatives to leave reviews to get it started.

Each of these feels like ordinary marketing, and each breaks the rules of the site where the reviews appear.

Most businesses doing them have never read those rules, and the consequence usually arrives without explanation, as reviews that quietly disappear.

What Google does not allow

• Incentives of any kind: discounts, draws, free items or credit for reviewing.
• Review gating: asking only the customers who said they were happy.
• Reviews from staff, owners or family, treated as conflicts of interest.
• Discouraging negative reviews, or pressing unhappy customers to withdraw them.
• Review stations, tablets on the premises for posting reviews, which Google has long discouraged.

The second is the one most businesses break without knowing, often because software does it for them. Google's policy has ruled out selectively asking satisfied customers since last year, and many review tools were built to do exactly that.

Sites with different rules

Each review site sets its own rules, and they do not all agree.

Yelp asks businesses not to request reviews at all. You may let customers know you are listed there, with a sticker or a badge, but an email asking for a Yelp review goes against its guidelines.

Some other sites allow asking but forbid incentives of any kind. Check before copying a request from one site to another, since good practice on Google can break the rules elsewhere.

How the rules are enforced

Google rarely announces that it has acted. Reviews stop appearing, or a batch disappears at once.

Google does not publish how its filters work, but the patterns that tend to trip them are familiar: bursts of reviews, accounts with no other history, several from one device or one place.

A tablet at the counter produces exactly that pattern. Reviews removed this way can include genuine ones from real customers, and they are hard to get back.

In Canada, fake reviews, including ones from staff or paid reviewers that hide the connection, can also be treated as misleading advertising under the Competition Act, a more serious problem than a missing star.

A worked example

An independent auto repair shop with two bays used a review tool that texted every customer after a service, asking for a rating out of five.

Fours and fives were sent on to Google. Ones, twos and threes went to a private feedback form only the owner read. A sign at the counter offered money off the next oil change for any review.

Over one week, a cluster of recent reviews disappeared from the listing, including several from long-standing customers.

The shop changed three things. Every customer now gets the same text with the same direct link, with the private feedback option offered beside it to everyone.

The discount sign came down, and the front desk now mentions reviews at handover.

The listing carries the occasional three-star review now, each with a reply, and it reads like a real garage.

Everyone, not only the happy ones

If you ask at all, asking everyone is the rule, and it is also good practice.

A profile of nothing but perfect scores looks curated, and many readers discount it. A few honest middling reviews with calm, specific replies tell the next customer more about how you treat people.

Unhappy customers you never asked often write anyway, later and angrier. Asking everyone gives them a route while the problem can still be fixed.

Asking at the right moment

The best time to ask is while the result is fresh: the day the job is finished, the moment the car is handed back, when the customer says thank you.

Ask in person first, briefly, then follow up within a day with a message containing the link. A request sent in a monthly batch arrives after the feeling has gone.

One reminder is reasonable. Three is pestering, and it tends to produce the review you were hoping to avoid.

A direct link

Every extra step between the request and the review box loses people. Searching for the business, finding the listing and locating the review button is three steps too many on a phone.

A direct link can open your listing's review box in one tap, and whoever manages the listing can set one up. Put it in the follow-up message, on the receipt, and in the email signature of whoever deals with customers.

Reviewers need a Google account, which most Android users already have. Ask for an honest review, never a particular number of stars.

What you are free to do

None of this makes asking risky. Most of what a business wants to do is allowed, and some of it is encouraged.

A sign by the till saying you are on Google is fine, as is a line on the receipt. So is mentioning reviews in person, provided nothing is offered and everybody hears the same request.

Replying to every review, good or bad, is encouraged. Replies are public, and the next customer reads them as closely as the reviews themselves.

And reviews that break the rules themselves, such as spam, abuse or reviews meant for another business, can be flagged for removal from the listing.

The counter-case

Asking is not right for every business or every customer.

Some regulated professions have rules about testimonials, and some clients, in legal, medical or counselling work, would be uncomfortable being asked at all. Check your professional body's rules first.

A business with a handful of customers a year will gather few reviews whatever it does, and a practice that works entirely by referral may reasonably put less effort here.

For everyone else, the rule is simple: ask every customer the same way, soon, with a direct link, and offer nothing in return.

This week

1. Remove any reward offered for reviews.
2. Check your review software for gating.
3. Ask staff and family not to review.
4. Set up a direct review link for your listing.
5. Send it to every customer the same way.
6. Ask within a day of finishing the job.
7. Reply to every review you receive.

Step two is the one that catches businesses that believe they are following the rules. Gating is often a setting inside the tool, sometimes on by default, and nobody at the business ever chose it.

Replying when a review singles out a member of staff is covered in a review that names an employee.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.