Reputation & Review Management
More reviews, earned the only way it is safe to earn them
Reviews are the one marketing asset you cannot manufacture without risking the profile everything else depends on. We build the asking into how your business already works, respond properly to criticism, and tell you honestly which reviews will never be removed.
Before anything else
The line we work to, stated first
This is the page where the ethics are the service, not a reassurance at the bottom. Everything below follows from this list, and we will not negotiate any part of it.
What we will do
- Ask every genuine customer, at the point they are most likely to say yes, through a route that fits each platform’s own rules.
- Respond to reviews in your voice, including the critical ones, and usually within a working day.
- Report reviews that breach a specific platform policy, and follow up when the first automated response declines it.
- Tell you plainly when a review is accurate and the right response is to fix the thing it describes.
- Keep a record of who was asked, how and when, so the process survives a staff change or an audit.
- Give you an honest probability on any removal request, including when that probability is close to zero.
What we will never do
- Buy reviews, or work with any service that supplies, trades or generates them.
- Write reviews, or ask staff, family, friends or suppliers to write them.
- Offer a discount, a prize entry, a credit or anything else of value in exchange for a review.
- Gate requests so that only customers we expect to be satisfied are invited to leave one.
- Attempt to bury or suppress genuine criticism, or report a review simply because it is unflattering.
- Promise a rating, a review count, a velocity or the removal of any particular review.
What we usually find
Five patterns behind a weak review profile
Almost none of these are caused by the quality of the service the business provides. They are caused by nobody owning the process.
- Reviews arrive in bursts and then stop.
- Someone pushes for reviews before a busy season, thirty arrive in a fortnight, and then nothing happens for eight months. That pattern reads differently from steady arrival, both to the platforms and to the person reading the profile, who can see the dates. Consistency comes from process rather than from campaigns.
- Nobody replies, or one person replies when annoyed.
- An unanswered critical review is read as agreement. A defensive reply written twenty minutes after the notification is worse than silence, because it becomes the permanent public record of how the business handles complaints. Response needs an owner, a tone and a cooling-off rule.
- A reply reveals something it should not.
- This is the serious one in regulated sectors. Confirming that a reviewer was a patient, a client or the subject of a particular matter can breach confidentiality obligations even when the reviewer disclosed it first, and regulators in some jurisdictions have penalised providers for exactly that. The rule we work to is simple: the reply never contains information the reviewer did not put in public themselves.
- The same automated request goes to every platform.
- A single integration fires review requests everywhere at once because it was convenient to switch on. Google expects businesses to ask. Yelp tells businesses not to. Sending the same request across both does not double your results, it damages one profile while helping the other.
- Three months are spent chasing one removal.
- Enormous energy goes into a review that platforms were never going to remove, while a steady stream of satisfied customers is never asked for anything. The fastest way to reduce the weight of one bad review is almost always to be worth reviewing more often, not to fight the review itself.
How the asking works
Building the request into the job, not into a campaign
Find the moment
There is a point in every business where the customer is most pleased and least busy. Handover on a completed job, the day after a procedure, the confirmation of a resolved case. Anchoring the request to that moment matters more than the wording of it.
You get: The moment identified and documented per service line
Decide which platforms, and how each is treated
Google first for most local businesses, then the industry platforms that your buyers actually consult, and an explicit decision about the ones where soliciting is against the rules. Those are not ignored, they are simply approached differently.
You get: A per-platform request policy
Make the ask part of the work
A short message from a real person at the right moment, a card or a code where the interaction is in person, and a script the team can say without feeling awkward. If it depends on somebody remembering, it will stop within a month.
You get: Request process and staff scripts in use
Respond as a matter of routine
Critical reviews first, within a working day, with a cooling-off rule before anything is published. Templates exist as starting points, never as the final text, and sign-off follows your sector’s requirements where those apply.
You get: Response process with named owners and sign-off path
Monitor, report and feed it back
Alerts across the platforms that matter, a monthly read of what the reviews actually say rather than just the score, and the operational issues passed to the people who can fix them. The reviews are a data source about the business, not only a marketing asset.
You get: Monitoring, monthly reporting and an issues log
When something damaging appears
A bad review, a policy breach and a legal matter are three different problems
Most of the wasted effort in this area comes from treating all three the same way. The right response, and the right person to handle it, differs in each case.
| Dimension | A bad review | A review that breaches platform policy | A review that may be defamatory |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | An accurate account of a poor experience, or an unfavourable opinion honestly held | Content prohibited by the platform: spam, conflict of interest, off-topic, a personal attack, or a review from someone who was never a customer | A false statement presented as fact, published, and capable of causing real harm to reputation |
| Will the platform remove it | No, and it should not | Sometimes, if it is reported precisely against the policy it breaches rather than as a complaint about the rating | Only if it also breaches a platform policy. Platforms do not adjudicate defamation |
| What actually helps | A calm, specific public reply, and enough recent genuine reviews that one poor one is read in context | A precise report, documented evidence, and escalation when the first automated response declines it | A written record of the facts, proper legal advice, and usually a measured public reply in the meantime |
| What makes it worse | Arguing publicly, or replying with details the reviewer never disclosed | Reporting it as a rating you dislike, which teaches the system to ignore your reports | An angry public response, or a threat sent in writing before you have taken advice |
| Who should handle it | Us, in your voice, with your sign-off where the sector requires it | Us, with access to your profiles and your account of the facts | Your lawyer first. We handle the public-facing side once you have advice |
Questions
What owners ask about reviews
Can you get a bad review removed?
Not if it is simply unflattering. Platforms remove content that breaches their policies, such as reviews from people with a conflict of interest, off-topic content, personal attacks or spam. They do not remove a genuine account of a poor experience, and they should not.
What we can do is report a review precisely against the specific policy it breaches, follow it up when an automated first response declines it, and be honest with you about the likely outcome. Anyone promising removal is either guessing or planning to do something you would not want associated with your business.
Why will you not offer a small incentive, or ask only the customers we know are happy?
Because both breach the policies of the major platforms, and both are now regulatory matters in several markets. Offering anything of value in exchange for a review is prohibited by the platforms we would be asking on. Gating, where you only invite people you expect to give five stars, is a form of review suppression.
There is also a practical reason. A profile built that way is fragile. If it is detected, the reviews are removed and the profile can be penalised, and every pound spent on local search visibility was resting on it. We are not willing to put a client in that position, and we will say so directly if a previous provider already has.
Should we reply to every review?
Reply to all the critical ones and to a reasonable share of the positive ones. Replying to every five-star review with the same sentence reads as automated and adds nothing; a specific thank-you to some of them reads as human.
The critical ones are where the real value is. Prospective customers read those replies more carefully than anything else on the profile, because they are the only available evidence of how you behave when something goes wrong.
Someone who was never our customer left a one-star review. What now?
That is a conflict-of-interest or off-topic issue under most platform policies, which makes it one of the more reportable categories. We document what you know, report it against the specific policy rather than as a complaint about the rating, and escalate if the first response is automated.
In the meantime we usually recommend a short, factual public reply noting that you have no record of the person as a customer and inviting them to make contact. It is written for the next reader rather than for the reviewer, and it deliberately does not accuse anyone of anything.
Can we ask for reviews on Yelp the same way we do on Google?
No, and this is where a single blanket process causes damage. Google expects businesses to ask customers for reviews. Yelp’s content guidelines tell businesses not to solicit reviews at all, and its software treats solicited reviews differently.
So the process is per platform. Ask where asking is expected, make it easy to find you where it is not, and never run the same automated request across every site because one integration made it convenient.
What if the review says something that is simply untrue?
Separate two questions. Does it breach a platform policy, which is something we can report? And is it a legal matter, which is a question for a lawyer rather than for us or for the platform.
Platforms do not adjudicate defamation, and an angry response or a written threat sent before you have taken advice tends to make the situation considerably worse. Our recommendation is a measured public reply for the benefit of the next reader while you take proper advice on the rest.
Get a straight read on your review position
We will look at your velocity, your rating trend, how your competitors compare and whether anything on your profiles is reportable. If a previous provider used a shortcut, we will tell you what the exposure is.
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Related
Where to go next
- local search visibilityReview behaviour is an input to local ranking as well as conversion.
- the wider growth practice
- getting more reviews, properlyThe problem framed from the buyer’s side.
- community management on socialWhere a public complaint often starts before it becomes a review.
- the rules we hold ourselves to
- law firms and professional practicesWhere confidentiality changes what a reply can say.
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal