Want to support small businesses? Leave more Google reviews.
Americans can’t agree on much, but nearly all of us want to support small businesses. In fact, more people have positive opinions about small businesses than seemingly every other institution, far more than the military, church, and education system.
Infographic from Pew Research Center report “From Businesses and Banks to Colleges and Churches: Americans’ Views of U.S. Institutions”
Well, here’s a free, fast, easy way to support more small businesses in your area: leave them positive Google reviews.
The number and quality of reviews a business gets on Google affects its ranking in search results, so your review can directly help more people find that business. And, since Google is now easily the most common place that people read local business reviews, your review there is much more likely to be seen than on any other platform.
Infographic from BrightLocal’s “Local Consumer Review Survey 2024: Trends, Behaviors, and Platforms Explored”
So that’s it. Easy, right? Go forth and support Americans’ favorite type of organization!
Of course, the reason this needs to be said at all is that most people don’t leave reviews nearly as much as they could.
The majority of consumers only review businesses after extreme experiences, positive or negative. We’re all much less likely to do so after a perfectly fine Sunday night at the family-owned ice cream parlor nearby, or a routine oil change at your town’s independent auto repair shop. If you get exactly what you expected, you just move on with your life.
I’ll be honest, as I’m writing this I can think of a dozen businesses off the top of my head that I’ve patronized loyally for years that I’ve never reviewed, e.g. my favorite car wash, liquor store, garden center. (I shall heed my own advice and go review them now.)
This is unfortunate, because an extra two minutes spent leaving a one-sentence, five-star review could have a significant impact on those businesses, especially businesses that are either new or that simply don’t get a lot of customers because of their business model. Professional services who work with a few amount of clients for a long time, like architects and accounts, get fewer than 10 reviews on average, according to an analysis of a million Google Business Profiles by Whitespark.
Average Google Reviews by Primary Business Category
When you only have a handful of reviews on Google, that extra review could mean the difference between appearing on Google Maps or not.
It’s hard to blame the average consumer for not realizing how a review on Google will impact the visibility of a business, or that Google is the ideal place to leave a review, because many local business owners often don’t know either! They naturally know good reviews are good, but they frequently don’t understand that this affects where they show up in search results, or that reviews on Google in particular are seen far more often than those on other platforms like Facebook and Yelp. We personally know this is not well understood because it’s often one of the first conversations we have with new small business clients.
The real trouble is that even after a business realizes this, it doesn’t necessarily get easier to build up their reviews. Pretty much the only legitimate thing a company can do is (somewhat awkwardly) ask its customers to leave a review, but these requests are commonly ignored because you still have the issue of most consumers not realizing the impact their reviews can have.
For example, a recent Harvard Business Review study found that emailing recent customers to ask for reviews only increased the number of ratings by 8 percentage points. That’s clearly better than doing nothing, but also highlights how many people ignore these types of prompts.
As a result, many business owners resort to offering discounts and prizes in exchange, even though these incentives are usually banned by review platforms. After all, it’s not fair if some businesses can just buy a bunch of positive reviews, and fake reviews are already a massive problem on many websites. But, you can also understand why legitimate businesses resort to these tactics if they know they have satisfied customers and still can’t seem to get more people to leave reviews. (On the flipside, Congress had to enact a law in 2016 to keep businesses from using contracts to suppress negative reviews, although there are apparently still some businesses that do this as well.)
Infographic from BrightLocal’s “Local Consumer Review Survey 2024: Trends, Behaviors, and Platforms Explored”
So, consider this a public service announcement. In an ideal world, consumers understand this situation, and practice what they preach. If more Americans think small businesses are good for the country than colleges and large corporations combined, it should be easy to spend a few minutes each time they patronize a small business to give them a positive review.
It’s time to normalize leaving more reviews for small businesses, even for everyday, unremarkable experiences.