How a waterproofing company gets more Google reviews, with the exact words
Review scripts for inspectors and crew leads, the two moments to ask, the text from the driveway, and a healthy review pace for a waterproofing company.
A waterproofing company does two or three installs a week and runs ten or fifteen inspections. That is 50 to 70 chances a month to earn a review. Most companies earn one or two. Across 3,745 waterproofing listings on Google the median review count is 10, 21.4% have none at all, and only 13.8% have passed 100. The companies holding the map pack in a real metro are past 144. The distance between you and them is not a trick. It is a habit of asking, in person, at the right moment, with the right words.
Why reviews matter more in this trade than most
A homeowner with water on the basement floor is about to let a stranger into the house and then spend between $4,000 and $25,000 on something she cannot see once it is finished. She is not comparing prices yet. She is deciding who to trust with the inspection. The review count is the only trust signal she can check in ten seconds. A 4.8 with 160 reviews beats a 5.0 with seven every time, even though the 5.0 looks better.
Reviews also feed Local Services Ads ranking and the map pack directly. Google's own help pages list review count and quality among the factors for local ranking. A company stuck at 12 reviews is paying more per lead on every channel than the company at 140.
The two moments to ask
There are two points where a homeowner is most willing to write something, and neither is a week later by email.
The end of the inspection. Roughly a third of inspections end with the homeowner saying thank you even when nothing is sold yet. That is a review. The inspector says: "If that was useful, a sentence on Google about the inspection helps us more than you would think. I will text you the link." Reviews of inspections tend to mention honesty and no pressure, which is exactly what the next reader wants to see.
The walkthrough after the install. The crew lead walks the homeowner through the finished system, shows the sump cycling or the clean liner, explains the warranty card, and asks: "We are a small company and reviews are how people find us. Would you mind writing one? Takes two minutes, and I will text the link right now." Then the link arrives before the truck leaves the driveway.
Asking by email five days later gets a fraction of either. The feeling has faded and the email is under a pile.
The text that goes out
Keep it to three lines and send it from a person, not a system:
"Hi Karen, this is Dan from the install today. Thank you for having us. If you have two minutes, here is the direct link to leave a Google review: [link]. It helps us more than anything else we do."
The link must be the direct review link from your Google Business Profile, the one that opens the five-star box, not a link to your profile page. Companies that send the profile link lose half the reviews to people who cannot find the button.
Send it 20 minutes after the job is marked done, while the crew is still packing. If no review arrives in three days, one polite reminder, then stop.
What a healthy pace looks like
Set the target as a rate, not a number. One review per install plus one per three inspections is realistic once the crew is asking every time. For a company doing ten installs and 40 inspections a month that is 20 to 25 reviews a month, which takes a company from the median to the 75th percentile of 44 in a few months and past 144 within a year.
Watch recency as much as the total. Google and homeowners both discount reviews older than a year. A company with 200 reviews and nothing new since last spring looks like it stopped working. Ten a month, every month, is worth more than a burst of 60 after a contest.
Track it on one line in the weekly meeting: installs, inspections, reviews earned. When the ratio drops, someone stopped asking.
Handling the bad ones
5.8% of waterproofing companies sit below 4.0, and most got there with two or three angry reviews on a small base. In this trade the angry review is usually "it leaked again" or "they said the warranty covered it and it did not." Reply within a day, in public, calmly. State what the warranty covers, that you have reached out directly, and what you are doing. Never argue about the cause of the water in public. The reply is written for the next 200 people who read it, not for the reviewer.
Then fix the process that produced it. A warranty misunderstanding usually means the inspector sold the warranty verbally and the paper said something narrower. Put the terms on the website and on the proposal in plain language.
What not to do
Do not buy reviews or run a gift card contest. Google's policy is explicit that incentivized reviews are prohibited, and the removal sweeps have taken whole profiles down. Do not gate reviews by asking "how did we do" and only sending the link to happy customers; that is also against policy. Do not ask employees or their families. Do not post reviews from the office Wi-Fi on behalf of customers.
Do set up the ask so it happens every single time without anyone remembering to do it. The crew lead's card in the truck, the text that fires from the job board, and the line in the weekly meeting are the whole system.
Frequently asked
Can I ask for a review on a job that was just a $600 crack injection? Yes, and you should. Small jobs produce the warmest reviews because the homeowner expected a bigger bill. "Sealed the crack in an hour, dry ever since" sells the next full system.
Should the review ask come from the owner or the crew lead? The person who was in the basement. The homeowner remembers Dan, not the company. Use his name in the text and have him ask out loud.
How many reviews before Google Ads and Local Services Ads get cheaper? There is no hard line, but owners see the cost per lead drop noticeably somewhere past 50 and again past 100. Check the benchmark report for where your count sits in your state.
If you would rather have the text, the cards and the follow-up set up for you, it is one of the services in the free 14-day trial, no card, text or call. Details on the free trial page.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, waterproofing companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor