Many ways to get great reviews to Google...

Above: The 'Holy Grail' of review management - a great Google score, a great score on the business's own website and stars in organic search, all achieved in compliance with the CMA regulations and Google's own T&Cs.

Over the years we have encountered just about every strategy known to man or woman to achieve one single objective: a great Google score. Here we list all that we can recall.

• Get happy customers to write a review to Google

• Get all customers to write a review to an independent reviews site, then invite only those that post a 5* review there to copy it to Google

• Use a system that allows the business to nominate those allowed to write a review

• Use a system that is closed to members of the public not specifically invited to post a review by the business

• use a system that allows the business to choose the timing of the invitation to write a review

• Get all customers to email you with a report of their experience with your business and then invite those that respond positively to write a review to Google

• Do the above, but then go the extra mile and set up a new Google account on behalf of the customer and then copy and paste their complimentary remarks there, adding a 5* rating

• Send an email to the customer telling them they will be rewarded with cash/Amazon vouchers/M&S vouchers if the post a 5* review

Not forgetting...

• Encouraging employees to leave a review

• Inviting friends and family to leave a review

• Inviting business connections to write a review

Let's examine them one by one...

• 'Happy' customers

Illegal - the CMA regulations specifically prohibit what they call cherry-picking. If you invite a single customer to post a review you must be able to demonstrate to the CMA that all your customers are invited - and no, saying 'anyone can write a review to Google at any time' will not wash.

• All customers invited to post to a reviews site and then those that score the business 5* asked to post to Google

Illegal - this is a practice known as 'gating' and it is self-evidently going to skew the impression any prospective customer is given when they look at the business's Google score and individual reviews.

• Only nominated customers allowed to write a review

Illegal - the CMA regulations state that all customers should be able to write a review

• Using a 'closed' system (often called 'invitation only')

Illegal - customers must be able write a review whenever the want

• Inviting the initial comment by email (or even verbally)

Illegal - gating again.

• Setting up a new Google account

Illegal - and, on top of that, strictly against Google's terms of service. 

• Incentivising customers 

Illegal - and against Google's terms of service.

• Employees

Just don't - no matter what.

• Friends and family

Not a problem, but they should declare their connection (and have first-hand experience of your service)

• Business connections

As for friends and family

Punishment

The CMA regulations have the force of law. If a business is found to be in breach then they may be liable to...

• an unlimited fine
• publicity
• being barred from acting as a director of a limited company in the UK

Google, on the other hand, will simply delete all of the business's reviews and flag all future reviews for special attention.

The overarching principle

The principle that the government, in the person of the Competition and Markets Authority, will apply in any investigation is as follows...

"Has any action or activity by the business engaged in the gathering of reviews the potential to mislead any consumer when reading the business's reviews and, furthermore, relying on those reviews when making a purchasing decision."

Put bluntly: Has the business done anything to make it look better than it otherwise would or should?

Further reading

• The CMA regulations - and an analysis

Clamping down on corporate reviews manipulation - Australia leads the way

Hardly a month passes when we don't write about compliance. Why? Because hardly a day passes when we don't see a business flouting the law. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission wanted the fine to be A$20m, but we think A$3m probably got the message across.

The point is: do we have to wait for a similar fine in the UK before businesses take our Competition & Markets Authority seriously?

What did Meriton do?

Exactly what most businesses we meet and see every day do: choose which customers to invite to post a review and control the timing of those invitations. All across the UK businesses, some one might describe as 'blue chip' in every other way, are doing the same thing, systematically.

How can we tell? Experience mostly - and when we meet you might be surprised how many people say 'What - we have to invite everyone?' Scoring at or near a 'perfect 5' is one clue, odd patterns of review writing another (we know of one business that has roughly a hundred reviews on Google - twenty in the five years running up to 2016 and ten following, with seventy in a three-month period in between - it doesn't take a genius, here at HelpHound or at the CMA to see what happened).

So - again - the CMA regulations explicitly state that if you invite reviews at all...

• you must invite everyone - no ifs, not buts, no 'but they will be certain to write an unfair and inaccurate review'
• you - or the external mechanism you use - must allow them to write their review at a time of their own choosing - businesses that either invite immediately post-purchase but have no mechanism for their customer to return at a later date and either write or alter a review are non-compliant. 

There's a full analysis of the CMA regulations here. Please call us if you have any questions or doubts. Regulatory fines are very bad for PR (see above).

Why do businesses do it - and what should they be doing?

They do it because of three things...

• they recognise the power of reviews, especially on Google - and sites like TripAdvisor for those in hospitality
• they also recognise just how damaging a single negative review can be - both stand alone and the impact it has on their all-important score (they have to score 4.5 or more on Google to avoid the filter since June this year)
• they don't know of a compliant way to protect their reputations

They should - and we make no apology for this sounding like an advertisement for HelpHound - be using professional review management.

Professional review management enables businesses to invite reviews in the knowledge that there is an inbuilt safety mechanism - moderation (we call ours Resolution™) - that stands a very good chance indeed of ensuring that inaccurate or potentially misleading reviews will not see the light of day.

How? Read this - but here's the short answer: every review that is written about a HelpHound client is read - before publication - by our moderators. If there are any anomalies in the review we alert the business and their customer and allow them to address them. It is, as you can imagine, popular with our clients, but is also, you may be surprised to hear, equally popular with the reviewers, most of whom don't want to publish nonsense - especially when the business has the ability to correct their errors if they are published.

Result? Compliance - yes. Great reviews on the business's own website? Yes (providing the business is good at what it does). Great reviews on Google? Yes.

So - and this is aimed directly at our readers who have yet to join - you will fall into one of two categories...

• a great business that gets the occasional dissatisfied customer
• a good business that needs to up its CRM game a tad 

...the former should join straight away - you will be compliant from day one. The latter should suspend all review gathering until its CRM has been addressed, then join. 

What you cannot do is continue 'selecting' those customers you invite to write a review - or use a mechanism that gives your business control over who writes a review and when.

Further reading...

• The CMA regulations analysed and explained
• Google ban 'review gating' - and other examples of CMA rule breaches
• Don't do this - an example of a business flouting the CMA regulations