Empowering local businesses by increasing Google Reviews

We are pleased to announce an initiative we undertook with gait and barn's, with the sole intention of increasing Google Reviews across their stores.

In this article, we will be discussing:

1. 01
   What are Google Reviews and why are they important?
2. 02
   What we made
3. 03
   Results

What are Google Reviews and why are they important?

Everyone knows Google. No matter which browser you use, odds are that you use Google as your search engine — unless you are one of the few people using Bing or Yahoo search, in which case, please see a therapist. Put simply, a business can register a Google Business Profile, where it can list its storefronts and locations.

Since Google powers so many aspects of online visibility — organic search, Maps, and now AI-generated answers — the reputation of each individual location has become a direct input into whether that business gets found at all.

Building up the number of reviews and the star rating isn't a vanity metric. It is one of the clearest, cheapest levers a local business has to influence both how it ranks and how it converts.

Here are some studies about Google Reviews specifically:

• Roughly 9 in 10 consumers read online reviews before visiting a business, and a similar share say they trust those reviews as much as a recommendation from a friend.
• About half of consumers won't seriously consider a local business rated below 4 stars, and nearly as many specifically look for a high volume of reviews before trusting the rating.
• Independent analysis has linked a single one-star improvement in rating to a meaningful uplift in revenue for local businesses.

More reviews and a higher rating mean more visibility, and more visibility with a strong rating means more foot traffic. For multi-location retail and F&B brands like gait and barn's, that compounds across every store.

What we made

Custom posters that sit inside each brand's guidelines, paired with custom QR codes and encoded NFC tags, so a customer can either scan or tap. Either action opens that specific store's Google review page.

Nothing here is novel technology. What makes it work is that it integrates seemlessly with the brand identity, and is present directly in the store. Customers with a good experience are more inclined to leave a review.

Results

Overview

We tracked review count and star rating daily across five gait pilot stores from the day the posters went in, and the results were immediate.

Store by store

Against the baseline recorded before installation, every one of the five pilot stores is up, and the two that started lowest moved furthest.