Your Review Link Goes To The Wrong Place, And It Has For Months

Here is a thing that happens and nobody catches for half a year.

You get the link. You put it on the printed cards, in the email signature, at the bottom of the invoice, on the sticker by the register. Then you get on with running the business.

And somewhere in month three, it stops going where you think it goes.

Nobody tells you. The customer taps it, lands somewhere strange, shrugs, and gets on with their day. They do not call you to report a broken link. They just do not leave the review, and you never find out that they tried.

That is the worst kind of problem. It looks exactly like nobody wanting to review you.

Four ways it breaks

You changed your business name. Even a small change. You added "and Sons", you dropped "LLC", you rebranded. Google usually keeps the profile and the ID, but if the change went through as a new listing, or if a duplicate got created in the process, your old link can end up pointing at a profile nobody is watching.

You moved. New address, new suite number, sometimes a whole new listing. Reviews sit on the profile they were left on. If a second profile got created at the new address, you now have two, and your link is on whichever one you grabbed it from first.

You opened a second location. This is the big one. Every location has its own profile and its own review link. If you printed one batch of cards and put them in both places, one of your locations has been sending its customers to review the other one for as long as those cards have been out.

Somebody shortened it. A link goes through a shortener, the shortener account lapses, or the free plan quietly stops resolving, and now the link is dead or parked. This is the one that fails hardest, because it fails to a page that has nothing to do with you.

Two minutes to check

Do not check it on your own phone while signed into your own Google account. That is the mistake. Signed in as the owner, all sorts of things resolve that will not resolve for a stranger.

Open a private window. Or hand your phone to somebody who does not work here.

1. 1Tap the exact link that is on the thing customers touch. The actual card in your hand, not the one saved in your notes.
2. 2Look at where it landed. Is it your business name, your address, your photos?
3. 3Check the star rating and the review count match what you think you have.
4. 4Do it for every place the link lives. The card, the receipt, the signature, the sticker, the website button, the text template.
5. 5If you have more than one location, do all of that again for each one, with that location's card.
6. 6Ask one person outside the business to do it cold and tell you what they see.

If any of those six lands somewhere that is not your profile with your review box open, you found money on the floor.

While you are in there, check the profile itself

The link is the plumbing. The page it lands on is the thing that decides.

If your hours are wrong on the profile, the person about to review you has already had a worse experience than they should have. If the phone number moved and the profile did not, some of the calls that were supposed to be yours have been ringing somewhere else this whole time.

Google also edits profiles on its own, from user suggestions and from what it thinks it learned. Which means a profile you set up correctly once is not a profile that is correct now.

Put a check on the calendar. Once a quarter is enough. It takes longer to find the calendar than to do the check.

The multi-location version, said plainly

If you have two or more locations, write this down somewhere your team can see it.

Each location has its own profile, its own link, its own reviews, and its own average. They do not pool. A review left on the wrong location does not move to the right one, and it does not get you anything at the location that actually earned it.

So the cards at the second shop cannot be a reprint of the first shop's cards. Neither can the QR sticker, the receipt footer, or the text template that the front desk sends.

Label them. Physically. Write the location on the back of the box the cards came in, so the next person who restocks does not shuffle them.

Then stop using a link you have to trust

The reason this problem exists at all is that the link is invisible. It is a string of characters nobody can read, printed on something nobody looks at, doing a job nobody checks.

You cannot tell by looking at a card whether the link on it is right. You can only tell by tapping it.

So the fix is not just to get the link right today. It is to reduce how many places a wrong link can hide, and to make the one place it does live something you can update without reprinting anything.

That is one of the quiet reasons the tap card works the way it does. The destination is set once and changed in one place, so a location change or a rename is one edit and not a reprint run. The card in the customer's hand is the same card. Where it points is yours to fix, from shop.optechsol.llc.

What it comes down to

Somewhere between the person deciding to review you and the review existing, there is a link. It is the narrowest part of the whole thing and it is the part you never look at.

Check it today, from a phone that is not yours. Then put it on the calendar so the next rename, the next move, the next location does not spend six months quietly sending your best customers to a page that is not you.

Nobody is going to report this one. You have to go and look.