Google Reviews for Tradies: The Complete Playbook

Nobody asks their mates for a plumber recommendation the way they used to. When a hot water system dies on a Saturday night or the power trips at 6am before work, most people reach for their phone and search "plumber near me" or "electrician [suburb]", not their group chat. What they see in that search decides who gets the call, almost always within the first thirty seconds.

For tradies, this makes Google reviews the modern version of word of mouth, except visible to every stranger searching in your area, all the time, rather than just the handful of people your past customers happen to talk to. A tradie with 80 reviews at 4.9 stars and a competitor with 12 reviews at 4.2 stars are not competing on skill in that search result, they are competing on trust signals, and the review count and rating are doing all the talking.

Emergency and urgent trade categories (plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, pest control) feel this most acutely, because the customer has almost no time to research beyond the search results page itself. There is no time to check a website, read a portfolio or ask around. The decision gets made off the star rating, the review count, and maybe the top line of the most recent review.

This is why building a steady stream of reviews matters more for tradies than almost any other business category. It is not a nice-to-have marketing extra, it is the primary way new customers decide whether to trust you enough to let you into their home or business.

The best time to ask for a review is before you have even packed up the van. The job is finished, the customer can see the result, and satisfaction is at its highest point it will ever be. Waiting even a day lets that feeling fade, and waiting a week means most tradies have moved on to three more jobs and simply forget.

Ask verbally on site, right after showing the customer the finished work: "Glad we got that sorted for you. I'll send a quick text with a link if you don't mind leaving us a Google review, it really helps." Then actually send the link, ideally automatically, straight after.

For jobs where you invoice after the fact rather than getting paid on the spot, the best trigger point is usually when the invoice is paid, not when the job finishes, since payment is the last interaction most customers associate with the job being fully wrapped up.

Avoid asking during the job itself, while there is still a chance something goes wrong, and avoid asking too long after, when the details of the job have faded from the customer's memory and the request feels random. The window that works best is narrow: right at completion, or right at payment, whichever comes second.

Not every request method suits every trade or every customer, and using the wrong channel is one of the quietest ways review requests get ignored.

SMS

For most tradies, SMS is the highest-performing channel, because open rates for text messages are far higher than email, and most customers already have their tradie's number saved after the job. A short text with a direct review link, sent within an hour of finishing the job, tends to get the fastest response.

Email

Email works well for trades that already send digital invoices or quotes, since the review request can sit naturally alongside the invoice or a follow-up receipt. It is a weaker option on its own for jobs where the only contact detail is a phone number.

QR code

QR codes work best for in-person, point-of-sale moments: a sticker on the van, a card left with the invoice, or a sign at a shopfront counter for trades that also run a retail side (locksmiths, small engine repair, tyre shops). A QR code generator makes this easy to set up in a couple of minutes.

Many tradies get the best results using more than one channel at once: SMS as the primary trigger straight after the job, with a QR code sticker as a backup for customers who prefer to scan on the spot before the tradie even leaves.

The moment a trade business grows beyond a single owner-operator, review requests start slipping through the cracks, because asking now depends on someone else remembering to do it on every job, not just the boss remembering on their own.

The fix is to remove memory from the equation entirely. Set up individual links or codes for each team member, tied to the job management or invoicing system where possible, so a review request goes out automatically the moment a job is marked complete, without any tradie on the tools needing to think about it.

Employee-specific links also create a healthy bit of visibility: owners can see which team members are generating reviews consistently and which ones are not, without needing to micromanage anyone. This works especially well as a light form of recognition, calling out a team member who picked up five new reviews in a week, rather than a compliance stick.

For teams that are not ready for full automation, a simple physical prompt helps: a laminated card in the van or toolbox with the QR code and a one-line script ("Ask them to leave a quick Google review before you drive off"). Even this low-tech version, used consistently, beats a sophisticated system that only the owner remembers to use.

The goal either way is the same: make asking a default part of finishing a job, not a separate task someone has to remember to do on top of everything else.

Every tradie eventually deals with a customer who is unhappy, whether the complaint is fair, unfair, or somewhere in between. How you handle that moment matters for your reputation just as much as the quality of the actual work.

The first move is always to try to resolve the issue directly and quickly, on site or by phone, before it ever reaches a review. Most complaints tradies face come down to communication (a price that felt higher than expected, a delay that was not explained, a callback that took too long) rather than the actual trade work itself, and most of these can be defused with a calm, direct conversation.

If a customer is still upset after the job, resist the urge to skip the review request out of nerves. Send the same request you would send anyone else. Filtering out unhappy customers from the review ask is a form of review gating, which breaches Google's policies, covered in detail in our guide on review gating. It is also usually unnecessary: most customers, even ones who had a hiccup, will leave a fair review if the issue was resolved properly.

If a negative review does land, respond calmly and professionally rather than defensively. Our guide on how to respond to negative reviews has templates suited to exactly these situations, including late arrivals, price disputes and quality complaints, which cover most of what tradies run into.

There is no fixed magic number that guarantees a top ranking, since Google factors in location, search relevance and competition alongside reviews, but patterns from local search do give a rough sense of what it takes to be competitive.

In most suburbs, the tradies appearing in the top three results of the local map pack for a given trade tend to have noticeably more reviews than the businesses below them, often somewhere in the range of 50 to 150 reviews with a rating above 4.7. In less competitive suburbs or niche trades, considerably fewer reviews can be enough to lead the pack. In dense metro areas with dozens of competing plumbers or electricians, the bar sits much higher.

Rather than fixating on a specific target number, it is more useful to look at what your closest three or four competitors currently have, since that is the bar you actually need to clear to start winning more of the searches happening in your suburb right now. If they average 60 reviews, getting to 80 to 100 with a strong rating puts you clearly ahead. If they average 200, the goal shifts.

Review velocity, covered in our complete guide to Google reviews, also matters alongside the raw number. A tradie with 60 reviews still adding two or three a week will often outperform a tradie with 100 reviews that stopped growing a year ago, since Google appears to reward businesses that look actively current.

The patterns that separate high-review tradie profiles from low-review ones are fairly consistent across trades once you look closely at how the request is actually made.

Plumbers who ask well tend to send the review request the same day as the job, by text, with a message that names the actual work done ("thanks for having us out to fix that leaking hot water valve today"), which both jogs the customer's memory and, as a side benefit, often ends up echoed in the review itself, reinforcing what the business does for future searchers.

Electricians doing smaller residential jobs often get the best results asking in person before leaving site, then backing that verbal ask up with an SMS link within the hour, since customers who verbally agreed are far more likely to follow through once the text arrives while the job is still fresh.

Builders and renovation trades, where jobs run over weeks rather than hours, tend to do best asking at practical completion or handover, rather than at the very start or partway through, since satisfaction peaks once the finished result is visible and the disruption of the build is over.

Across all of these patterns, the common thread is the same: ask close to the moment of highest satisfaction, make the ask specific to the job, and remove every possible bit of friction between the request and the review box itself.

Getting review requests running consistently does not need to be a big project. Most tradies can get Testimo set up during a single lunch break or a slow stretch between jobs.

The basic setup takes a handful of steps: connect your Google Business Profile so review requests point to the correct review link, add your team members if you want individual tracking, choose whether requests go out by SMS, email or both, and decide the trigger point (job completion, invoice paid, or both). Most of this takes under ten minutes.

From there, the system runs in the background. Every time a job wraps up or an invoice gets marked paid, a request goes out automatically, without any tradie on the tools needing to remember a thing. Testimo also offers a parallel private feedback option, so any customer with a concern has a direct, private way to flag it, alongside (never instead of) the public review request.

For tradies who bounce between job sites all day, this matters because reviews stop depending on memory or mood. Whether it has been a smooth day or a stressful one, every customer gets the same consistent, professional request at the right moment, which is exactly the kind of steady, unspectacular consistency that builds a strong profile over months rather than one big push.

Once it is running, most of the ongoing work is simply replying to new reviews as they come in, covered earlier in this guide, and occasionally checking the dashboard to see how review velocity is tracking.