✦ Reviews
Online Reputation Management for Contractors
Online reputation management for contractors is the ongoing process of building positive review volume, responding to feedback professionally, and maintaining the review rating and sentiment that AI systems use to select which businesses to recommend. It's not crisis management — it's infrastructure. Businesses that treat reputation as infrastructure rather than reactive PR consistently outperform those that only pay attention to it when something goes wrong.
The three components of contractor reputation management:
1. Review generation (proactive) The foundation of reputation is review volume. Without a systematic review request process, review accumulation is random and slow. With one, it's predictable and compound. The standard approach: a text message sent to the client within 48 hours of job completion with a direct link to your Google review page. For commercial clients, an email follow-up with a review request attached to the project close-out documentation. For businesses doing 10+ jobs per month, this process generates 15–25 new reviews per month versus the 1–3 that arrive organically.
2. Response management (ongoing) Every Google review — positive and negative — should receive a response within 48 hours. Positive reviews: acknowledge specifically ('Thanks for mentioning the custom flashing detail — that one required some creative problem-solving'), confirm the client's experience, and include a subtle keyword ('glad the Edmonton home addition project worked out'). Negative reviews: acknowledge the concern professionally, avoid defensiveness, offer to resolve it offline, and include contact information. The response is not for the reviewer — it's for every potential client who reads it afterward.
3. Reputation monitoring (ongoing) Regular checking of all platforms where reviews appear: Google, HomeStars, Houzz, Yelp, BBB. New reviews on secondary platforms can sit unresponded to for months if there's no monitoring process. A weekly 10-minute check of all platforms is sufficient for most contractor businesses.
Reputation recovery: if your current review profile is poor (under 4.0 average), the fastest path to recovery is volume, not removal. Getting 20 new 5-star reviews in 60 days while responding professionally to existing negative reviews changes the overall impression more effectively than attempting to dispute and remove negative reviews (which is slow, uncertain, and often unsuccessful).
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