If you run a business in Lagos with a physical address, your Google listing does more selling than your Instagram does. Somebody searches "plumber near me" or "printing Yaba", they see three results in a map box, and they call one. Which one depends almost entirely on two things: how close you are, and what your reviews look like.
This is about the second one.
What Google actually reads
Three things feed the local ranking, roughly in this order:
Proximity. How close the searcher is to you. You cannot change this and it dominates. A business two streets away with 3.9 stars will often beat you at 4.8 from across town.
Prominence. How established you look. Review count is the loudest signal here, and review count matters more than the average — a business with 120 reviews at 4.3 generally outranks one with 11 at 5.0.
Relevance. Whether your listing matches the search. Categories, description, the words people use in their reviews.
The third one is quietly important. If four reviews say "fast delivery", you start ranking for people searching that. Reviews are not just a score; they are text Google reads.
The free things that work, done first
Most businesses skip these and go looking for shortcuts, which is backwards because these are genuinely the highest-return actions:
Ask. Immediately. The moment a job goes well is the only moment somebody will write a review. An hour later they will not. Ask at the point of handover, out loud, with the link ready.
Make the link one tap. Google gives every business a short review link in your Business Profile. Put it in your WhatsApp auto-reply, on the receipt, in the signature. Nobody is searching for your listing to review you.
Reply to every one. Including the bad ones, especially the bad ones. Replies are indexed, they show a business that is present, and a calm reply under an angry review sells better than the angry review damages.
Never offer a discount for a review. This is against Google's terms, it gets reviews removed, and in Nigeria it produces a wall of identical five-star one-liners that any customer can smell.
What buying reviews actually costs
We carry Google reviews across three tiers. Sold per review, they run from about ₦2,647 to ₦21,926 each depending on tier — the spread reflects how much like a real customer the account looks and how durable the review is. Current rates are on the services page.
That is expensive relative to everything else we sell, and that is the honest shape of this market. A review is a written, account-backed, human-looking action. It costs what it costs.
The honest risk
We will not tell you this is risk-free, because it is not.
Google removes reviews it decides are inauthentic. Sometimes it removes them in batches, months later, and it does not tell you why. A listing that gains forty reviews in a week after two years of none is exactly the pattern its filters look for. In rare cases a listing gets suspended, which is a much worse outcome than having few reviews.
We are also selling these, so weigh that when reading our advice. Here is the advice anyway:
Go slowly. Two or three a week, never a burst. Keep them varied. Different lengths, different phrasing, some four-star. A page of five-star two-liners reads as bought to humans before Google gets involved. Never stop asking real customers. Paid reviews should be the minority of what arrives, always. If they are the majority, the pattern is visible no matter how careful the pacing. Do not do it at all if your business is the kind that gets audited — regulated professions, anything where a suspension ends you.
The case where it plainly makes sense
A real business, doing real work, with three reviews after two years because nobody ever asks. Competitors have forty. The three are genuine and good.
That business is losing calls it deserves to win, and the gap is not quality — it is that four in five happy customers never write anything and always have not. Closing that gap slowly, while fixing the asking habit, is a reasonable commercial decision.
The case where it does not make sense is a business with poor reviews trying to bury them. Reviews will not fix an operation. Customers arrive, have the experience the real reviews described, and write more of them.
Where to start
Fix the asking first. It is free and it compounds. Put the link in your WhatsApp auto-reply this afternoon and ask every customer for a month.
If you are still far behind after that, the Google review services are here — and go slowly.