How many Google reviews does a business need?
Who publishes this: OfficeStaff.ai helps Australian local businesses get found on Google, trusted through reviews and booked through their website and past customers.
The short answer
There is no magic number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing.
What matters is that you have more than the business people are comparing you to, that some of them are recent, and that you have replied to them. A business with 40 reviews from this year beats one with 200 that stopped in 2023.
That is the short answer. Here is the longer one, because the number is the wrong thing to be asking about.
Five reviews looks worse than you think
If you have five or six reviews, think about who a customer assumes wrote them. Your brother. Your sister. Your mum. A couple of mates who owed you a favour.
That is not fair, and it is probably not true, but it is what people think. A small pile of glowing reviews reads as staged, not as a young business doing its best. So the first jump, from nothing to a real number, is worth far more than any jump after it. Going from 5 to 50 changes how you are seen. Going from 500 to 550 barely registers.
More is better. It is just that the early ones are worth the most.
Not sure how your reviews compare with the businesses showing above you? Get your Free Growth Audit.
A perfect five out of five is a warning sign
Nobody has two hundred customers who all had a flawless day. When a page shows nothing but five stars, people get suspicious, and the suspicion spreads to the good reviews as well.
One or two ordinary reviews sprinkled through do the opposite. They make the rest believable. They tell a customer that these are real people saying real things, and that the business has not filtered out anyone who had a complaint.
So a 4.7 with a couple of three stars in it usually sells better than a spotless 5.0. That feels backwards until you think about how you read reviews yourself.
The reply matters more than the review
This is the part almost everyone gets wrong.
A review with no reply underneath it does damage whether it is good or bad. A five star review that nobody acknowledged says the business is not paying attention. A one star review that nobody answered says the same thing, only louder.
A bad review with a calm, human reply under it can do more for you than the review it replaced. People do not read reviews looking for a perfect business. They read them looking for how you behave when something goes wrong, because they are working out what happens if it goes wrong for them.
So the question is not how many reviews you need. It is whether you have a process for answering every single one, good and bad, within a few days.
On review gating, and why we will not do it
Review gating is where you ask customers how their experience was, and only send the happy ones through to Google. Plenty of companies sell it. Some of them will tell you it is standard practice.
Google's own review policies prohibit it. Beyond the policy, it is dishonest, and it produces exactly the spotless profile that makes customers suspicious.
The honest version is harder and it works better. Ask everyone, the same way, every time. Reply to all of it. If you are getting bad reviews you cannot answer well, the reviews are not the problem.
The one that nobody says out loud
Some systems will tell you to keep a customer on the phone while they leave the review, and walk them through it.
Nobody gives you a bad review while you are on the phone with them. That is not feedback, it is a performance, and after twenty years around small business you can spot a page full of them.
If a customer will not leave you a good review once they are off the phone and back in their day, the fix is not a better script. It is the service. A customer is a customer, but a customer who had a genuinely good run becomes a raving fan, and raving fans write reviews you could not have scripted.
What to actually do
Ask every customer, not the happy ones, and ask them the same way each time so it stops being a job somebody has to remember.
Reply to every review, including the good ones. Two sentences is enough.
Do not chase a number. Look at the two or three businesses a customer would compare you to, and be ahead of them on how many you have and how recent they are.
If a review is fair, say so in the reply and say what you have changed.
Why this is only half the job
Reviews are about being trusted. But there is a catch. All the trust in the world is worth nothing if a customer never sees your business in the first place, and most local businesses disappear from Google a few suburbs from their own front door without ever knowing it.
That is the other half. Why is my business not showing up on Google Maps?
About the author
Greg Hamlyn
Greg Hamlyn has been in business since 1981, and has spent more than twenty years coaching other business owners, most of them trades and service businesses around Australia. He started OfficeStaff after watching the same thing happen over and over. Good operators paying for marketing that never once showed them where they actually turned up, sitting on customer lists they never used. He will tell you if you are not a fit. Based on the Gold Coast.
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