How This Roofer Got 600 Google Reviews in Just 2 Yrs

Cody, you got how many 5-star reviews?

About 600 in the first 2 years.

2 years. And I remember your rating for the longest time was at 5 stars and then it dropped to 4.9, which is almost a good thing. It's like, now we can believe it. Yeah, no one's going to be happy.

Yeah, there was a couple of people that would question like, hey, do you really have all 100% 5 stars?

Right. And when I said no one can be happy, I mean, not everyone can be happy. Like you could— I used to have this, this joke, like you could show up with a pot of gold to a homeowner, be like, look, you won the lottery and we're doing your roof for free and they're still not satisfied. There's just always that person. So obviously Google reviews are so important. You've been leading the Roofing Strong Alliance community in a lot of marketing initiatives and specifically LSA, local service ads, for those who are unfamiliar. Can you just paint me a picture of like, why are reviews so important? We've got the obvious, but I want to get into the less obvious and then we'll move into some of the tactics on how you collected them.

Yeah, I think it's one of the most important things for 2 big reasons. One, it's a trust signal to your customer, obviously. But more importantly, Or equally importantly, maybe not more importantly, is it's a trust signal with Google. Google fundamentally, their job is to deliver you what you're looking for. So if you, if you search good Chinese food near me and they take you to a restaurant that's really good Chinese food, then you're going to use Google the next time. That's, that's fundamentally what Google's design is and why they're so successful is because they find you exactly what you're looking for. And so what people are looking for is good roofer near me, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so they are going to want to provide them a good roofer. And the, the best trust signal that Google has is a Google review. Especially if it also comes with a picture. Because what the picture does, a couple things. One, it geolocates it to Google. But, but two, it tells Google that, no, this is a real person with an actual home that this happened to. There's no way it's fake because here's a before and after. And then it also tells your customers that this, this customer loved their project so much they weren't— they were willing to not just do a Google review, they were willing to also take the time to upload the pictures.

Right.

So that's really the gold standard, is the Google review with the photos. It will help with getting you higher in your map pack. help with you getting higher with Google LSA leads. And then once somebody does come on, has gotten to your funnel, once they see that, you'll have much higher conversion because all of that trust signal.

Gotcha. When you talk about trust signals, you mentioned the photos included. What else do you like? What else do you slash Google want to see in a review?

Yeah, I think it's really valuable to work well with SEO terms. You know, it's great. And, you know, one, you can control that on the front end of, you know, suggesting replies or, or, you know, there's a great session in RSSM USA where somebody was even giving the structure, like they made it super simple for them to generate themselves.

Yeah.

But what you can control is the reply. That's another big thing that I really, really encourage people is to do really great replies because this is your opportunity. It says message from the owner. So if I come onto a website and I look and I see that here's a review and here's like a heartfelt message from an owner, That makes me trust the company so much more. Same thing if you have a negative review. Don't let it sit and don't give a corporate response of, hey, we're working on this. Say something like, hey, I'm so sorry, Jennifer. Here's my direct line. Call Cody. You know, I will make this right.

Yeah, we'll be reaching out. And because you're responding to all the people, I think people get— their ego may get involved and they're like— and let's just say you're the 1-star reviewer. I'm like, oh, this guy. And then I'm like, yeah, well, you know, what you left off here was that you were rude to our crew, you know? And then they kind of just want to defend themselves.

But really, you're writing the reply to all of the shoppers.

And I remember I did a video, gosh, years ago, one of, uh, one of my earlier clients, a really large company, um, they had like great reviews. There was like 2 not good reviews. They had the most likes from people. And that like blew my mind. But anyway, uh, so you're replying to folks who might be shopping with a discerning eye. How are they going to handle this? So that's the kind of lens.

Yep. And I think, you know, it can also help, you know, if you put in the terms, hey, uh, thanks for trusting us with your Roof replacement in Phoenix.

So, so mentioning, you know what, when you mentioned SEO terms, we're looking for basically service details, roof replacement, hail damage, wind damage, leak repair, etc.

And I like to take it a step further and add the city. So it's just, you know, thanks for trusting us with your roof replacement in Mesa. You know, thanks for trusting us with your hail inspection or your insurance claim or your— or congratulations on your new roof in The city. So, whatever, get kind of creative with it. And that's where for a lot of people, you can use AI. You can take a general response and say, give me 10 to 15 variations. You take those variations and then you put the last kind of 10% in there of your personality into that, make it feel human, and then you post it back into there. And that's how you can do it really quickly.

So, you want to double dip almost. When I say double dip, I mean, Ideally, if you're collecting reviews, it'd be wonderful for the homeowner to share service area specifically, or location is what I mean by service area. Service type: roof replacement, roof repair, leak, wind damage, hail damage, whatever. Helped us through X, Y, and Z process.

And if I could add to that, especially if it's, you know, a more rural area. So like when we were doing roofs in Arizona and New Mexico, we did a lot of stuff in towns that had 50,000 people, you know, like a Yuma, Prescott, Thatcher, you know. So if somebody could see a review that says, thanks for doing this, our roof all the way out in Kingman, then when we go to sell a roof in Kingman, they're like, oh wow, they do other good roofs in Kingman and there's only 20,000 people. Because I'm concerned as a homeowner, are you going to come out here 3 hours away from your city center and do a good job? Yeah, because that's a big concern. So if they can see those trust signals from the person that's just like them, you know, in that same area, that is huge for rural.

Right. That makes sense. And circling back, when I said essentially double dip, what I mean is ideally we'd have our homeowners write the reply with that structure. The service, the location, service type, etc. But then also the reply will include that as well.

100%.

Yeah. So what I'd love to learn, because there's so many companies and this came up in a recent RSA session, and the reason that, you know, this already, like why I filter some of the magic that our members had shared on how they're making this review process easier. It's like what's shared there stays there. I'll bring my ideas, you share your ideas, but I don't want to share what the other members have shared. But one thing conceptually, and I'm sharing this because it's a general challenge, especially newer roofing companies or even some more established companies that haven't built reviews yet. And they're like, wait a minute, we've been like behind the times, we've relied on word of mouth, and now all of a sudden my competitor is blowing it up on reviews and now I'm sinking down the list on, um, uh, my GMB listing and local search results, etc. What was your process of actually collecting such incredible reviews? Where does it start? And how do you do it?

I think it's really 3 big pillars is, is how I think about it. First, we gotta give a world-class experience.

Yeah.

We can't get a 5-star review if we don't give a 5-star experience.

Yeah.

And so that has to be systemized within the business. You know, a great book that I recommend is a book called Delivering Happiness. And it really talks about how you can build into the culture the happiness of the customer as part of the culture. The default should be the customer happiness. Like within my company, if, if a customer was unhappy, they would look to solve the problem first and then tell us what the solution was. Yeah. It's like, hey, you know, Susan was mad Because we did this, I did XYZ for her and I got her a gift card. And, um, you know, is that good?

Yeah.

And sometimes it was, we got a little crazy, $500 gift card because, you know, we showed up 5 minutes late and it's like, all right, maybe that's a little bit too much happiness. Let's pull it back, you know, tone back that happiness. But nobody ever got in trouble for it. And like, that's, that's how you empower your team to, to default to happiness.

Yeah.

Um, and then once that happens, then we, that's the first step, including also making sure you have a systemized approach with your install process, doing a pre-site job walk, you know, all the things on production so that we can ensure that one, you know, we start off on the right foot, making sure we show up on time. And then, you know, we manage that project. So that's step one. We got to do a world-class project. We got to give a 5-star experience or we can't get a 5-star review.

Yeah.

Then step number 2 are kind of twofold. So one is the behavior of your team. And so one, you create a culture around reviews. And so Every week I would— I was shouting out, hey, big shout out to, you know, Bob. He got 6 reviews last week. That's what I'm talking about. And so straight from leadership, what it tells the team is Cody cares about reviews, or Reimagine Roofing cares about reviews. So if I want to do a good job here, I'm going to get reviews. And people like, like praise. People also like money. So a lot of contests—

Those two go together really well, right?

Yeah.

People like a pat on the back and acknowledgment and getting paid for their work.

Yeah. So, you know, incentivizing, you know, Charlie Munger always said, show me the incentive and I'll show you the result. And so we want to incentivize it and gamify it. Uh, you know, uh, it's great to have, you know, $25 per review or $50 per review for, for your team, uh, just not for the, not the customer. Google doesn't like that. Um, but, um, also then, then changing that up and doing some, uh, contests.

Yeah.

So like, hey, from now, you know, let's say today's, uh, you know, from now till the end of the month, you know, we've got 15 days left. Um, whoever gets the most reviews, $500, minimum 10.

Yeah. And, and on this note too, I, I, I wanna circle back cuz you did say Not to pay, not to incentivize homeowners. You say Google doesn't like that. The as far as my understanding, Google's terms and conditions, their policy around review collection has evolved over the years up until around now, and it's up to up to our our viewers tuning in to make sure you're compliant with all of the the local laws and Google's policy and whatever other platform incentivizing homeowners is not is not. Is not okay. Like, and again, that could that change possibly? But as my understanding stands now, it's not okay. Correct. And you'll hear that being done in the home, and people are kind of pushing the boundaries on it. But if that gets flagged, one, just operate above board.

It's not hard.

And two, the risks that you run is is not good.

One hundred percent. Yeah. Yep. One hundred percent. Yeah. And then the final aspect with this on the actual ask of the customer, there's there's you know two big parts of it. One, making it human. People always have more loyalty to a human than to a company.

Mm-hmm.

You know, just if you— people all the time steal from Walmart at self-checkout, but they wouldn't come and like steal right from your wallet. And on the same side of it, you're much more likely, like for a sales appointment, to stand up a company than to stand up a person. Same idea here. You're much less likely to provide a review to a company than you are to a person. 'Cause I don't really care. I mean, reimagine you already got 800 reviews, 900 reviews. Why do you need another one? But if I'm working with Bill and Bill tells me that, hey, you know, it's really important to me and it's how I'm judged as a, as an employee, it goes into my criteria, the number of reviews. And so if you think I did a wonderful job, it, it really means the world to me. That is different. Now it's a lot harder not to leave Bill a review. Bill did great work. He showed up early, he cleaned up the yard, he gave me a world-class experience. He left me a video review. That's, that's kind of another little nugget that we used to do to, to systemize one-of-one experiences. Every single job we closed out got a video, um, uh, video closeout in CompanyCam. So like, that was part of the closeout process. They would go up there, be like, hey Jennifer, just closed out your roof. We got all brand new shingles. Look over here, we did the nice chimney flashing. Here's this, we replaced that. You asked about this. Um, I really loved working with you, Jennifer. They get that, and then you call— so they, they see that before the final walkthrough, and then they— you go, hey, it'd mean the world to me to, to, um, you know, tell the world what I did here. Tell, tell Google. I mean, it's really hard to not do that. And then this comes the final little thing that will rocket ship your reviews: close the deal. Just like in sales, if someone says, hey, I really want to do business with you and I would love to buy a roof from you— in that analogy, so many people go, okay, great, Adam. They walk out the door.

Right.

They don't bust out the contract and say, sign right here. It's like, I would love to leave you a Google review. You're like, okay, see you later.

Yeah.

And the Google review never happens because life happens, right? The second you walk out that door, you leave the yard, they're not gonna think about it. They, they might even open up the phone and go to Google and forget why they even opened up their phone earlier. Just like, just like we did this morning. Yeah.

We're like getting ready and I'm like, I opened this, what was it for again?

And I'm sure everybody has done that and that, and it was for something important. So now imagine leaving a Google review for a roofing company or for Bill. That's not the most important thing. You got a kid crying, the dog just pooped on the carpet, whatever. You know, life happens. You're not leaving that review.

Yeah.

And just like in sales, it's so much harder to ever get back into that person. And now you maybe text 'em one time, maybe 2 times. Am I being annoying? You start having all these weird emotions. You're standing right there. Have a QR code on a laminated sheet on the back of your phone, on your phone, you know, tattoo it on your forearm. I don't care. Have it on your shirt. Scan the QR code. Can you leave me it right now? That'd mean the world to me. Yeah. And then, you know, close the deal at the point of sale. And that will rocket ship your Google reviews.

Yeah.