Sauce · Reviews
Tracking your review reputation city by city, not as one number
Quick answer
Local rank is decided per area, so one overall star average is the wrong scoreboard. A 4.8 site-wide can hide a town where you sit at 4.1 with two reviews, and that is the town losing you the pack. Tag every review by the job’s city, build a per-city average, count and recency, then aim your next review requests at the weakest market. Thin markets move the fastest.
Serving more than one town?The free 49-point scan checks your visibility and reviews per market, not as a single score.
Get the free scanYour overall rating is 4.8. In the one suburb you keep losing bids in, it is 4.0 with three reviews. Nobody told you, because nobody was counting that way.
Most owners watch one number: the star average on the profile. It is an average of every market you serve, weighted by wherever you happened to get reviews. It can look healthy while a specific town quietly costs you work.
One number versus a per-city view
- One star average across every town you serve.
- A strong home market masks a weak outer one.
- You cannot tell where the next reviews should come from.
- Looks fine right up until you lose the town.
- A rating, a count and a recency date for each town.
- The weak market is obvious at a glance.
- Review requests get pointed where they move the needle.
- You can set a target per town and actually hit it.
How to build the view
In a spreadsheet or your CRM, log each review with the job’s city, the date, the rating and the platform. A minute per review. After a month or two you have real per-city numbers.
Average rating, total count, and how recent the last review is. A town with a good average but nothing new in six months is still a weak spot, because recency is its own signal.
Aim to match or beat the top competitor’s rating in that town, plus at least one fresh review a month. A steady trickle everywhere beats a burst in one place.
For the next few weeks, push review requests on jobs in the weak town, make sure each request names the local work, and check that town has a clear service-area page.
Related
Where this connects
Getting the reviews, replying to them, and measuring visibility per area.
Want the per-market picture done for you?The free scan breaks visibility and reviews down by the towns you serve.
Get the free scanWhat to do with the weak town
- Make it the priority for review requests for the next month.
- Name the town in the request message and on the matching service-area page.
- Reply to every existing review in that market so the profile looks tended.
- Recheck in 60 days. Thin markets shift quickly because there is the most room to gain.
Why track reviews by city instead of overall?
Because local rank is decided per area, not site-wide. A 4.8 overall can hide a town where you sit at 4.1 with two reviews, and that is the town where you are losing the pack. Breaking the numbers down by city shows you where the next five reviews should come from.
How do I break my reviews down by location?
Tag each review by the job's city as it comes in, using a simple spreadsheet or your CRM. Record the city, date, rating and platform. After a month or two you have a per-city average, count and recency you can actually act on.
What is a good per-city target?
Aim for a rating at or above the top competitor in that town, plus at least one new review a month so the profile stays fresh. Recency counts as its own signal, so a steady trickle in every market beats a big burst in one.
What if one city has almost no reviews?
Treat it as the priority. Point your review requests at jobs in that town for the next few weeks, make sure the request names the local work, and check the city is clearly stated on the matching service-area page. Thin markets move fastest because there is the most room to gain.
Sources
- Google Business Profile Help, Improve your local ranking on Google: prominence draws on review count and score, and local results depend on the searcher’s location, so reviews and rank are effectively assessed per area. Read it
- Whitespark, Local Search Ranking Factors (2026 edition): review count, rating and recency are top Local Pack factors, and their effect is local to the query and location.
- DataForSEO, Reviews and SERP datasets (2026): businesses with even review distribution across their service-area towns hold local-pack positions more consistently than those with reviews concentrated in one market.
- Peer-reviewed: Tadelis, S. (2016). “Reputation and Feedback Systems in Online Platform Markets.” Annual Review of Economics 8, 321–340. Aggregate ratings compress information; the variation they hide is where the actionable signal sits.
- Peer-reviewed: Proserpio, D., & Zervas, G. (2017). “Online Reputation Management.” Marketing Science 36(5), 645–665. Targeted reputation effort measurably changes the rating a business carries, so directing it at a weak market works.
Figures are directional and drawn from the sources above.
Next step
Score your reputation the way Google does
The free scan breaks your visibility and reviews down by the towns you serve, so the market that is dragging your average stops hiding.