Reviews are where local SEO and plain good business stop being distinguishable. They influence whether people choose you, whether Google’s systems consider you prominent, and whether a bad Tuesday turns into a permanent public record. They’re also the area with the sharpest gap between what works and what’s allowed.
This cluster is strictly compliant-tactics territory: how to ask for reviews in ways Google explicitly permits (and how incentives and review gating violate policy), how to respond to negatives in ways that serve the next hundred readers more than the angry one, what review removal actually covers, and how to think about review count, velocity, and keywords honestly — including what the evidence supports and what it doesn’t.
We also cover the technical edges: review widgets on your site, and why self-serving review markup on your own site is a policy violation people still copy from old blog posts.
Start with: Local reviews: earning them without breaking rules — it includes the response framework and templates. Reviews feed directly into prominence (covered in how local rankings work); the review section of the audit checklist tells you what to check first.
All guides in this cluster- Local Reviews: Earning Them Without Breaking the Rules
How to ask for reviews compliantly, respond to negatives like a professional, understand what reviews do and don't affect — and the policy lines that get profiles suspended.