Would You Choose You? – larry fischer

Go look up your business on Google right now.

Not to check your website. Not your hours or your address. Look at your reviews.

How many do you have? When was the last one posted? Are there three reviews from 2021 sitting there while your competitors are racking up fresh ones every week?

If what you see gives you even a flicker of concern, that’s the whole point.

The Credibility Problem You’re Not Thinking About

Most business owners know reviews matter. They just don’t do anything about it.

And the cost of that inaction is real.

98% of consumers read online reviews before choosing a local business. Not most. Not many. Nearly all of them. And 92% won’t even consider a business with less than 4 stars.

That means before someone ever visits your website, calls your number, or walks through your door, they’ve already made a judgment call based on what strangers said about you online.

Here’s where it gets worse.

Old reviews hurt you almost as much as bad ones. Recency matters. A business with 12 reviews from three years ago signals one thing to a prospect: nobody has had a reason to talk about you lately. Whether that’s true or not, it plants doubt.

Businesses that show up in Google’s top 3 local results average 240 reviews. Not because Google arbitrarily rewards them, but because review volume and recency are direct ranking signals. They’re not winning by accident.

The “Would You Choose You?” Test

Here’s the exercise I give every business owner I work with.

Pretend you don’t know yourself. Pretend you’re a prospect in your town, searching for what you offer. You pull up Google, your business appears, and you read what you see.

Would you choose you?

Not based on what you know is true about your work. Based on what a stranger can see in 30 seconds.

If the answer is anything less than a confident yes, that’s where you start.

This isn’t about ego. It’s about understanding what your prospects are seeing and feeling before they ever reach out. First impressions have always mattered. Online, they happen without you in the room.

It’s Not Just About SEO

A lot of people think about reviews as an SEO play. Get more reviews, rank higher, more traffic. That’s true, and it matters.

But that framing undersells it.

Even if you strip away the ranking benefits entirely, you still have a trust problem if your review presence is thin or stale.

Reviews are social proof. They answer the question your prospect is too polite to ask: “Can I trust this person with my money and my problem?”

When reviews are fresh, specific, and plentiful, that question gets answered before the conversation starts. When they’re sparse or outdated, the question lingers. And doubt kills deals.

Your competitors who have 80 reviews from the last six months aren’t just ranking higher than you. They’re closing faster, too.

The Fix Is a System, Not a Campaign

Here’s the thing about reviews. Most businesses treat it like a project. They’ll do a push for a few weeks, get some reviews, feel good about it, and then forget about it for another 18 months.

That’s not a strategy. That’s a spike followed by silence.

What actually works is consistent velocity. A steady drip of fresh reviews tells Google your business is active and trusted. It tells prospects the same thing.

Getting there is simpler than most people think:

Ask every happy customer. Most people are willing to leave a review. They just don’t think to do it on their own.
Make it easy. Send them a direct link to your Google review page. Every extra click costs you conversions.
Ask at the right moment. Right after a job well done, after a compliment, when the customer is still in that warm feeling.
Follow up. A gentle reminder to customers who didn’t leave a review after the first ask captures a lot of people who just got busy.

The goal is to make review requests automatic, not something that depends on you remembering to do it.

If you want to take that step, our AI Reviews tool does exactly that. It works in the background, sends review requests at the right time, and keeps your Google profile fresh without adding anything to your plate.

But whatever approach you take, build a system for it. Reviews that come in once a year don’t protect you. Reviews that come in every week do.

Go back and look at your Google listing one more time.

Now ask yourself honestly: would a stranger choose you over the competitor with 90 reviews from the last three months?

If the answer is no, you already know what to fix.

Larry Fischer is the CEO of Internet Media Now, helping small businesses grow with AI, marketing systems, and smarter technology.