Google’s algorithm looks at the reviews you get and tracks the pace at which they come in. A business with 30 reviews that gets 5 new ones each month will beat out a competitor that has 60 reviews but only gets them every once in a while. Google reads this as a sign that a business is active and legitimate and uses this to rank them higher in the search results. This review timing helps Google separate customer engagement from businesses with paid review campaigns or accounts that have gone dormant.
Local search rankings can make or break your business, and the numbers prove it. Businesses in Google’s local 3-pack (those top three map results) pull in 126% more traffic and see 93% more customer actions than the ones that are ranked four through ten. Review velocity (how fast you pick up new reviews) is one of the biggest factors that decide whether you’ll snag one of the top three places or get pushed down to page two, where hardly anyone bothers to look. A steady strategy to bring in reviews versus just waiting for customers to leave them whenever they feel like it can separate a business that dominates the local market from one that watches the best customers walk right past them.
Here’s how you bring in reviews at a steady pace to improve your local search rankings!
Steady Reviews Work Better Than Bursts
Google pays close attention to when your reviews come in and how consistent the flow is. The timing and frequency can change how the algorithm evaluates your business. Bringing in two or three reviews each week on a steady basis sends the right signs to Google’s system – it looks natural and legitimate. A business that suddenly receives twenty reviews in 1 week and then goes silent for months leaves a much different impression. The algorithm picks up on irregular patterns like this pretty fast.
Sudden bursts like this might hurt your rankings. Google has spam filters that watch for weird patterns in review activity, and fake review campaigns usually appear as big spikes within a short window of time. If Google notices a massive spike in reviews followed by weeks or months of radio silence, they’re going to think that something suspicious happened with those reviews.
Lots of business owners make the same mistake when they try to build up their review count fast. They’ll send out mass emails to their entire customer list and ask for reviews, or they’ll give discounts or rewards to everyone at once and try to get as many reviews as they can within a few days or weeks. Google actually updated its spam detection algorithms, and one of the main patterns it looks for is this type of sudden review spike.
The algorithm always watches your review patterns and compares what it sees to what legitimate businesses normally get. Most customers will leave their reviews spread out over the course of weeks and months – not all at once. One person buys from you on Monday, and another person visits on Friday, and maybe a few of them write their review in the next week or so. It’s random and natural. If twenty different accounts all post reviews for your business in a 3-day span, though, the algorithm will flag that as suspicious activity pretty fast.
Two reviews this week and three more in the next week will work much better for you than if you go silent for 2 months and then suddenly have fifteen reviews show up over a 3-day span.
New Reviews Are Worth More To Google
Google puts a lot more weight on your newest reviews compared to your oldest ones. A review from last week is going to matter more for your rankings than one from two years ago – 5-star rating or not. Google’s algorithm pays the most attention to your reviews from about the last 30 to 90 days. The reviews that fall within that timeframe carry plenty of weight because they tell Google what’s actually going on with your business. Fresh reviews work as proof that you’re still open, you’re actively working with customers, and you’re taking care of them well on a day-to-day basis.
A business could be sitting on hundreds of positive reviews that customers left over the years. But when fresh reviews stop coming in for a few months, the ranking usually starts to slip. Google wants to show searchers which businesses are active and are doing well right now. Reviews from a few months or a few years back just don’t tell that story anymore.
Google treats fresh reviews almost like a pulse check on your business. When customers leave new feedback, it shows that you’re active and customers actually walked through your door or used your services recently. Those recent reviews tell Google that you’re still in operation and customers are satisfied enough to write about their experience. If you don’t have a steady flow of new reviews, Google doesn’t have a strong reason to feature your listing at the top of local search results.
Time decay is a factor that touches every search result on the platform. Your older reviews don’t disappear from the system. But recent feedback carries a lot more weight for your ranking position. A business that has fewer total reviews but keeps up a steady recent activity can outrank a competitor with hundreds of older reviews and a few months of radio silence.
How Many Reviews Should Your Business Get
Every business needs customer reviews to stay competitive. But the right number of reviews you should be bringing in each month depends on your industry. A restaurant with decent foot traffic should shoot for somewhere around 15 to 30 new reviews per month if it wants to keep strong visibility on Google and make sure customers stay confident in what they’re reading. A dental practice pulling in those same numbers is going to look suspicious. The average patient only schedules two cleanings per year, so if a dentist is somehow collecting 20 or 30 reviews each month, something doesn’t quite make sense.
Professional services like attorneys or accountants can achieve pretty strong rankings with just 5 to 10 reviews each month. Their clients aren’t repeat buyers who come back every other week, and they need to develop a great working relationship with their lawyer or accountant before they’ll actually take the time to leave them a review. A slower, steadier review pace just makes sense for businesses like these.
Review frequency depends on the foot traffic and how many customers a business actually sees. Coffee shops serve hundreds of customers every week. Professional services firms usually only take on a handful of new clients each quarter. Customer expectations matter quite a bit as well. Walk into any local pizza place, and you’d expect to find recent reviews because dozens of diners are eating there each week.
Your local competition matters quite a bit if you want to keep your place in the rankings. A lawyer who works in a small town will face very different challenges compared to a lawyer who has an office in a busy downtown district. That downtown lawyer has to compete with other firms that could have been pulling in dozens of new reviews every month.
When a dentist gets reviews each day, customers are going to start asking questions about what’s actually going on there – whether those reviews are legitimate or if someone is gaming the system. A coffee shop that only pulls in a handful of reviews each month might give customers the impression that the business has dried up, or worse, that the place isn’t even open anymore. The right review frequency for your business needs to line up with what the customers expect to see for your industry.
The Right Time to Request Reviews
The timing of your review request matters quite a bit when you want customers to actually respond. Most businesses send them between 3 and 7 days after they finish the service. This tends to be when it works best because your customers have had enough time to actually use what you provided to them. But the experience is still fresh enough in their minds that they can write something helpful about it.
You should give them a little bit of breathing room before you send that request out. Right after a service ends, customers can still feel rushed or like you’re putting too much pressure on them to respond. Wait for too long, though, and they’ll start to forget all of the small details that actually make a review worth reading.
It’s another big benefit – it spreads your reviews across multiple weeks instead of letting them all pile up at once. When Google sees dozens of reviews all land within a 2 – 3 day span, the algorithm starts to flag them as questionable. Reviews that trickle in over time match the exact pattern that Google expects from customer activity at businesses.
The customers you contact matter just as much as the timing. Customers who had a great experience with your business are a lot more likely to write longer, more detailed reviews. Google gives these reviews more weight because they help future customers who haven’t decided yet. A short, generic review with no substance won’t help anyone.
Automation can save you quite a bit of time when you’re requesting reviews from customers. It’s one area where you should plan it out before you flip the switch. The biggest problem with automated messages is that they all go out at the exact same interval and say the exact same message word-for-word. Nobody communicates like this, and most customers can tell when they’re reading something that came from a bot. Automation does have its place in your review strategy.
But you just need to build in some variation to make it natural. Try changing your send times by a day or two in either direction and personalize each message enough that it sounds like it came from someone who remembers working with that customer.
How Google Spots the Fake Reviews
Google has become much better at catching suspicious review patterns in the past year or so. The algorithm now evaluates a few different factors instead of just one or two basic metrics. Response time has also become a bigger factor in their system – how fast your business replies to customer feedback actually matters.
Software programs that send out automated review requests can save you time. But the automation itself needs to have some built-in variation. Sending every email at the exact same interval after a sale makes it all feel robotic and obviously fake. The review length matters just as much. Reviews that all come in at roughly the same word count are going to raise some red flags with anyone who’s paying attention.
Google has learned a ton about this over the years, and they’re cross-referencing your review activity with the other data points they’ve collected about your business. All that foot traffic information and transaction data they pull in gets matched up with your review patterns. When fifty reviews roll in during a single week, but your customer volume stays the same, it raises a red flag in their system.
All this ties back to what actually makes review velocity work for you instead of against you. A steady stream of new reviews does matter. But only if the pattern looks authentic. The reviews need to appear as if they came from customers who visited your location and had genuine experiences that are worth writing about. Submission times should be a bit different for each one. Review length needs to change from person to person. Even the IP addresses matter – they need to come from different locations around your service area.
Google’s whole business model relies on how well it connects users with businesses that actually take care of their customers. When the pattern of reviews you receive lines up with what’s going on in your everyday operations, it all makes sense from their perspective. They can trust that what they’re seeing is legitimate business activity. Review velocity helps your rankings because it shows that customers are satisfied with your service again and again over time – not that you’re trying to manipulate the algorithm with fake reviews or in some other questionable way to artificially inflate your position.
Google developed these detection methods specifically to tell the difference between genuine business growth and the fake review tricks that some businesses try to use. What you’ll have to work on is bringing in legitimate reviews from your customers at a steady pace. As long as you’re doing this correctly, the natural variation in how customers leave reviews will match up with what Google’s algorithm wants to see.
Monitor and Manage Your Reputation
Review collection just doesn’t work if you treat it like a one-time project. Trying to game the system with sudden bursts of activity will come back to bite you eventually. What you need is a system that brings in the reviews at a natural, steady pace – something that lines up with how your business actually runs and how much you’re in touch with your customers.
You should look back at your own review patterns and check if they match up with what we’ve talked about. Check whether reviews come in at a steady pace or if you see long, quiet periods and then lots of them all at once. Consider whether your customers actually leave feedback right after they visit, or if reviews only trickle in after you finally remember to send out a request. Your pattern probably tells you quite a bit about where you stand right now and what changes would help you the most. Small adjustments to build a steadier flow are going to pay off way more in the long run than any quick trick or shortcut will.
A healthy review velocity takes some genuine attention and intention from you. Your contact with customers needs to continue throughout their entire experience, and every interaction should give them a reason to want to leave a review. Day-to-day consistency doesn’t have the same appeal as watching your review count suddenly jump. But it builds something way more solid – a review profile that Google sees as legitimate and that future customers actually trust when they pick where to take their business.
At Reputation.ca, we’ve helped hundreds of Canadian businesses manage everything from review management and social media strategy to crisis response and cancel culture defense. We work with businesses at every stage, from immediate reputation crises to long-term brand building and web presence development. Get in touch, and we’ll create a custom plan for your situation.
