Online Reputation Management Checklist for Small Businesses

Online Reputation Management Checklist for Small Businesses An online reputation management checklist covers four areas: profile and listing accuracy, review collection and replies, monitoring beyond formal review sites, and basic AI visibility. The list below is written so you can copy it into a doc, a note app, or print it, and check items off as you go — a reputation audit checklist is only useful if you actually keep coming back to it. Save this page or copy the list into your own notes before you start — it's meant to be worked through once as an audit, then revisited quarterly, not read once and forgotten. Checking something off doesn't mean "done forever"; a few items (profile accuracy, response backlog) need a repeat pass every few months. If you'd rather not re-run this by hand each quarter, there's a faster option further down to check every item automatically instead. Profile and listing basics ☐ Google Business Profile is claimed, verified, and showing as active ☐ Business category, hours, and service area are current (check again after any holiday schedule change) ☐ Name, address, and phone number match exactly across your website, Google, Facebook, and any other platform you appear on ☐ At least one recent, real photo has been added in the last 90 days ☐ Business description is written in plain language, not keyword-stuffed ☐ Any secondary listings on industry-specific sites (Yelp, Healthgrades, Houzz, Trustpilot, or whatever applies) are claimed and accurate ☐ Website contact page and footer match the same name, address, and phone number used on your Google Business Profile Review collection and replies ☐ Every customer gets asked for a review the same way, regardless of how the interaction seemed to go — no filtering based on predicted satisfaction (review gating is against most platforms' terms and the FTC's rule on fake and deceptive reviews, 16 CFR Part 465) ☐ No discount, refund, or anything of value is offered in exchange for a review ☐ Review request message goes out consistently (same timing, same channel) after every sale or job — see review request text message templates if you need a starting point ☐ Yelp is treated as monitor-and-respond only, never solicited directly, if Yelp applies to your business ☐ Every outstanding review has a reply, including old ones from more than a few months back ☐ Positive reviews get replies too, not just negative ones ☐ A written plan exists for responding to negative reviews, so nobody is improvising a reply while upset — see how to respond to negative reviews ☐ Recurring complaints (the same issue mentioned in three or more reviews) have been traced back to an operational fix, not just replied to individually Monitoring beyond review sites ☐ Your business name has been searched on Reddit, X, and relevant local Facebook groups in the last 30 days ☐ You have a way to find out about a new mention within days, not by accident weeks later ☐ Review rating, volume, and recency trend have been checked over the last quarter, not just today's snapshot ☐ Share of negative reviews (not just the average) has been checked over a rolling 90-day window ☐ Response rate and response time to new reviews have been checked against your own target, not just compared vaguely to "fast enough" AI visibility basics ☐ You've asked at least one AI assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini, or similar) what it says when prompted for a recommendation in your category and city ☐ If the AI assistant doesn't mention your business at all, that gap is noted rather than assumed to be fine ☐ Review volume and recency — two of the signals that influence AI answers — are being actively worked on, not just hoped for ☐ You've read through how to get recommended by ChatGPT at least once to understand what actually moves this How to use this checklist going forward Work through the full list once as a baseline audit — most small businesses can get through all four sections in half a day, with the profile and listings section usually fastest and the monitoring section usually slowest since it involves actual searching rather than just checking settings. After the initial pass, the review-collection and monitoring sections deserve a repeat check monthly; the profile and AI-visibility sections are reasonable to revisit quarterly, since they move more slowly. Running this list manually every time is the practical argument for a tool once you've outgrown doing it by hand — a reputation scan can run most of this audit in a few minutes and flag what's missing instead of you clicking through five platforms individually to find out. How long should this audit take the first time? Plan for two to four hours for a single-location business doing it manually for the first time — most of that is the monitoring section, since searching Reddit and Facebook groups for mentions takes longer than checking a profile's settings. A multi-location business should expect proportionally longer, since listing accuracy and review volume multiply by each location. Do I need to redo the whole checklist every quarter? Not the whole thing at the same depth. The profile and listings section rarely changes once it's correct, aside from a periodic recheck after holidays or a business detail change. Review collection, replies, and monitoring are the sections that drift fastest and deserve the most frequent attention — monthly is reasonable for those even if the rest of the list is quarterly. What's the most commonly skipped item on this checklist? Replying to old, already-outstanding reviews. Most businesses reply to new reviews as they come in but never go back to clear a backlog of unanswered ones from months or years earlier, which sits there looking neglected to anyone scrolling past the most recent few. Should a multi-location business use one checklist or one per location? One per location, run independently, even if a single person is responsible for all of them. Profile accuracy, review volume, and mention activity vary enough by location that a combined checklist tends to hide a problem at one struggling location behind an average that looks fine across the rest. For the reasoning behind each section rather than just the checklist itself, see how to improve your business's online reputation, and if your audit turns up more damage than a checklist alone can fix, how to fix a bad online reputation is the next read. Every review, mention and AI answer in one place → Try Tailwind free. Tailwind runs $5 a month per tool, or $50 a month for the Full plan covering everything, with the first month free and no card required to start.