How much does reputation management cost?
There is no single number because “reputation management” is three different products sold under one name: software you operate yourself, a managed programme that asks your customers for reviews and answers them, and search-result repair that tries to push unwanted pages down. They are priced an order of magnitude apart.
Rather than quote an industry average nobody can check, here is what two sources actually publish. They are different in kind, and that difference is the most useful thing on this page.
| What is being priced | Published figure | Source, and what kind of number it is |
|---|---|---|
| Search-result repair — Starter | From $3,000/mo | Reputation X rate card — one firm’s own published prices, described on the page as sample investments |
| Search-result repair — Professional | From $5,000/mo | |
| Search-result repair — Enterprise | From $10,000/mo | |
| Restaurants and cafes | $149–249/mo | EmbedMyReviews pricing guide — what the guide advises agencies to charge, not a survey of what businesses pay |
| Home services (HVAC, plumbing) | $200–350/mo | |
| Dental practices | $250–399/mo | |
| Legal firms | $375–599/mo |
Figures as published on those pages in August 2026. We have not surveyed what businesses actually pay, and we are not going to present a number we cannot show you the source for. If you have a quote in hand, the table above tells you which end of the market it came from.
Why is the range so wide?
Because the cheap end and the expensive end are not the same job.
- Software sends review requests and collects replies in one inbox. You still do the work. This is the $149–$400 end.
- A managed programme runs that software for you and writes the responses. Priced on your industry, because a law firm’s average case is worth more than a haircut — which is why the guide above prices legal at roughly double restaurants for the same underlying software.
- Search-result repair is a different discipline entirely: publishing and promoting enough credible material to move an unwanted page off the first result page. It is slow, uncertain, and priced in thousands per month because it is mostly content production.
What does that money actually buy?
At the software and managed end, three things: requests sent to your customers after a visit, a place where the replies land, and someone writing responses. At the repair end, published content and the promotion behind it.
What none of it buys is a guarantee. No provider controls Google’s index, and any of them who says otherwise is describing an outcome they cannot deliver. That is worth holding onto when you read a proposal — the honest ones tell you what they will do, not what will happen.
Does FiveStarGuard do reputation management?
No. We sell local SEO and answer-engine optimisation, and nothing else. We used to publish pages about reputation work; those are gone, and this is the only page on the site that discusses it.
Reviews still matter here, but as a ranking signal rather than a service. Google weighs them alongside the page when it decides who appears in a local result. That means a weak review profile can hold back a page you are paying us for — and it also means the fix belongs between you and your customers, not on our invoice.
When is reputation spend the wrong purchase?
When nobody can find you in the first place.
A review programme works on people who have already dealt with you. It does nothing for the person two towns over who typed what you sell into Google and got a competitor, because you have no page for their town. Money spent polishing a profile that never appears in front of that person buys nothing.
The order that makes sense for most local businesses is: be findable in every town you actually serve, then worry about how you look when you get there. If you are already ranking and the reviews are the problem, a managed programme at the prices above may well be right — just not from us.
What we do instead, and what it costs
We find the towns near you where people search for what you sell, write a separate page for each one, publish them, and work Google Search Console until they are indexed.
$500 to start and $500 when your pages are live. Then $100 per page per month, stepping down as more pages rank — and charged only for the 28-day windows in which that page holds page one (a top-ten organic result; sponsored placements do not count) and earns at least one click. Checked in your Search Console, not ours. If a page drops off page one, it stops being billed until it climbs back. No contract.
That is the whole difference between this and a monthly retainer: a retainer bills whether or not anything ranked. What local SEO costs sets our pricing against the rest of the market, and the pricing calculator runs the numbers for your own town list.
See which towns you have no page for How the build works
Frequently asked questions
How much does reputation management cost?
Published rates run from about $149 a month for local review software to $3,000–$15,000 a month for enterprise search-result repair. Local businesses are typically quoted $150–$600 a month depending on industry. The table above links the sources for both ends.
What is the average cost of reputation management?
We are not going to give you one, because the three products sold under that name are priced an order of magnitude apart and averaging them produces a number that describes nothing. Decide which of the three you are buying first, then compare inside that band.
Which reputation management company is best?
We do not rank them, because we do not work in that market and any list we published would be guesswork. What we can tell you is what to check: whether the price is for software or for someone doing the work, whether the contract has a term, and whether anything in the proposal is phrased as a guaranteed outcome. That last one is the tell.
Do reviews affect Google rankings?
Yes — reviews are one of the signals Google weighs for local results, alongside the page itself and the proximity of the searcher. That is why a thin review profile can hold back a page that is otherwise strong. It is also why we describe reviews as a signal rather than selling them as a service.
Is reputation management worth it for a small local business?
It depends on whether you are already findable. If you rank in the towns you serve and the reviews are what is costing you the call, then yes. If you have no page for half the towns around you, a review programme is polishing something almost nobody is looking at.
Does FiveStarGuard sell reputation management?
No. Local SEO and answer-engine optimisation only, priced per ranked page. This page exists because people arrive here asking the cost question, and sending them somewhere unrelated would waste their time.