Google Reviews for Tradies: Why You're Leaving Money on the Table

Think about what a homeowner is actually doing when they search for a plumber at nine o'clock at night.

They are not choosing a lunch spot. They are deciding which stranger they are willing to let through the front door, into a house that may have kids and a dog in it, to do work they cannot assess themselves and will pay for either way. Then they will be alone in the house with that person for three hours.

That is a risk check, not a preference. And the only evidence most homeowners have to go on, before they pick up the phone, is what other people in their suburb have written about you.

You're not being compared. You're being vetted.

The commercial case for reviews is well covered elsewhere and it holds for any business. What is specific to the trades is what the reader is looking for when they land on your profile.

They are looking for reassurance that you turned up, that you did what you said you would do, that you cleaned up, and that the price at the end was the price at the start. Those four things are the whole decision — and a profile with a handful of reviews saying exactly that will beat a slicker-looking operator with nothing, because nothing is the one answer a nervous homeowner cannot work with.

Most quotes are lost before the phone rings

A homeowner gets three quotes. Your number is one of them. Before they call any of you, they search all three business names — because that is what people do now — and they form an opinion about each one in about forty seconds.

You never hear about that stage. There is no missed call, no unanswered email, no "we went with someone else". The job simply never becomes a conversation. The quote you priced carefully and lost on money may not have been lost on money at all.

Where good tradies stall

Almost every tradie has the same review story. You did a job early on for someone who was genuinely thrilled, and they left a review. Maybe it happened twice. Then work got busy and the asking stopped — not because you decided against it, but because there was never a moment when you sat down and decided anything about it at all.

So the profile sits on two reviews. Both are lovely. Both are three years old.

That is the actual problem, and it is not a problem of effort or of doing good work. It is the absence of a habit. The tradies with forty reviews are not better at their trade than the ones with two. They are asking every customer, every time, and the ones with two are asking whoever they happen to remember.

The best moment to ask is the one you can least use

The window that works is narrow and obvious: right after the job, when the customer is standing there looking at the finished work and is more pleased with you than they will ever be again.

It is also the exact moment you are coiling leads, loading the van, taking a call about tomorrow, and mentally already at the next address. Nobody is getting their phone out to compose a polite message then. By the time you are home, the moment has gone — and next week, asking feels like dredging something up.

That gap between the best time to ask and the only time you are free is the whole reason a system beats good intentions. The how of asking — the wording, the timing, what makes it feel natural rather than needy — is covered properly in our guide to asking for reviews without feeling pushy.

Urgent work makes it worse

If you do emergency work — burst pipes, no power, no hot water — the stakes go up again. Someone with water coming through a ceiling is choosing in ten minutes, not ten days. They are not reading carefully; they are scanning for a business that looks busy and looks current, and a profile whose most recent review is from 2023 reads as one that may not still be operating. Recency does more work in urgent trades than in any other kind.

Three ways the trades ask goes wrong

The asking is simple, but there are three traps this trade walks into more than most.

Don't ask them to name Dave. The natural version of the ask on a jobsite is "if you leave a review, mention Dave — he did the work". Google's review policies now prohibit a business soliciting reviews that name a particular staff member, along with things like review quotas for staff. A customer who decides on their own to write that Dave was great is fine; it is the business engineering it that is the problem. It is worth reading what Google's policies actually allow before you build a habit around it.

Don't sweeten it. Money off the next job, a spot in a draw, a carton for anyone who leaves a review — all prohibited, all endemic in the trades, and covered in the same guide.

Get the texting right. Most tradies ask by text, and the Australian rules on commercial messages are straightforward: you need the customer's consent, and every message needs an easy way to opt out. That is set out in plain English in where you stand legally when texting customers.

And one that is not a trap so much as a temptation: ask every customer the same way. Not just the ones who seemed pleased, not just the easy jobs. Screening people by how happy they look breaches Google's rules, and it is also the fastest way to end up with a profile nobody believes.

Make it something that happens without you

None of this is hard. It is just one more thing to remember at the end of a long day, which is another way of saying it will not happen.

That is the piece Gold Reviews handles for the trades: the request goes out automatically once a job is marked complete, worded the way tradies actually talk to customers, with the opt-out built in and the same ask going to everyone. You are not adding a task to your afternoon — you are removing the need to remember one.

Your work is already good enough to be worth reviewing. The only thing missing is the asking, and that is the part you should never have been doing by memory. Have a look at what Gold Reviews costs.