Reputation management in Newcastle, NSW: control what people find.

Your Google listing and its reviews, your website, your social accounts, and any directory or article carrying your name. The listing is nearly always the first thing and the loudest.

Search your own business name on a phone while logged out, and look at the screen the way a stranger does. That screen is the subject, and most owners have never once looked at it.

What is on that screen

• The Google listing sits at the top.

  Rating, review count, photographs and hours. It is the largest single thing there, and it is yours to fill in.

• The most recent reviews come next.

  They are shown first, which is why a recent review counts for more with a reader than the average score.

• Your own pages come after that.

  The website and the social accounts. Where they look abandoned, that is the impression somebody leaves with.

• Then everything else.

  Directories, an old listing nobody remembers creating, an article, a complaint on another platform entirely.

The first three are things a business controls outright. The fourth is where the anxiety lives, and it is usually the smallest part of what somebody actually sees.

A single critical review inside a set of recent good ones reads as a normal business. A page of nothing but perfect reviews reads as arranged, and customers trust it less.

An owner experiences a bad review as a wound. Somebody choosing between two businesses experiences it as information, and often as reassurance that the rest of them are real.

What they do read closely is the reply. A short, calm answer that does not argue the detail and offers to sort it out says more about a business than the complaint ever did.

What genuinely damages a business is a pattern. Several reviews describing the same problem is not a reputation problem with a marketing answer, and it is worth naming rather than managing.

Reviews that break the platform's own rules can be reported and sometimes come down. A genuine bad experience, honestly described, stays, and no service can promise otherwise.

This is where the subject gets sold badly, so it is worth being plain about it. There is a reporting route, it works sometimes, and it applies to a narrow set of things.

What can actually be reported

• A review from somebody who was never a customer.

  That includes a competitor, and it includes a straightforward case of mistaken identity.

• Abuse, or somebody's personal information.

  Content that breaches the platform's own published rules on its face, rather than content that stings.

• A review that is about a different business.

  It happens regularly where two businesses have similar names.

• Obvious review spam.

  Runs of identical reviews, or a burst of them arriving together from accounts with no other history.

Google's contributor policies set out what counts, and reporting is free. What does not work is asking for an honest bad experience to be deleted.

Where something published about a business is untrue rather than unflattering, that is a legal question and it needs a lawyer rather than a marketing agency. It gets said rather than taken on.

Recent reviews arriving steadily, replies to all of them, your own pages looking alive, and the old listings nobody has touched being cleaned up. Addition, rather than removal.

The reliable route is adding to the picture rather than trying to take things out of it. Every part of it is something a business can do for itself.

What genuinely moves it

• Every customer is asked for a review.

  Recency is what the first screen shows, so a steady trickle outweighs an old burst of them every time.

• Every review gets a reply.

  The good ones briefly and the bad ones calmly. Both of them are read by the next person deciding.

• The business's own pages stay alive.

  A website and a social account showing recent work answer the question a stranger is actually asking.

• The old listings are cleaned up.

  Directory entries with the wrong number, a duplicate listing from a previous owner, an address left behind years ago.

All of that is ordinary upkeep, and it compounds. The businesses with a clean first screen are the ones that have been doing it quietly for a year.

Search the name properly first, then list what is actually wrong. Report only what breaches a rule, start the reviews arriving, reply to every one of them, and clean up the stale listings.

The order matters because the reporting route is the slow one and the additions are the fast one.

1. Search the business name, logged out, on a phone

The way a stranger sees it, not the way it looks to somebody already signed in. Screenshot it, because that is the starting point everything else compares against.

2. List what is actually wrong

Old details, a duplicate listing, a stale social account, a review that breaches a rule. Separating the fixable from the merely unflattering is most of the job.

3. Report only what breaches a rule

With the reason attached. Reporting an honest bad review as though it were fake wastes the route for the time it is genuinely needed.

4. The reviews start arriving

Every customer, every job, automatically. This is the single largest change available here and it takes an afternoon to set up.

5. Everything gets a reply

Including the old ones nobody answered at the time. It is visible to the next reader, and it takes about an hour.

6. Clean up the stale listings

Old directory entries, duplicates, an address the business left. It is tedious work, and it cleans up the bottom half of the screen.

Replying and cleaning up listings is about a week of work. Shifting what the first screen shows takes months, because reviews arriving is what drives it rather than anything being removed.

The order it happens in

• First somebody looks at the picture honestly.

  Searched, screenshotted and listed. Nothing has changed yet at this stage, and that is the point of it.

• Then the quick things are fixed.

  Replies, stale listings, duplicates and wrong details. About a week, and the bottom half of the screen improves.

• Then the reviews start accumulating.

  That is what changes the top half of the screen, and it is the slow part of the work.

Anybody promising to make something disappear on a timeline is describing something they do not control. The route that works is addition, and it does not come with a date attached.

Ask what will actually be done, whether anything is being removed or reported, whether any reviews are being generated, and what happens if you stop. A promise to delete a genuine review is the answer to walk away from.

These are worth asking of any agency, including this one, so the answers given here are underneath each question.

• What will actually be done?

  Reviews, replies, listings and your own pages. Where the answer to that is vague, there is usually a reason for the vagueness.

• Are you promising to remove anything?

  Only what breaches a platform rule, and even then it is a report rather than a guarantee. Nothing here is promised as removable.

• Are any reviews being generated?

  They are asked for from real customers after real jobs. Anything else, the platform removes, and it can suspend the listing with it.

• Who owns the accounts?

  The business does, in its own name, including the listing and every directory entry that carries it.

Where several reviews describe the same problem, no amount of this work is the answer, and that gets said. It is a business question rather than a marketing one.

What spareday's own clients say is public rather than collected here, and the reviews point at the listing they sit on.