Your reputation is your first impression

No. Selectively soliciting reviews from customers you expect to be positive — or filtering people to a private form when they seem unhappy — is review gating. Since October 2024 the FTC rule on consumer reviews and testimonials prohibits it, with civil penalties currently up to $53,088 per violation. Every customer gets the same invitation.

Only where a review breaches the platform's own policies — spam, a competitor posting, or content about a business the reviewer never used. Those can be flagged and often removed. Suppressing genuine negative reviews, or threatening a reviewer to take one down, is specifically prohibited by the FTC rule.

You can't buy reviews, and you can't condition an incentive on the review being positive. A prize draw open to everyone who leaves a review — positive or negative — with the incentive disclosed, is the safer pattern. We'll set it up that way or advise against it.

Ask everyone, ask promptly, make it a single tap. Automated invitations by text shortly after service consistently outperform email, because the experience is still fresh. Volume comes from asking every customer, not from choosing which ones to ask.

Without confirming the person was a patient. Acknowledging a care relationship, or referencing treatment, can breach HIPAA even when the reviewer disclosed it publicly first. We use responses that thank the reviewer, state the practice's commitment, and move the conversation to a private channel.

Holding your business facts — name, address, phone, hours, services, attributes — in one place and pushing them automatically to every publisher that displays them: search engines, maps, social platforms, industry directories and voice assistants. Platforms such as Yext exist for this. Without it, an address change means editing dozens of sites by hand and missing most of them.

Two or more records for the same location, usually created by an old address, a franchise rollout or a data aggregator. They split your reviews and ranking signals between records and send some customers to the wrong details. Finding and suppressing them is one of the fastest wins in local visibility.

Yes, and quickly. Prospective customers read the replies as closely as the reviews, because a reply is the only part you control. A calm, specific response to a critical review often does more for you than the five-star ones above it.

Review volume and response times move within weeks once invitations are automated. Average rating moves more slowly, because it's an average — and listings corrections can take a publisher time to propagate. The compounding effect on local ranking and conversion is months, not days.