Reputation management that earns reviews and controls what your name returns
Two things decide your online reputation: how many recent genuine reviews you have, and what a search for your business name returns. Both can be worked on deliberately, and both have rules worth knowing.
What is reputation management?
Reputation Management is the ongoing work of generating genuine customer reviews, responding to them and shaping what appears on the first page of search results for your business name. It suits Australian businesses whose buyers check reviews and branded search before making contact, which now covers most service and retail categories.
Get a fixed written quote- Typical timeline
- Setup in 3 to 4 weeks, meaningful change in 3 to 6 months
- What drives cost
- Depends on how many locations you have, whether review requests can be automated from an existing system or need integration built.
- Best for
- Businesses where buyers read reviews before enquiring
- You own
- Every profile, the review data and all published content
- Built with
- Review request automation, Google Business Profile, owned search assets
Your handover
Two halves of the job: earning reviews and owning page one
Reputation management gets confused with crisis PR, and for most businesses it is neither dramatic nor reactive. It is two ongoing programmes. The first is generating a steady flow of genuine reviews from real customers, so that your rating reflects your median customer rather than the small number of people motivated enough to write unprompted. Unprompted reviewers skew toward the delighted and the furious, and the furious write more.
- 01Audit of branded search results and every profile that ranks
- 02Claimed and completed profiles with consistent details
- 03Compliant review request automation tied to your systems
- 04Response templates for recurring positive and negative themes
- 05Team training on responses and escalation
- 06Owned content plan targeting branded search queries
- Monthly review volume, rating and sentiment reporting
- Policy breach removal requests lodged with evidence
- All profiles and data registered in your name
The second is what a search for your business name returns
The second is what a search for your business name returns. That page is your de facto homepage for anyone who heard about you and went looking. It should be occupied by things you control or influence: your website, your Google Business Profile, your social profiles, your review pages, staff profiles, industry association listings and any coverage you have earned. When it is not, the vacancy gets filled by whatever else mentions you, which might be a directory page with your old address or a single complaint on a forum from 2019.
One consideration worth planning for is that reviews on third party platforms are not portable.
How to ask for reviews without breaching ACCC guidance
Australian Consumer Law prohibits misleading conduct, and the ACCC has been explicit that fake reviews, reviews written by staff or their families, and undisclosed incentives are all misleading. Suppressing negative reviews while publishing positive ones misrepresents the overall picture. Buying reviews is straightforwardly a legal risk as well as a platform violation that can remove your listing entirely.
Businesses do this constantly and it breaches the policies of the major platforms
There is also review gating, which is asking customers how satisfied they are and only sending happy ones to the public review link. Businesses do this constantly and it breaches the policies of the major platforms. Compliant review generation is less clever and more effective. Ask every customer, ask at the right moment, make it a single tap, and accept that some reviews will be critical. A profile with a small number of measured criticisms and thoughtful responses reads as more credible to a real buyer than an unbroken run of perfect scores, which most people now read as suspicious.
The practical work is in timing and automation: triggering the request at the point of highest satisfaction, which is different for a plumber than for a clinic, and sending it through the channel the customer already uses. Most of that runs through SMS and email automation connected to your job or booking system.
- Ask every customer, not a filtered subset
- No incentives unless the offer is disclosed and available regardless of the rating
- No reviews written by staff, family or suppliers
- Trigger the request at the moment satisfaction peaks
- One tap to the review form, with no login hurdle you can avoid
- Never make removal of a negative review a condition of anything
Choose the right level
Where your reviews should actually live
Spreading review requests across five platforms leaves you with a thin presence on all of them. Concentrate. For nearly every Australian business, Google is first, because it appears in the map pack, in branded search and in the panel beside your name. After that it depends on the category, and the honest answer is often that a second platform adds little.
Platform
01
Google Business Profile
Worth the effort when
Almost always, for any business with local buyers
Limitation
Reviews cannot be moved elsewhere and removal requests are rarely granted
02
ProductReview.com.au
Worth the effort when
Consumer products and services where Australian buyers compare brands
Limitation
Ranks strongly on branded search, so a thin profile is conspicuous
03
Industry specific directories
Worth the effort when
Categories where buyers genuinely start their search there
Limitation
Audience is narrow and effort per review is higher
04
Your own website
Worth the effort when
Always, as a complement rather than a replacement
Limitation
Self published testimonials carry less weight and cannot be verified by readers
How we work this out during scoping
One consideration worth planning for is that reviews on third party platforms are not portable. You cannot take a decade of reviews with you if a platform changes its rules or its audience moves. That is an argument for concentrating on the platform your buyers actually check, and for capturing testimonials on your own site in parallel, where you control the presentation.
Controlling the first page of a branded search
When someone searches your business name they are usually late in their decision. What they find there matters more per visitor than almost any other traffic you get. The goal is not to hide anything, which rarely works and looks worse when discovered. It is to make sure the genuinely relevant, accurate and current material about your business is easier to find than a stale directory entry or an isolated grievance.
The work is unglamorous and reliable
The work is unglamorous and reliable. Claim and complete every profile that ranks for your name. Fix the ones with wrong details, since old addresses and disconnected phone numbers do real damage. Publish substantial pages on your own site that answer the questions people search alongside your name, such as complaints handling, pricing structure or how your process works. Build out staff profiles and association memberships that legitimately rank. Over a few months the page fills with accurate material. The technical side of that overlaps with local SEO, and the content side with content strategy.
Responding to a bad review is a public writing exercise
The person who wrote the review is not your audience. The next fifty prospects who read it are. That single reframe fixes most bad responses, because the defensive reply that feels satisfying to write is the one that costs you customers. A long rebuttal correcting the reviewer's version of events reads as an argument even when you are right, and readers side with the customer by default.
What works is short, specific and calm
What works is short, specific and calm. Acknowledge the experience without conceding facts you dispute, state plainly what you do in that situation, and move it to a private channel with a named person and a real contact detail. Do not disclose customer information, which for a healthcare provider is a privacy obligation as much as a courtesy. Respond to positive reviews too, briefly, because a profile where the owner replies consistently signals an attentive business. We write response templates for the recurring themes and train your team on the judgement calls that templates cannot cover.
What reputation management cannot do
It cannot delete a legitimate negative review. Platforms remove content that breaches their policies, such as reviews from someone who was never a customer, personal abuse or conflicts of interest, and we will lodge those requests with evidence when they apply. A truthful account of a bad experience stays up, and anyone promising removal is either planning something that breaches platform terms or is simply going to take your money.
The rest of the answer
It also cannot fix a service problem. If reviews consistently mention the same wait times, the same communication failure or the same staff member, the reviews are functioning correctly and telling you something valuable. More review requests in that situation just generate more evidence of the problem at a faster rate. We will say so plainly, because the alternative is billing a monthly fee to paper over something that gets worse. And if your issue is not reviews at all but a live public flare up across social channels, that is a different discipline with different response times, covered under social media reputation management.
How we scope it
Four ways to scope your Reputation Management project
We do not publish package prices, because the same brief can be a short build or a long one. These are the shapes the work usually takes. Tell us which one sounds like you and you will get a fixed written quote that spells out exactly what it covers.
Reputation Essentials
The core of it, scoped and quoted
Fixed written quote, agreed before work starts
- Audit of branded search results and every profile that ranks
- Claimed and completed profiles with consistent details
- Compliant review request automation tied to your systems
Reputation Growth
The version most businesses need
Fixed written quote, agreed before work starts
- Everything in Reputation Essentials
- Response templates for recurring positive and negative themes
- Team training on responses and escalation
- Owned content plan targeting branded search queries
Reputation Platform
The largest version, built around your operation
Fixed written quote, agreed before work starts
- Everything in Reputation Growth
- Monthly review volume, rating and sentiment reporting
- Policy breach removal requests lodged with evidence
- All profiles and data registered in your name
Reputation Care
Ongoing support once it is live
Rolling monthly, quoted in writing
- A named engineer rather than a ticket queue
- Patching, monitoring and a tested backup
- Changes and improvements worked through monthly
- Rolling, cancel with 30 days notice
These are shapes, not menus. Most quotes end up somewhere between two of them, and we will say so when the honest answer is the smallest one. Describe the problem and we will tell you which it is.
Questions buyers usually ask
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to improve our rating?
Setup takes 3 to 4 weeks, and visible movement usually takes 3 to 6 months. The maths is simple: a rating is an average, so shifting it requires volume rather than time alone. A business with forty reviews changes faster than one with four hundred. Recency also matters to readers, so a steady flow of current reviews improves perception before the numeric average moves much.
What does reputation management cost?
It depends on how many locations you have, whether review requests can be automated from an existing system or need integration built, and how much owned content is required to occupy branded search. A single location with a booking system already in place is a small setup. A multi-site business with no shared systems is not. We quote in writing after an audit.
Can you remove a negative review?
Only if it breaches the platform's policies, for example a review from someone who was never a customer, personal abuse, or a competitor posting under a false name. We lodge those with evidence and a reasonable share succeed. A genuine review describing a real experience will stay, and any provider promising otherwise is selling something that does not work or that puts your listing at risk.
Is it legal to offer a discount for a review?
It is risky and generally not worth it. Under Australian Consumer Law an undisclosed incentive is misleading, and if the incentive is only offered for positive reviews it is clearly so. Platform policies are stricter still and can remove your reviews or your listing. If you do run any incentive it must be disclosed, and offered regardless of what the customer writes. We advise against it.
Who owns the profiles and the review data?
You do. Every profile is registered under your business with your details and your billing where relevant, and we hold manager access you can revoke. Review data, response history and any content we publish belongs to you. A common problem we inherit is a Google Business Profile created under a former agency's personal account, and recovering it is slow, so we never create that situation.
We are a medical practice. Does this work differently for us?
Yes, considerably. AHPRA advertising rules prohibit using testimonials about clinical care in your own advertising, which means you cannot display patient reviews on your website or repost them as marketing. You can still encourage patients to leave reviews on third party platforms and respond to them, carefully, without disclosing any patient information. We build those constraints into the programme from the start.
Related services
Find out what your business name currently returns
Send us your business name and locations. We reply within one business day with what we find on page one and a fixed written quote if there is work worth doing.