Reviews courseModule 7 of 7: Your Review SystemLesson 7.2
Your Audit, Priorities and 90-Day Plan
Pulling the course together: score your agency against every check, sort what you find by priority, and turn it into a 90-day plan with owners and dates. Then measure progress honestly, without fooling yourself.
By Morgan King, founder of Reyse Facts checked October 2026
01What it is
Before a long journey you check the car, decide what has to be fixed before you set off, and plan the route. This is the check, the list and the route.
The reviews audit has a check for every lesson, each linked to the lesson that explains it. Tick Yes, Partly or No, see a score for each part of the course, and whatever you haven't done yet turns into a 90-day plan in priority order. It's saved in your browser and prints on a few pages.
The four priorities
| Priority | What it means | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Critical: fix now | Breaks the law or a platform's rules, exposes personal data, or means you can't control your profiles | Incentives or gating; asking only happy clients; staff or fake reviews; a misleading rating on your website; personal data in a reply; no company-owned login; a clause stopping reviews |
| 2. High impact | Affects most clients or most readers | No consistent request; a reply backlog; no negative review process; no alerts; different figures on each platform; no permission for named testimonials |
| 3. Growth | Raises the quality of your reputation | Theme fixes, a second platform, AI checks, the competitor check, a dated reviews page, a monthly report |
| 4. Refinement | Smaller improvements | Widget speed, markup tidy-up, minor wording, extra templates |
The 90 days
| When | Focus | What gets done |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1 to 30 | Foundations | Baseline sheet; every login in the company's name with a second admin; a shared reviews inbox; review links and QR codes tap-tested; the reply backlog cleared; Priority 1 compliance problems fixed; notifications on |
| Days 31 to 60 | Routine | A trigger and a same-day request with one reminder for every client; the negative review process and bad-day plan; the reply standard; Bing, Facebook, Apple and Trustpilot checked; the first monthly report |
| Days 61 to 90 | Use and learn | The AI check; an honest reviews page; the competitor check; themes turned into fixes; the audit re-scored and the next 90 days planned |
Quick wins (each under a day)
- Find, copy and tap-test your Google review link and QR code for every branch.
- Reply to every unanswered review, oldest first, without personal data.
- Switch on Google notifications to a shared inbox.
- Stop anything that selects who's asked, or offers anything for a review.
- Make the figures on your website match your profiles, with a date.
- Move the Google Primary Owner role to a company account with two admins.
- Write the bad-day plan on one page.
- Claim Bing Places and your Facebook Page.
- Write down who owns what (lesson 7.1).
Never do
- Buy, fake, swap or incentivise reviews, or ask staff or family to write them.
- Ask only happy clients, or send unhappy ones somewhere else.
- Run a one-day review drive, or send more than one reminder.
- Argue with a reviewer in public, or put personal data in a reply.
- Show only five-star quotes and call it your rating.
- Mark up your own reviews expecting stars in Google.
- Scrape a competitor's reviews or post about them.
- Paste client data into public AI tools.
- Pay anyone who guarantees reviews, ratings or rankings.
Go deeperMeasuring progress honestly
Review numbers are small and noisy. One bad review moves a small profile's average, and a good month can be a fluke. Each month, track requests sent, reviews received on each platform, the share of requests that led to a review, reviews in the last three months, your average rating with the count behind it, , typical reply time, and themes with example quotes. Each quarter, add the AI check ("named in 4 of 12 answers"), the competitor comparison and enquiries by source, and add "read your reviews" to your "How did you hear about us?" options.
| What you control | What you partly control | What you don't control |
|---|---|---|
| Who's asked, how fast, reply rate and quality, ownership, accuracy | Review count and recency, because they depend on how many deals you complete | Platforms' algorithms, competitors' choices, and the client who was always going to leave a poor review |
- Never judge from one month, and always show the count next to a percentage.
- Don't compare a month with 3 reviews to a month with 15.
- Don't claim a cause: if you made six changes, you don't know which one mattered.
- Keep dated screenshots of important findings.
- Once a quarter, give the directors one page: the audit score and how it moved, Priority 1 issues open and closed, request coverage, response rate, reply time, rating and count, one theme and its fix, the competitor gap, the AI check, and what you need from them.
See it happen
The same five new reviews, on a small profile and a big one. Watch how far each moves.
Average now
4.2
from 20 reviews. Google would show 4.2.
To reach 4.5
12
more five-star reviews, and no lower ones in between
A small profile moves fast, both ways. Five good reviews lift it a lot; one bad one drags it down just as quickly.
02Keep it up
Sources
- 1.Prohibited and restricted content · Google Maps user contributed content policy
- 2.Fake reviews: guidance for businesses (CMA208) · Competition and Markets Authority
- 3.Testimonials and endorsements · Advertising Standards Authority
Facts checked October 2026, and re-checked every quarter. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.
That's lesson 7.2
Worked through it? Mark it done and we’ll keep track on this device.
← Back to 7.1 The Review Operating System: Roles, Routines and Scripts