Every number, with its source.

Answering in five minutes instead of thirty makes contact up to 100 times more likely.

The same audit tested 2,241 US companies with a live lead. 23% of them never responded at all.

It measured responding, not phoning, which is exactly what missed-call text back does. It's the strongest number we have.

Source: James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," Harvard Business Review 89, no. 3, March 2011.
hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads

One extra star on your rating is worth 5 to 9% more revenue.

Michael Luca used Yelp's rounding cutoff as a natural experiment. A 3.24 average displays as 3 stars and a 3.25 displays as 3.5, so businesses of identical real quality ended up showing different ratings. That is what makes this causal instead of a correlation.

Two caveats we would rather state than bury. The study covered Seattle restaurants only. And the effect showed up only for independent businesses, with none for chains. If you run an independent business, that second one is in your favor.

Source: Michael Luca, "Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com," Harvard Business School Working Paper 12-016, 2011, revised 2016.
hbs.edu, Working Paper 12-016

How a site looks is the thing people mention most when they decide whether to trust a business.

2,684 people each judged two live websites and wrote down what made them credible or not. The look of the site came up in 46.1% of the comments, ahead of information design at 28.5% and information focus at 25.1%.

It's a Stanford study from 2002, and it has held up as the standard citation. The version everyone else quotes, that 75% of people judge a company on its website design, is a distortion of this one. We don't use that number.

Source: B.J. Fogg, Cathy Soohoo, David Danielsen, Leslie Marable, Julianne Stanford and Ellen R. Tauber, "How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility?" Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab with Consumer WebWatch, 2002.
credibility.stanford.edu, How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility

A tenth of a second off mobile load time produced 8.4% more retail conversions.

Average order value went up 9.2% in the same test, and lead generation pages saw bounce rates improve by 8.3%. It covered 37 brands across retail, travel and luxury in Europe and the US.

It's also the plain answer to "my nephew already built me a site." Ask how fast it loads on a phone.

Source: Google and Deloitte, "Milliseconds Make Millions," 2020.
thinkwithgoogle.com, Milliseconds Make Millions

Google says three things decide where you rank locally: relevance, distance and prominence.

Prominence is fed by your review count and your review score, among other signals. That is the honest reason we send a review request after every visit.

This one is Google describing its own product. No agency is guessing at how Google works, and that is the whole value of the citation.

Source: Google Business Profile Help, "Tips to improve your local ranking on Google."
support.google.com/business/answer/7091

74% of people look for reviews written in the last three months.

In the same survey 97% read reviews before choosing a local business and 85% said positive ones made them more likely to use it. It's a survey of 1,002 US adults, run by BrightLocal, who sell review software. You should hear that from us.

The recency number is the one that matters. Reviews go stale. Collecting twenty of them once stops working within a few months, and that is the whole case for asking after every visit instead of asking your customers one time.

Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. 1,002 US adults.
brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey