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.
- 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!