Short answer
Ask within minutes of the job being signed off, by text, with a direct link. Manual asking fails because the best moment is the moment you are busiest. Never offer an incentive and never screen customers before asking, both break Google's rules and both show.
Every plumber knows they should be collecting reviews. Very few do it consistently. The reason is not laziness, it is timing.
Why asking manually never sticks
The best moment to ask is the moment the hot water comes back on. The customer is relieved, you have just solved a real problem, and they feel like they owe you one.
That is also the moment you are packing the van, thinking about the next job and already running late. So the ask does not happen, and by the time you remember on Sunday evening the crisis is a memory and the review is a chore.
Manual asking fails because the moment worth catching is precisely the moment you are least able to catch it.
What works instead
A text that fires when the job is signed off, with a direct link straight to the review form.
Three things matter about that:
- Text, not email. Emails from trades get ignored. Texts get read in under a minute.
- A direct link. Not your website, not a QR code on the invoice. Every extra tap between reading the message and typing the review costs you reviews.
- Automatic. Triggered by the job being marked complete, not by you remembering.
Most trade job management systems can fire something when a job is closed. Where they cannot, a one tap manual trigger still beats relying on memory.
What the message should say
Short, and like a plumber wrote it.
Something along the lines of: thanks for having us out today, if we did a good job would you mind leaving a quick review, takes about thirty seconds.
What it should not say is please take a moment to share your experience with our valued service. People can tell, and the ones who can tell are the ones who do not bother.
The things you must not do
No incentives. Offering a discount or a draw entry for a review is against Google’s rules. It also shows, because incentivised reviews read differently.
No gating. Screening people first and only sending the happy ones to Google is specifically prohibited. Ask everybody whose job went through properly.
No invented jobs. A mate who has actually had work done is a customer like anybody else, so write them up. What you cannot do is make the job up, because a review describing work that never happened is a fake review and it reads like one. Also avoid having a batch land in the same week from accounts with no history, which is the pattern that gets reviews filtered.
Why this counts as SEO
Because review volume, recency and wording all feed the map pack.
A plumber with ninety reviews averaging 4.8 and a few from last week will generally beat one with two hundred that stopped two years ago. That is why a review system is not a separate nice to have sitting next to your local SEO. It is part of it.
There is also a practical point beyond the ranking. A profile with a perfect five and no substance reads as fake. A 4.8 with a couple of fair criticisms and good replies from the owner reads as a real business, and the second one wins the job.