Google reviews for landscapers: every enquiry costs you a morning first.

Landscaping cannot be quoted over the phone. Somebody has to look at the fall of the land, the access, what is already there and what the client actually wants, and that is an hour of driving and an hour on site.

Which makes reviews unusually valuable in this trade, because they do not just win jobs, they decide whether the site visit is worth doing at all. A homeowner who has read your reviews before you arrive is already most of the way to yes.

The opposite is also true and it is expensive. A landscaper with a thin profile spends the same morning driving out to somebody who is collecting quotes with no intention of paying for design, and there is no way to tell in advance.

Reviews are the only thing that changes the ratio, because they are what makes a homeowner ring one landscaper instead of four.

On handover day a new garden is a lot of bare mulch and small plants. It looks like potential. Six months later it looks like the thing the client paid for, and that is when they are pleased with it.

This is genuinely unusual and it defeats every standard piece of advice about asking on the day. A landscaper who asks at handover gets a polite review from somebody who is not yet sure.

It also explains why so many landscapers feel their reviews undersell them. The reviews were written before the work looked like anything.

The photographs have the same problem and the same fix. A photo taken on handover day shows a construction site with plants in it. A photo the client takes in spring shows a garden, and clients will happily send one if asked at the right time.

When a landscaping job actually looks good

• Hard landscaping, immediately.

  Paving, retaining walls and decks look finished on the day and can be asked about straight away.

• Planting, after a season.

  Give it three to six months and it becomes the garden they imagined.

• Lawns, after the first mow or two.

  Turf looks like turf for a fortnight and then it looks like a lawn.

A monthly maintenance client and a one-off design and construct client have nothing in common except the name on the van. They decide differently, they review differently, and asking them the same way at the same time gets one of them wrong.

The maintenance client is choosing reliability. They want somebody who comes when they say, does the same thing every time, and does not need managing. Their reviews say exactly that and they are the least likely to be asked, because there is never a completed job.

The design client is choosing taste and competence on a large one-off spend. They are reading for whether the finished thing looked like the drawing and whether the budget held.

Both are worth having on one profile and they do different jobs on it. The maintenance reviews prove you are still here. The design reviews prove you can do the work somebody is about to spend twenty thousand dollars on.

What each one is reading for

• Design and construct.

  Did it look like the plan, did the price hold, did they finish.

• Maintenance.

  Do they turn up, is it the same crew, do I have to think about it.

• Commercial grounds.

  Reliability and paperwork, and almost never anything about aesthetics.

Ask on a delay that matches the work, ask for a photograph in spring, and ask maintenance clients once a year at a point that makes sense. All of it automatic, because nobody remembers a job from four months ago.

The delay is the part that has to be deliberate. Hard landscaping can be asked about within a few days. Planting waits a season. A business doing both needs the ask tied to the job type rather than to the invoice date.

The spring photo request is the highest-value thing in this whole page and it costs nothing. A client with a garden they are proud of will send a photo and write two sentences, and that combination outperforms everything else on a landscaping profile.

And the wording has to be from the person they dealt with. Landscaping is a relationship with a designer or an owner over weeks, and a generic message at the end of it reads as though somebody else took over.

What the ask has to do

• Match the delay to the work.

  Days for paving, months for planting.

• Ask for a picture in the right season.

  The single best asset a landscaper can have on Google.

• Include the maintenance rounds.

  Once a year, at a natural point, with an honest reason for asking.