Reviews & Reputation

Reviews are the single biggest lever most home-service businesses leave untouched. Star rating, review velocity, response quality, and how you handle negative feedback in public all affect both where you rank (local pack signals) and whether the prospect who sees you actually picks up the phone (conversion). And yet most contractors either ignore reviews entirely or treat them as a reputation-management problem to survive rather than a conversion asset to build.

This category covers the full system: review acquisition workflows that actually get customers to leave reviews without feeling begged, response frameworks that turn negative feedback into public trust signals, review schema implementation, and how to handle the harder cases — fake reviews, extortion scams, and coordinated negative review floods. We pull heavily from the working playbooks practitioners publish publicly, but always through the lens of a home-service owner who doesn't have a full-time reputation manager on staff. Everything here is built to be executed by the operator or a small team, not outsourced to a dedicated reviews department.