How reviews affect where you show in search

What reviews do in local search

Google’s local ranking weighs relevance, distance, and prominence, and reviews are the largest part of prominence that you can influence directly. Google states in its own help documentation that review count and review score factor into local ranking. The text of reviews is read too. A review that says “Kelsey walked us through our VA loan in three weeks” is a small vote that this lender handles VA loans, and enough of those votes move the business up for “VA loan Idaho Falls.”

Recency matters in the same way. A profile whose last review is fourteen months old reads as a business that may have closed. A profile that gets two or three reviews a month reads as one that is open and busy. Google also notes whether the owner replies, and a reply in the owner’s words with the customer’s situation in it adds text of its own to the profile.

Reviews on other sites, Zillow for a lender, Healthgrades for a clinic, Campendium for a park, count toward prominence too, and those pages are read by AI assistants as mentions of your business. The Google Business Profile is still where the count and rating are shown in the map results, and it carries the most weight.

What a weak review profile looks like for a mortgage lender

The lender closes 22 loans a month, which is 260 or so families a year who could leave a review, and the Google profile shows 31 reviews total after six years. The problem is the rate. Most arrived in the first year when the owner was asking, and the most recent is nine months old. The profile reads as a quiet business, and the branch of a national lender two miles away with 410 reviews and a 4.6 rating outranks it for every search that is not the business name.

Read the 31 reviews and a second problem shows. Twenty-six of them say some version of “great to work with, highly recommend.” None mention the loan type, the town, the timeline, or the loan officer by name. Google can tell the business is liked. It cannot tell what the business does, because the reviews never say. The lender’s site has a page on VA loans and a page on construction loans, and neither the site nor the reviews connect them to Idaho Falls in words a searcher would use.

The third problem is that nobody has replied to a review since 2022. Each unanswered review is a missed chance to add the loan type and the town in the owner’s own words.

A worked example: building a steady review flow for a lender in Idaho Falls

Teton Gateway Mortgage is a lender in Idaho Falls closing about 22 loans a month. The table shows what a year looks like for a lender at this volume once every borrower is asked at closing and every review gets a reply within two days.

A quarter to a third of borrowers leave a review when asked at closing with a direct link, and that rate holds. The column that matters most for search is the last one. When the loan officer asks the borrower to mention what kind of loan it was and where the house is, the reviews start carrying the words. Here is the ask, before and after.

Thanks so much for choosing us. If you have a minute, we’d love a review on Google.

Congratulations on the house on Ammon Road. If you have two minutes, a Google review at this link helps the next first-time buyer in Idaho Falls find us. It helps most if you say what kind of loan it was and how the process went for you.

And the reply, before and after, to a review that said “Kelsey was great, closed on time.”

Thank you for the kind words.

Thank you, Marcus. Getting your FHA loan closed in 24 days on the Ammon Road house was a good one for us too. Enjoy the new place, and call Kelsey directly if the rate ever makes a refinance worth a look.

How to check your own reviews

1. Search your business name in Google and note the count and rating in the profile panel. Then do the same for the three competitors that appear for your main search, such as “mortgage lender Idaho Falls.”
2. Sort your reviews by newest and note the date of the most recent one. More than 60 days is a gap Google will notice.
3. Count your reviews from the last 90 days and divide by your customers in the same period. Under 10 percent means you are not asking, or the ask is buried in an email nobody opens.
4. Read your last 20 reviews and count how many name a service, a town, or a person. Under a quarter means the reviews are not helping you rank for anything but your name.
5. Count how many reviews have an owner reply. Every review should have one, and the reply should be specific to that customer.
6. In your Google Business Profile, open Performance and look at the searches that showed the profile. If the searches are almost all your name, reviews are one of the things holding the profile back from service searches.

What we do about reviews

We set up a review request that goes out at the moment a customer is happiest, at closing for a lender, at checkout for a park, at discharge for a clinic, with a direct link and a sentence that invites them to say what the service was and where. We reply to every review within two business days in your voice, with the service and the town in the reply. Reviews that mention a service are shown on the matching page of your site, and the count, rating, and recency are tracked in your monthly report against your competitors. A steady flow of specific reviews is one of the few ranking factors your customers build for you, and starting it is part of every engagement.

Questions people ask about SEO: how reviews affect where you show in search