How To Deal With Bad Reviews

| SEO

How To Deal With Bad Reviews

 

Google My Business pages are very important to an estate agents reputation and if you receive a negative review they can be quite difficult to recover from. However with a bit of effort it is possible to overcome bad reviews...

Why does it matter?

Google My Business pages have quite a big impact on both online reputation and click-through rates (CTR). You should always address negative reviews; otherwise they have the potential to affect rankings, traffic and sales.

  • 7 out of 10 people say they trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations.
  • 5 out of 10 people say they are more likely to use a local business that has a positive reputation.

Negative reviews also affect your rankings within Google's local search results, so if you want to be found you must do everything you can to squish bad reviews.

How to deal with bad reviews

If you don’t believe that the review is genuine then you can report it to Google. You can “Report a policy violation” by clicking the “Flag as inappropriate” symbol below the review. Google will then review the comment and if it goes against Googles guidelines than the review will be removed.

However if the comment is genuine you won’t be able to remove it. Here is how you can overcome genuine bad feedback:

1) Publicly respond to the negative review.

If you are the verified owner of the Google My Business page then you can respond to negative reviews. This will usually only work if you can fix the issue and make the customer happy but it does let potential customers know that you are on top of your customer services and if you do solve the issue, the reviewer may even remove the negative review altogether.   

2) Dilute the negative reviews with positive ones.

If you could get your current happy clients to write reviews then you will bury the negative reviews and improving your overall ratings. A constant flow of positive reviews will greatly weaken the impact of the negative ones but how can you achieve them?

There are a few ways in which you can obtain positive reviews:

  1. Asking current customers in person
  2. Directly emailing customers requesting reviews
  3. Onsite requests

Every now and then you may get some bad feedback from an unhappy customer and in many cases they can’t be removed or avoided. However negative comments can be countered with a direct response and positive reviews. By doing this you will ensure your estate agencies online reputation won’t be damaged.    

Luke Stanley