Several Digital Dynamo clients have seen a notable – at times massive – uptick in local rankings and visibility after a sharp increase in Google reviews. In this article, Digital Marketing Strategist Marcie Lord discusses the surprising trend and what businesses can do to shore up a large amount of reviews in a small span of time.

We have always known that Google reviews are important for local SEO. However, at Digital Dynamo, we were never able to correlate Google Reviews to a big impact on rankings movement.

There are certain intervals where yes, a business will see a noticeable uptick in rankings from reviews. We have seen where a fresh business with no reviews will get good rankings movement once they acquire the first 10 or so reviews. This is backed up by Joy Hawkins, Founder of Sterling Sky, who also says that small businesses that go from 9 to 10 reviews on Google will get a notable rankings boost.

But beyond that first 10, reviews never correlated to rankings, which was fine and expected – reviews were always more about credibility and trust rather than rankings.

Then this past year, we witnessed several of our clients get a huge increase in rankings after they received an abundance of 5-star reviews in a short period of time. 

I don’t have a huge data set to pull from, but the correlation to reviews and rankings is hard to deny, and that’s why I wanted to talk about it in this article.

Jump to:

Client 1: A Financial Advisor with a small scope

This example is very notable because the site wasn’t even fully optimized when we started to see the rankings increase.

We began working with a financial advisory firm in April of 2025. While optimization of the site was underway, a reviews building campaign started, with reviews starting to hit the Google Business Profile in June 2025.

From June to August – a two month period – the client built 25 new 5-star reviews, a robust influx for a financial advisor. 

They had a modest 4 point gain in visibility from April to the beginning of June. But from June through the end of August, they saw another 7 point gain, and then another 9 point gain from August to mid October. All told, it was a 20 point gain in visibility – in a city outside of their home base, no less – over a 6 month period.

Client is the blue line:

This client also had a small scope. We have seen these types of rankings increases before, but at this scope, it typically takes more like 6 months to see the uptick. In this instance, we started seeing robust gains within 3 months of optimization.

Client 2: An HVAC Company with a Modest Scope

Now this HVAC client already had a solid set of reviews and was ranking well within a 5 mile radius of their location. But they only averaged about 5 reviews a month, and their rankings beyond the 5 mile radius were middling.

Then a reviews building campaign started, and they built more than 100 reviews in just 4 weeks.

Their rankings in the 5 mile radius saw an 8 point uptick in a 1-2 month span. But it was the tracked locations in the 6-10 mile radius that showed the most surprising movement.

There was a 14 point gain in visibility in a 90 day period. For comparison’s sake, you can see how our SEO campaign without a huge influx of reviews performed in the months prior:

If you can’t tell, the reviews started coming in toward the end of December 2025.

Client #3: An Auto Glass Company with a Small Scope

The final example I’ll show is that of an auto glass company that had been averaging roughly 3 reviews a month. Over the past 4 weeks, we helped build more than 20 reviews for the business, and already we’re seeing the uptick, mainly in the areas outside of where the business is located:

Location 1

Location 2

I will say, all three of these examples had healthy websites and healthy Google Business Profiles to begin with. So I can’t say building reviews ALONE had an impact. However, I don’t typically see these increases in a short period of time, with the scopes we were given, unless multiple high domain authority backlinks are gained. High domain authority backlinks weren’t built for these websites for the time frames presented, so my conclusion is that the reviews did the heavy lifting.

The oldest data we have is with that of the first client, and that is not even a year old. I will say, rankings did take a minor dip toward the end of January 2026, but they did hold strong until then. I’ll keep an eye on our other clients and see how long the trend lasts.

At Digital Dynamo, we have run reviews building campaigns for many clients where we 20X the amount of reviews coming in, and we never ran into a problem. This is because we built reviews using actual clients; we didn’t buy them or curry fake reviews. So at this point, I feel safe saying that as long as you’re building reviews from actual customers or people that have engaged with your business, your rankings, Google Business Profile, and built reviews will exist without penalty.

One way to build reviews in a short period of time is to reach out to clients – current and former –  whom you never asked for a review.

Digital Dynamo has a service specifically designed to help financial advisors build reviews, and part of the strategy is outreach to years long clients. We ask them for reviews all at once for SEC-compliance purposes, but we’ve also applied this strategy for law firms. We take a client list that goes back multiple years, and do outreach to all of them. You’d be surprised how many former clients are happy to leave a review once asked.

This reviews building model can be applied to many industries, even businesses in the trades. So if you run a business and you know you haven’t asked all your clients for a review, pull out your customer list and reach out to all of them in one fell swoop (or just hire Digital Dynamo to do it 🙂).

For now, building a large swath of 5-star reviews from actual clients (i.e. no fake reviews) in a 1-2 month period appears to have a massive impact on rankings, more than we ever noticed before. If you can build reviews in this fashion, I recommend doing it. But if not, then aim to build 5-star reviews (that include text!) at a higher clip than your competitors. Get systems in place to make asking for reviews part of the sales process. Given the impact we’re also seeing reviews have on AI driven search, reviews can give a boost in so many other areas – meaning this is a great investment for your digital marketing strategy.

If you need help with your reviews building process, book a free consultation with Digital Dynamo.