Almost every local business has felt the impact of positive and negative online reviews on Google and having both good and bad in the mix actually makes you look like a legitimate business to prospective customers looking for your business.
1. Respond as soon as possible to the negative review – When someone says something bad about your business it can set off a knee jerk reaction that makes you want to “give it right back” to them. But resist the urge to sound defensive! Customers that have a negative experience at your business sometimes just need to be heard, and so they take to the internet. Once that happens and they feel understood, they may remove the review if you respond effectively. Here’s a few tips for your response:
- Be concise
- Be professional
- Let the customer know you appreciate all feedback and will do whatever you can to make it right
- Ask the customer to get in contact with you and leave a number or email for them to take action
- Once they follow up and in a non-public forum, ask them if they would help you out by amending or removing their negative review
- Claim your business on Google by visiting Google.com/business if you haven’t already
- Sign into your Google My Business account
- Click on the location that has the review you want to change
- Pull up the menu bar and click on “reviews”
- Type your response and click Submit
- Visit Google Maps where they likely left the review
- Click on the Menu with 3 lines in the upper lefthand corner of the webpage
- Click on “Your Contributions”
- Click on “Reviews”
- Locate the review you want to delete
- Click on “More” 3 dots image
- Choose to either edit or delete the review
- Log into your Google My Business profile
- Select the location with the negative review you want to flag
- Pull up the menu bar and click on “Reviews”
- Click on the 3 dots next to the negative review
- Click on “Flag as inappropriate”
- Ask others to also flag reviews so it will draw attention to the review sooner
- Keep a screenshot of the negative review handy to send to Google
- Visit support.google.com/business
- Click on “contact us” at the upper righthand side of the webpage
- Click on the “customer reviews and photos” option
- Click on the “manage customer reviews” option
- Select the option to connect with Google by phone, web chat, or email – you can also tweet @GoogleMyBiz and sometimes you can get a faster response
- Wait up to 24 hours for Google to reach out at which time they might escalate your claim further to a specialist who will be in touch with you about the negative review removal
In short, it isn’t easy and it can be a painstaking process to remove a negative Google review about your local business (wouldn’t it be great if there was a big shiny button you could push instead? :). But, it IS possible. Take the steps above to make it happen and let us know if you have any questions!