Of everything on the local search list, reviews are the one I would fight for hardest. Not because Google weights them heavily, although it does. Because they are the only thing nobody can shortcut.
Somebody can hire a better designer than me and have a nicer website than yours in three weeks. They cannot manufacture four years of people saying you showed up when you said you would.
Asking, correctly
The moment is when the work is finished and the customer is visibly happy. Standing there. Right then.
Not in an automated email nine days later when they have moved on with their life. That email gets ignored and you conclude your customers do not leave reviews. They do. You asked at the wrong time.
And just ask like a person. Would you mind leaving us a review on Google, it genuinely helps a small shop like us. That is it. No campaign, no incentive, no QR code funnel.
Recency beats volume
A business with eight reviews from the last six months looks more alive than one with forty from 2019.
Old reviews read like a business that used to be good. Which is unfair, and also exactly how everybody reads them, including me.
So the goal is a steady trickle, forever. Two a month beats twenty in one push and then silence.
The bad ones
You will get one. Sometimes deserved, sometimes from somebody having a terrible week who picked you to have it at.
Reply calmly, briefly, and factually. No paragraph of defense. No arguing. Acknowledge, state what you did or would do, offer to sort it out offline.
Because the reply is not for that person. That person is gone. The reply is for the next forty people who read it, and what they are judging is whether you seem like a reasonable human to deal with when something goes wrong.
A calm reply under an unfair review is one of the most persuasive things on the internet.
Do not buy them
I know it is tempting and I know somebody has pitched you on it. Google has gotten genuinely good at detecting patterns, and when they act it is not a warning, it is your listing.
The slow honest version takes a year to build and then works forever. There is no version of this that is worth risking the profile over.