Google Reviews Are Doing More Selling Than Your Website. Here's How to Get Them Without Breaking the Rules

A customer looking for someone to fit a stove doesn't start with a website. They open Google, type "wood burner installer" plus their town, and scroll the map results. Whoever sits in the top three gets looked at properly. Everyone below that is scrolled past. BrightLocal's most recent research on local search behaviour puts the number at 83% of consumers using Google to check out a local tradesperson before they get in touch, and for an installer working a 20-30 mile radius, that map pack is effectively your shopfront.

Review count and star rating are one of the biggest levers you have over where you land in that shopfront, and one of the few that costs nothing but a bit of organisation. But the rules around asking for reviews changed properly in April 2025, and a fair few small trade businesses are still running on habits that are now against the law.

Why the stars matter more than most installers think

Local ranking isn't just about being HETAS registered and having a nice logo. Review signals (rating, volume, and recency) make up a meaningful chunk of how Google decides who to show first for a "near me" search, and the knock-on effect on enquiries is bigger than most installers assume. Analysis from SOCi found that businesses sitting in the top three map pack results get 126% more website traffic and 93% more calls, clicks, and direction requests than those ranked below. Separately, a one-star increase in average rating has been linked to a 44% jump in the same conversion actions on a Google Business Profile.

Put plainly: a business sat at 4.8 stars with 60 reviews is winning jobs that a business at 4.2 stars with 12 reviews never sees the enquiry for, even if the second installer does equally good work.

What changed in April 2025 (and why it matters for a one-van business)

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 brought in new rules on consumer reviews that came into force on 6 April 2025, enforced by the CMA with the power to fine businesses up to 10% of global turnover for serious breaches. The headline points that apply to a small installation business:

• Writing, buying, or asking someone to post a review that doesn't reflect a genuine customer experience is now a banned practice outright, not just bad form.

• Offering an incentive (a discount, a free service, a bottle of something nice) in exchange for a review is fine in principle, but only if you don't try to influence what the review says, and only if it's disclosed clearly that the review was incentivised. Asking a happy customer to leave a review is not the problem; asking them to leave a positive review, or paying for one, is.

• Getting a mate, a supplier, or a family member to post a glowing review of a business they haven't actually used as a customer falls squarely inside "fake reviews," even if it's meant as a favour rather than fraud.

• If you run any kind of review incentive scheme (a prize draw for anyone who leaves a review, say), you need to make sure it doesn't nudge people toward leaving only positive feedback.

The CMA gave businesses a grace period through to June 2025 to get their house in order before shifting to active enforcement, and it has since said it's prioritising the most obviously exploitative cases. That doesn't mean a small installer is a target for a fine. It does mean the old habit of quietly offering "leave us five stars and I'll knock £20 off" is no longer something to say out loud, or in a text message that could end up as evidence.

When to actually ask

Timing is the part installers get wrong most often, usually because asking feels like an extra job on an already long list. The best window is genuinely narrow: satisfaction peaks right at job completion, and conversion on review requests drops an estimated 30-40% if you wait until the next day. Waiting a week, which is the realistic default when there's no system prompting you, loses most of that window entirely.

A text message sent the same day, ideally within an hour or two of finishing up and showing the customer the completed job, converts at roughly 15-20%, noticeably better than email alone (12-15%). Sending both, a text on the day and a follow-up email a day or two later if there's no response, gets you closer to 24-26%. None of this requires anything clever. It requires knowing which jobs finished today, which most installers currently track by memory or a paper diary that gets looked at once a fortnight.

Handling the reviews you get, good and bad

Responding to reviews, not just collecting them, is itself a ranking factor, and customers notice it too: research suggests the majority of people checking reviews expect to see the business owner respond to both good and bad feedback, and businesses that reply consistently see a measurable bump in local visibility. A two-line reply thanking someone by name for a good review takes thirty seconds and is worth doing every time, not just when you remember.

A bad review needs a calmer approach than most people's first instinct. Respond factually, acknowledge the specific complaint without getting defensive in public, and offer to sort it offline (a phone call, a return visit). Never offer money or a refund in exchange for the review being changed or removed, since that edges straight back into the incentivised-review problem above. If a review is genuinely fake (a competitor, someone who was never a customer), Google has a reporting process, and it's worth using rather than arguing in the comments.

Where this actually breaks down in practice

The honest reason most installers don't have a steady stream of reviews isn't reluctance, it's that by the time anyone thinks to ask, the job's three weeks old and the moment's gone. That's less a marketing problem than a record-keeping one: if you can't immediately see which jobs were signed off yesterday, you can't hit the same-day window that actually converts.

This is one of the smaller, less flashy reasons BurnerCRM exists. Every job in the system carries a completion date and a status, so at the end of the day it's a two-minute job to see who finished today and get a message out while the stove's still warm, not a case of scrolling back through a diary trying to remember. It doesn't send anything on your behalf or write the message for you, and it won't stop you from doing the wrong thing if you're determined to, but it does put the "who do I need to text today" answer in front of you instead of leaving it to memory. If you want to see how the job tracking side works, BurnerCRM has more detail.