How to Get Your First 10 Google Reviews as a New Local Business

A new business can do excellent work and still have an empty Google review section. Customers may be willing to share their experience; they simply have not been asked or cannot find the right place to do it. Your first ten reviews are a useful milestone for building a repeatable process, not a ranking threshold or a promise of more sales.

Allow four weeks to get the basics working. You need real customers, a verified Google Business Profile and a way to contact or invite them appropriately. For profile setup, use the Business Profile checklist.

Week 1: Make it easy to leave an honest review

1. Find your review link. In your Business Profile, open “Read Reviews” and then “Get more reviews” to copy the link or QR code. Google's instructions show the current steps. TrustMint's free review-link generator offers another way to prepare a shareable link and QR code.
2. Test the destination. Open the link on a phone while signed out of your business account. Confirm it points to the correct location and offers a way for a customer to write a review. If you have multiple branches, keep a separate link for each.
3. List eligible customers. Start with customers who actually experienced your service and whom you may contact. Do not add employees, friends who were never customers, or a purchased contact list.
4. Choose the handoff. Decide who will ask and when: after a completed job, at checkout, or in a suitable follow-up message. Write that moment into your normal closing checklist.

Test the link before asking anyone else to use it. A request that opens the wrong location is difficult to recover after the customer has moved on.

Write down the number of completed jobs you expect in an ordinary week. Ten reviews from twelve customers is a very different prospect from ten reviews from two hundred. The four-week schedule is a way to establish the habit; it is not a deadline for customers to post. If you have not yet served ten eligible customers, keep the routine running and let the public count follow at its own pace.

Week 2: Ask every eligible customer fairly

Use the same neutral invitation whether the customer seems delighted, quiet, or disappointed. Google prohibits offering incentives for reviews and selectively asking only customers likely to leave positive ratings. It also prohibits asking for a specific rating. Read Google's guidance on getting more reviews and its review policies before you start.

Thanks for choosing {Business name}. If you'd like to tell others about your visit, here's our Google review link: {Link}. We welcome your honest view.

For an in-person handoff, keep it shorter: “If you would like to share your experience, this QR code opens our Google review page.” Do not stand over someone while they write, suggest what they should say, or offer a discount in exchange. For more channel-specific wording, use the review request templates.

Recent customers are a reasonable starting group if you genuinely served them and can contact them appropriately. Use the same eligibility rule for a customer whose visit was uneventful as for one who thanked you enthusiastically. If the customer has an open service problem, work on that problem through your normal support route; do not make a private complaint form a required stop before the Google link.

Week 3: Check the process, not just the count

Look back at completed services from the previous week. Count the customers who were eligible for an invitation, then check how many actually received one. Use customer references rather than full names if the list will be shared within the team.

If 20 eligible jobs produced five invitations, you have found the first problem: the handoff. Public reviews may arrive days later or from people you never contacted, so use the count as a separate signal rather than a precise per-customer conversion rate.

A useful weekly conversation is specific: “We finished 20 jobs, could contact 16 customers, and invited 12. Two records were missing email addresses and two customers had opted out. Four eligible jobs had no invitation because nobody owned the closeout.” The next action is to assign ownership for those four, not to ask staff for a five-star quota. Keep the reasons in the log so the same gap does not recur.

If someone leaves a critical review, respond calmly and address what you can. Do not remove future invitations from customers who might have a complaint. A fair process gives prospective customers a more useful picture of your business.

Week 4: Keep the routine after the first ten

Review the sheet with the person who closes jobs or appointments. Check the link again, confirm that requests are going only to appropriate contacts, and assign one owner for the weekly count. If you reached ten, keep the same fair process. If you did not, look at eligible-customer volume and missed handoffs before changing anything else.

For a small team, a manual message or QR card may be enough. As volume grows, an email workflow can save repeated admin work, but only if the customer handoff is reliable. The automation setup guide covers that decision when you need it.

What if the first month ends without ten?

Start with the denominator. A business that served eight eligible customers in four weeks cannot expect ten new reviews from that period. Keep asking fairly after future jobs and judge the process by whether those eligible customers received an invitation. If you served many more customers but few were asked, the handoff needs attention. If invitations went out but nobody could open the link, fix the destination. If the requests were delivered and the link works, the remaining choice belongs to the customers.

Do not ask the same recent customers repeatedly to force the milestone. One clear invitation is enough for the first pass. A later reminder, if appropriate under your contact rules, should be brief and easy to ignore. Public reviews may also arrive after the month ends, so keep the invitation log and the public count as separate measures rather than labeling each person a success or failure.

Do not replace a fair request habit with a campaign that stops at ten. The public count will sometimes pause, and that is normal. What you can maintain is the closeout check, a working link for each location and a short monthly review of missed invitations. If the count later appears low against comparable local businesses, check your own eligible-customer volume before copying a rival's number as a target.

The first useful action is small: open your review link on a phone and check the destination. Then put the invitation into the next completed-service handoff. The weekly checks will tell you whether the routine is holding.