The words in your reviews are an SEO signal, here's how to earn the right ones
Most owners think a review is a number. Four stars, five stars, an average sitting under their name. The stars matter. But they aren't the part doing the quiet work in search.
The words are.
When a customer writes "best gluten-free pizza in town" or "fixed our boiler the same day," they're describing what you do in the exact language other customers use to search for it. Google reads that. Not as a ranking trick, but as evidence, confirmation, in a stranger's words, of what your business actually is.
That's the part of Google reviews SEO most owners miss. The words customers use are a relevance signal, not just the star average. Reviews that describe what you actually do, in the language people search, help you show up for it.
Why the content of a review matters for SEO
Google's Best Practices Playbook is clear that your business category is a core signal: it "clearly defines your business's core services" and decides which searches you show up in. Reviews work alongside that. When the language in your reviews lines up with the services you offer and the things people search for, it reinforces the relevance you've claimed.
Think of it from Google's side. It's trying to decide whether to show your shop to someone searching "sourdough near us." Your category says bakery. Your description mentions sourdough. And twelve customers, unprompted, used the word "sourdough" in their reviews. That agreement between what you say and what your customers say is exactly the kind of signal a search engine trusts.
A wall of "Great, 5 stars" reviews gives Google none of that. It's positive, but it's mute. It says nothing about what you actually do.
The catch: you cannot put words in their mouth
Here's where most advice goes wrong, and where it gets dangerous.
The obvious move, once you understand this, is to tell customers what to write. "Please mention the deep-tissue massage and ask for Sarah." Tempting. Also banned. Google's 2026 policy update explicitly prohibits asking a customer to include specific content in a review, including naming a staff member. Do it and you risk the reviews being removed, taking the very signal you wanted with them.
So you can't script it. But you're not stuck, either. There's a real difference between dictating a review and inviting a fuller one.
How to earn detailed reviews without scripting
A review's depth is mostly decided by the question you ask. "Leave us a review" gets you "Great, 5 stars." A better, open question gets you a paragraph, in the customer's own words, about the things that actually stood out to them.
Ask something open and specific to the experience, not the keywords. "What did we get right today?" pulls out detail. "How was your visit?" invites a sentence rather than a rating. You're not telling them what to say. You're giving them room to say it. The keywords that matter show up naturally, because they're describing real things that happened.
That's the whole trick. Natural detail beats scripted keywords, and it's the only version Google allows.
How RealGoodWords does this
RealGoodWords asks one open question and lets the customer answer in their own words. No script, no suggested phrases, no service names planted for them to repeat. The question is designed to draw out a real sentence instead of a bare rating, which is exactly what produces reviews rich in the natural language Google reads as relevance.
Because nothing is dictated, the reviews stay compliant and stay up. You get depth and safety at the same time, which is the combination scripting can never give you.
If you want to see whether your current reviews are saying anything about what you do, or just stacking up stars, the free Local Standings tool at realgoodwords.app compares your profile to nearby competitors. No signup, no card.