Marketing Myth No. 2: “More Reviews Is All That Matters”

The hail rolls through on a Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning half the street is out in the driveway squinting up at the shingles, and you are at the kitchen table with coffee and a phone, typing “roof repair Tulsa.”

Two companies sit at the top of the map. The first has 640 reviews and a 4.9, which in roofing is close to sainthood. The second has 85 reviews and a 4.7.

You tap the first one. The newest review is fourteen months old, and the owner stopped replying sometime before that. You back out and tap the second. Three reviews landed this week, all about the same storm, and the owner answered each one by name.

You call the second company.

Most business owners I talk to would bet on the first one. More reviews, higher rating, done. The total feels like a fence you build once and then get to stand behind. That belief is Marketing Myth No. 2, and it sends calls to the company down the street.

What I see in Tulsa profiles

I manage Google Business Profiles for dentists, medical practices, banks, churches, property managers, and home-service contractors. Reviews come up early in first conversations, and the question arrives as a number: “How do we get to 500?”

The profiles that bring in calls look different from the profiles with the biggest totals. New reviews show up a few at a time, month after month. Somebody at the business answers them. The reviews talk about the actual work: a crown, a refinance, a leaking roof, a lease renewal.

A profile with a big total and nothing new since last spring tells a customer the business stopped paying attention. The phones inside might ring all day. The customer has no way to know that.

What quietly stopped working

For years the play was a review blitz. Run a contest, email the whole customer list in one afternoon, hand out cards at the front desk for a month, and watch the total jump. Then stop, because the number looked good enough.

Google caught on. Its review policies prohibit offering anything in exchange for a review, and they prohibit asking only the customers you expect to be happy. Google removes reviews that break those rules, sometimes in batches, and a business can watch a chunk of its total disappear overnight.

Customers caught on too. They scroll past the star rating and look at the dates. A stack of glowing reviews from 2023 tells them how the business used to run.

What still works

The count still matters. Google says review count and rating both factor into local rankings. The count cannot carry the whole load by itself anymore.

A steady pace. A few new reviews every month, year after year. Build the ask into something you already do: a text after the appointment, a line on the invoice, a card handed over with the keys. Ask every customer, the grumpy ones included.

Fresh dates. Your newest review is the first one a customer reads when they sort by Newest. Keep it recent and you never have to explain the gap.

A reply on each one. Google’s own guidance tells businesses to respond to reviews, and customers read the replies. A calm, specific answer to a two-star review shows the next reader how you treat people on a bad day. That reader is deciding whether to trust you with their teeth or their roof.

Reviews that describe the work. When a customer writes “they fixed my cracked molar the same afternoon,” that sentence helps the next person searching for an emergency dentist. Google pulls phrases like that out of reviews and shows them under your listing, and the AI summaries on Google Maps draw from the same text. You cannot write a review for anyone. You can ask a better question when you request one: “Would you mention what we helped you with?”

How to tell which side of the line you are on

Three checks you can do tonight on your phone.

1. Search your main service plus “Tulsa,” open your own profile, and sort the reviews by Newest. If the top review is more than a couple of months old, customers see the gap before they see your rating.
2. Count the replies on your last ten reviews. Each review without one is a customer who spoke up in public and heard nothing back.
3. Read your last five reviews out loud. If they all say “great service” and stop there, a stranger learns nothing about the work you do. Start asking customers to name it.

If those checks come back clean, your reviews are pulling their weight, whatever the total says. If they do not, you can fix it without a contest or a blitz. Ask every customer, answer every review, and keep doing it through the busy months, when it is easiest to forget.

If you would rather have someone look at your specific situation than read about it, grab 20 minutes on my calendar. No pitch. You will leave knowing where you stand.