Tutorials & user manual
Exact click paths for everything you are likely to do, and plain answers for the things that usually go wrong. If you want the mechanics rather than the steps, how it works explains what the software is actually doing.
Getting started
Pick a plan, complete three short setup steps, and your locations appear. Every paid plan includes a 15-day free trial and the card is only charged when it ends — one trial per account. The Free plan needs no card at all.
Your details
/onboarding/profileYour name, and whether this is a single business or an agency. Agencies are asked roughly how many clients and staff they have.
Watch out — The dashboard will not open until this is done — any attempt redirects you back here.
Connect Google
/onboarding/connectFirstcliq asks for one permission: manage your Business Profile. That covers reading reviews, replying, reading profile details and publishing posts. It cannot read Gmail, contacts, or anything outside Business Profile.
Watch out — The Google account you sign in with must already own or manage the business listing. A personal account that has never touched the profile returns nothing — and the error you see comes from Google, not from us.
Choose locations
/onboarding/locationsEvery location on the connected Google account is listed. Tick the ones you want to manage. Your plan's limit applies — one on Free, more on paid plans.
Your first fifteen minutes
Locations appear straight away but sit empty for a few minutes. Reviews are fetched by a job that runs every fifteen minutes, so the first poll may be a quarter of an hour away. Nothing is broken — there is simply nothing yet.
Your existing reviews are picked up too, not only new ones. A profile with two hundred reviews arrives with two hundred reviews. Anything at one or two stars is held for approval rather than answered, so a large backlog becomes a queue for you to work through rather than two hundred replies going out unsupervised.
Performance figures take longer. Google publishes them two to three days behind, and a newly connected location may show nothing at first.
How to do each thing
Every path below is exact. Follow it literally.
Change how replies are written
Three modes, plus the tone and the delay before a reply posts — all on the same screen.
Tone options are Professional & warm, Friendly & casual, Formal, or Enthusiastic. Delay can be 1 hour, 4 hours, 24 hours, or hold everything for manual approval. Free plans are fixed at Professional & warm with a 24-hour delay.
Approve or edit a held review
Every held review shows why it is being held. You can edit it before sending, send it as drafted, or write your own from scratch.
Set what happens to negative reviews
1–2 star reviews are always held before anything is posted. This screen controls how long that hold lasts and what happens at the end of it.
The default is a 48-hour hold that keeps waiting rather than posting. Set the timer to immediate with a posting fallback and negative reviews are answered automatically after a short grace period — that is your call to make, not ours.
Write your reply templates
Ten scenarios per language — five star ratings, each with and without a written comment. Set the primary and optional secondary language on the same screen.
Watch out — In Template mode every scenario must be filled for each configured language. The save is refused otherwise, naming the ones you have missed — a template setup with gaps would silently hold reviews it could not answer.
Add someone who should hear about bad reviews
Any email address. They receive the same escalation alerts you do, and they do not need a Firstcliq account.
Mark the address as a client and the email carries your agency's branding instead of Firstcliq's, linking to their own portal rather than your dashboard.
Schedule a Google post
Write once, pick which locations it goes to, choose a date. Update, Offer or Event.
Watch out — Leave the image in Firstcliq for the life of the post. Google fetches it from a URL when publishing rather than copying it, so deleting it early breaks the post.
Track a keyword
Type what a customer would search for. By default it is checked from the business's own location; Search from somewhere else checks from any other area.
Positions refresh monthly. Each keyword-and-place pair counts as one slot against your account's allowance.
Send a client their monthly report
Opens a printable page. Use your browser's own Save as PDF to produce the file you send.
On Agency plans the report carries your name and logo, with no Firstcliq branding anywhere on it.
Give a client access to their own dashboard
They get a login at /c/{workspace-slug} showing only their own locations.
Per-client toggles control whether they can edit templates, see the QR review page, see competitor comparisons, and receive alert emails.
Add a teammate
Staff see only the locations assigned to them, and cannot reach billing, usage, or the team page.
Professional includes two seats and cannot buy more. Agency includes three and adds further seats automatically at the seat rate, with a confirmation before the charge.
When something goes wrong
In roughly the order people hit them.
Almost always the wrong Google account — one that does not own or manage the listing. Sign out of Google entirely and reconnect with the right account. It is also possible the listing is unverified or still pending verification with Google; that has to be resolved in Google Business Profile first, and Firstcliq cannot fix it from this side.
Worth knowing
Negative reviews are never answered instantly
One and two star reviews are always held first, on every plan. You decide how long that hold lasts — from immediate through to fully manual — and what happens when it expires: post the AI draft, post your saved template, or keep holding until you have dealt with it. The default is a 48-hour hold with reminders.
Replies go out as the business
Google shows “Response from the owner”. There is no way to attribute a reply to a particular person, and no indication it was written by AI.
The AI does not invent things
It is instructed never to promise refunds, discounts or compensation the business has not offered, and never to add details that were not in the review.
Timing is deliberate
The delay exists because an instant reply signals automation. Four hours reads as attentive; four seconds does not.
Data starts when you connect
Competitor ratings, keyword positions and performance figures are recorded from the day a location is added. There is no way to see last year — Google does not provide it, and neither does anyone else.
Still stuck?
Contact support from inside your dashboard, or read how it works for what the software is doing underneath.
See plans