Your reviews are your SEO

Reviews aren’t separate from SEO. They are your SEO.

Hi y’all,

Marketing’s one of those things where everybody’s got an opinion about what works. Half the advice worked five years ago and doesn’t anymore. The other half worked for somebody else’s market but won’t work for yours. So it’s hard to know where to put your energy.

We had Jim Mariano on for our latest webinar — Jim ran a tent rental company in Boston for 18 years and now runs a marketing agency for around 250 rental companies. So he’s seen this from both sides. The thing that stuck with me most: most rental owners treat SEO and customer reviews like they’re two different problems. They’re the same problem.

Here are some of my takeaways from Jim’s session:

AI is changing where people find you. When somebody asks ChatGPT or Claude for the best tent rental in their area, those tools pull from your Google reviews. Same with Google’s AI search summaries. So the place with 50 five-star reviews shows up — not necessarily the place with the prettiest website.

Reviews are the lever you actually control. You can’t out-rank a competitor who’s been online for 15 years on domain authority alone. But you can outwork them on getting reviews from happy customers. Jim’s rental business was driving 40% of its traffic from earned visibility. He didn’t pay for it. He just stacked five-star reviews and let them compound.

Speed and convenience beat volume. Don’t ask for a review once a month from memory. Send a short thank-you with the review link the Monday after the event, while the goodwill is fresh. Bake it into your post-event flow so it happens every single time.

So if you’ve been putting off the SEO stuff because it feels too technical, this is your shortcut. Reviews don’t care about your domain authority. They care about whether you did a good job — and whether you asked.

What does your post-event flow look like right now?

See you next Monday,

Mallory Mullen

Goodshuffle