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Short answer: enough to beat whoever's currently in the top 3 for your service and town. There's no universal magic number — but there is a way to figure out your real target, and a realistic timeline for hitting it.
Search your exact service + town and look at the review counts on the top 3 Map Pack results. That's your real benchmark — not some industry-wide average. In a lot of NJ towns, the top 3 for a given category have somewhere between 25 and 90 reviews.
A business with 45 reviews at 4.9 stars will often outperform one with 90 reviews at 4.2 stars in both ranking and actual conversion — people scroll past low ratings even at position #1. Don't chase volume at the expense of quality; ask happy clients, not everyone.
Google weighs how recently your reviews came in, not just the total. A profile with 60 reviews from 3 years ago and nothing since looks less trustworthy to both Google and customers than one with 20 reviews, 8 of them from the last two months.
With a simple automated request system (a text or email sent after each engagement), most businesses we work with see 10+ new reviews in the first 30 days just by asking consistently — something most businesses never do systematically, even though most satisfied clients would leave one if asked.
Ask every single client, every single time — timing it right after the engagement, while the experience is fresh. The businesses winning the Map Pack aren't necessarily better at the work, they're just better at asking.
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