How far you are from the top quarter of med spas on reviews, and what to do this week
The top quarter of med spas have a review count most clinics never reach. Here is how to find your gap and a five-day plan to start closing it this week.
A woman searching for Botox near her office sees three med spas in the map. Two have a few hundred reviews. One has forty. She does not read your bio or check your injector's credentials before she taps. She picks from the counts.
That is the number this post is about. In our data on 53,312 med spas, the median clinic has 50 Google reviews. The top quarter starts at 143. The top 10% have 333 or more. If you sit near the median, the clinics you lose to in the map are often in that top quarter, and the gap between you is the thing most worth working on before the holiday season.
Find your gap first
Open your Google profile and write down three numbers: your review count, your rating, and how many reviews you got in the last 90 days. Then search your main treatment plus your town, "lip filler in Scottsdale" or "Botox near me," and note the review counts of the three clinics above you.
Now do the math. Say you have 70 reviews and the clinic above you has 190. That is 120 reviews. If you get four a month, that is two and a half years. If you get fifteen a month, it is eight months. The count is not the problem. The monthly pace is.
Most med spas have more than enough clients to close that gap. A clinic doing a few hundred appointments a month only needs a small share of them to leave a review. What is missing is a system that asks every time.
Why rating is not where you are losing
Med spas mostly have good ratings. The average in our data is 4.8, and only 2.9% of clinics sit under 4.0. Patients see a 4.8 next to a 4.9 and treat them as the same. They do not treat 60 reviews and 300 reviews as the same. So stop worrying about one 4-star review and put the energy into volume.
The five-day plan
Monday: write the ask. One text, sent after the appointment, from the clinic number. Keep it short and name the person who treated them.
"Hi Dana, thanks for coming in today. If you were happy with your visit with Jessica, would you leave us a quick Google review? It really helps other people find us. [link]"
No discount, no free units, no entry into a drawing. Paying for reviews breaks Google's rules and, as we covered in an earlier post, now carries federal risk too.
Tuesday: pick the moment. The best moment is the end of a visit where the patient is happy and the result is visible: a follow-up where the filler has settled, a facial, a laser session in a series. The worst moment is right after a first Botox injection, before anything has kicked in. Tell the front desk which visits get the ask.
Wednesday: put it in the software. If your booking system can send an automated text after a completed appointment, turn it on, set it for about two hours after checkout, and limit it to once per patient every few months. If it cannot, the front desk sends it from a saved template at the end of each day. A daily habit beats a quarterly blast.
Thursday: work the back list. Pull every patient who has been in at least three times in the last year and has never left a review. These are your regulars. Send them a personal text, a few a day, not all at once. Regulars are the most likely to say yes, and a slow trickle looks normal to Google.
Friday: reply to everything. Answer every review from the last 90 days. Keep it short. Do not confirm what treatment someone had unless they mentioned it first; a reply like "Thanks, Laura. We loved having you in" is enough. Then check the count against Monday.
The reviews guide has more scripts, including what to say in person at checkout.
What a healthy pace looks like
Set a monthly target based on your gap, not on a number you read somewhere. If you need 120 reviews to catch the clinic above you and want to get there in a year, that is ten a month, or two or three a week. Write the target on the wall where the front desk can see it. Check it every Friday.
One more check while you are in the profile. 10.3% of med spas in our data have no website on their Google listing, and their median review count is 11, against 57 for clinics with one. If your website link is missing or broken, fix it the same day. The Google Business Profile guide walks through the rest of the settings.
What not to do
- Do not ask staff, friends or family to review you. Google filters many of them and can suspend a profile over patterns.
- Do not send the ask to everyone on your list on the same day. A spike of fifty reviews in a week looks unnatural.
- Do not gate the ask by sending it only to people who said they were happy in a survey first. Google does not allow that either.
You can see where your market sits in the benchmark report.
If you want a review system set up and running for you, the free 14-day trial covers any one service, no card: text or call (385) 217-0892.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, med spas among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor