How to Respond to Negative Google Reviews

Maintaining a polite and professional approach while responding to positive and negative reviews on Google is important. The best way to respond to a bad review is to address the concerns raised in the review, offer a sincere apology if necessary, and offer to make things right to improve your customer’s negative experience. Always remember to verify the customer review details within your Google My Business Profile and respond promptly to show your commitment to customer satisfaction. 

On the previous episode of The Determined Mom Podcast, we discussed How to Respond to Negative Google Reviews. When a business acknowledges these reviews, as Sylvia Ho mentioned, it demonstrates a commitment to understanding and addressing customer issues, positive or negative. I also take the time to share valuable tips for how to respond to negative feedback or reviews about your business.

1. Don’t Take It Personally: The first step is not to take negative reviews personally. Understand that people who leave negative reviews may have different experiences than you desire but it is still important to respond to an unhappy customer.

2. Acknowledge Feelings: Address the reviewer cordially, and respond directly, by acknowledging their feelings and thanking them for taking the time to review your business. Avoid getting into arguments, and don’t respond to personal attacks. Readers of the review response you leave will see how you respond to a customer with a negative experience.

3. Show Empathy: Apologize for their negative experience or dissatisfaction, make them feel heard, and show that you care about their feelings and feedback.

4. Offer a Solution: Tell them that you are sorry to hear their concerns and offer them to reach out and discuss the issue further. Invite them to please feel free to contact you directly through phone or email to address the problem because it is your goal to always provide the best possible service.

5. Maintain Professionalism: Take responsibility and keep your response to negative reviews professional, even if the reviewer is aggressive or unreasonable. Use your response to a negative review as a chance to help you improve your business.                                              

6. Highlight Customer Service: Emphasize that you value customer satisfaction and are committed to resolving issues promptly. 

7. Avoid Details Online: Don’t discuss specific details or disputes in your response. Encourage the reviewer to contact you directly to discuss the matter more.

8. Be Brief and Positive: Keep your response to a bad Google review concise and positive. The best response is to focus on being willing to address their concerns rather than engaging in a back-and-forth argument.

9. Timely Responses: Even if you receive a bad Google review for your business, you must aim to respond to negative reviews promptly. 

10. Use Review Responses Strategically: Remember that your review responses are not just for the reviewer but for potential customers. 

11. Encourage Positive Reviews: Gather and ask for reviews from every satisfied customer coming back to your business.

Why Responding to Reviews is Important

Responding to your Google reviews is critical, and there are different reasons why you should reply to your reviews. I will give four reasons why responding with positive and negative reviews is important.

Reason 1. Bad reviews hurt because Google picks up everything that is in that review. 

Google not only picks up good reviews or negative ones but also your response to the review. For example, If a customer has a particular service,  like a hair salon, and let’s say they got a great haircut, they mention exactly what they got done. They mention your salon name and the city and say, ” This was the best balayage and haircut I’ve ever had, and I cannot wait to go back.” That is going to give you more of an SEO Juice on Google.

And let’s say a customer doesn’t leave a great detailed review. And they only ” Sarah’s so great. It was amazing. Love it. Can’t wait to go back”. What was great? What was amazing? Why can’t you wait to go back? Google doesn’t have any idea. As the business owner, you must put those details in that review. 

For example, ” Sarah is excellent. I’m so glad you enjoyed your eyelash treatment and her service”. And you want to use all those keywords in your reply, especially if they don’t leave it in the review. So that is the number one reason, KEYWORDS. 

Reason 2. Protect your online reputation

The review response is really all about reputation management. If you get a negative review, and you learn how to respond make sure that the next customer who’s reading that review is comfortable with your response. And you want that next customer to say, “I would like to go there just because of how they replied to this negative review.” That is the kind of response you need to put out there. I’ve seen a lot of business owners start arguing with people. 

They start name-calling. It’s just not the place to do it. And the reason is that you’re not replying to that person leaving you the review; you’re replying to every potential future customer that you have that is looking at your listing. So keep that in mind when you’re responding because it does help your reputation. You can steer that ship however you’d like and give the public the proper feeling about your business, the proper knowledge of what you do, all of those things in review response. 

Reason 3. Responding to all reviews

Responding to your online reviews is important because it is every customer that you’re responding to. They will get an email after you respond to the review, and it will say, have responded to your review on Google, and they’ll get a link to check it out. And so that is going to give them a warm fuzzy feeling if it’s a nice heartfelt response, and they’re going to be like, “I can’t wait to see that person next time, or I can’t wait to go back for my next service or treatment.” 

They’re not going to be able to forget you as easily. It’s another touch in your customer service system, and it lets that customer know that you value them and want to see them again soon, and you took the time out of your day to respond to their review. You might have 100 reviews in your Google Business Profile. You took the time to respond to their review. 

Reason 4. Monitoring all reviews

The reason why we’re responding to reviews is important is for your business practices. So ensure you have a system for review response, whether, on Google, Yelp, or any of that can affect how you run your business. Paying attention to the reviews that are coming in. Are they good? Are they bad? Is there anything in them that you can use to improve? Is there anything that you can talk to your staff about that might be something that can be mitigated for the next customer that comes in so they don’t have that same experience? It’s very important to read your reviews, process them, and understand how you can use them to improve. 

 Using Keywords in Reviews and Review Responses

Keywords and review responses are really important to your website and your social media, your blog posts, and for Google My Business, everything you write in both negative and positive reviews should include your keywords. That includes reviews and review responses from your happy or unhappy customers. If you have one service you want to rank for that you’re not ranking for. Let’s say you added a service recently, and you haven’t had a lot of clients, but it’s going to be a successful service, and you want to get as much traction for it. This is where in your review management responses, you can start adding that in. So maybe, you respond to customer feedback who had a massage and say, ” Happy that you loved your massage.” 

The best tool I can suggest, and the one I use in keyword research, is “keywords everywhere.” I recommend to every single business owner to have this tool built into their Chrome browser. So anytime you Google anything, it’s going to bring up statistics on the right-hand side, it’s going to bring up a little chart, and it’s going to say these are similar searches or to whatever search you’re doing. Then you can just click the button and see the search volume, the cost per click, and how competitive that particular term is to rank for. And again, that extension is keywords everywhere.

Can You Remove Reviews from Google?

You cannot remove a review from Google. However, if it is inappropriate, contains inappropriate language or abusive, and contains hate speech, there are some parameters in which that review can be removed. So you can submit a request to Google to have a particular review removed. If it doesn’t contain anything that violates Google’s terms, then most likely, they’re going to leave it. There are some occasions in which I have had reviews removed from cut for customers. 

Let’s say I had a carpet cleaning service, and someone left a review for a chiropractor on their listing, and it said chiropractor. The case was. I could submit that review to Google and say, “This is the wrong business. They did not mean to leave this here. Maybe they clicked on the wrong place and just went to town on the review”.

 But that is an instance where you can get reviews removed from Google. Why can’t you remove just any old review? The reason is that people want to know the good, the bad reviews, and the negative feedback for every business. And Google also wants people to know those things as well. If someone had a bad experience, it’s really important for Google as a reputation management service to allow those negative reviews to stand.

How to Get More Google Reviews

You may have a CRM, follow-up, or email system in your business. Every time you send an email, you want to have a link to your Google review page. I don’t mean just your Google My Business listing. If you go on to your home, log in to Google My Business, go home, and then scroll down, you’ll see a little person that’s like looking up at the sky.

That is where you can get your review link. So you’re going to click that. Copy that link because that will get your people to go directly to your review link and start typing. All they have to do is click that link and start things. So there’s no friction in there. They’re not going to go to your listing and then have to figure out where the reviews are because sometimes it’s hard for you to find, and then they’re going to click on it, and then they’re going to click on write a review. 

Now this takes them into the compose a review section. This is important for every type of business, but it’s also really important to have that link on your website, your Facebook page, and your invoices wherever you interact with your clients. It’s important to do that. Another great way to get more reviews is to have a follow-up system. This system will allow you, after your customer leaves or after your business is completed with them, it will allow them to get an email from you, and it will give them the link to leave a review. 

How Review Generation Software Works

We recently started doing this for our clients at TDM Marketing. It empowers the owners of the business to control the ratings that go onto their listing, And it also allows the clients of the business to easily, without very much resistance, leave reviews. Review generation software we offer at TDM Marketing Works by you either have it on your website. You can have a link on your website that will go to a kiosk page, and someone will just click on how they thought their service was. 

So 1 star, 2 stars, 3 stars, four stars, 5 stars, whatever that is, If they click on 1 through 3 stars, they will be directed to give feedback. Like, what went wrong, and what happened in this case? Why didn’t you like the service? What could we have done better? What are we going to do next time to keep you here as a customer? What can we do this time to fix what we’ve done? that you didn’t like. 

So those numbers are going to lead them there. And if they click on a 4 or a 5, they are going to be directed to your Google link your Yelp link, or whatever link you choose to have them leave it on; our software allows you to automate that, and it will allow you to pick from the one with the lease reviews. So you can put it on if you have 400 Google and 20 Yelp reviews. 

It will allow you to build up those Yelp reviews, and it will direct people automatically based on the number of reviews you have. If you have Google, if you haven’t set to Google reviews, this is why I love Google. You are going to be able to collect a ton of reviews. The more reviews you have, as we spoke about in past episodes of this series, the more keywords are going to be in your reviews for Google to choose from, and that is going to give you a deeper keyword profile online in the local SEO and national SEO market. 

So those keywords are very important, And the more of those you have in your reviews, the better. So how can you get more in your reviews? You have to get more reviews. So that’s where this review generation software comes in because it automates everything for you. It will immediately send out an email to your client. We can tie it to your CRM; you don’t have to enter them manually. 

 The Easiest Way to Respond to Google Reviews

You don’t even have to think about it. It’s like responding to a text message. That’s how easy it’s going to be for you. You will first go to either the Google Play Store or the Apple iTunes Store or App Store. All technology aside. You’re going to download the Google Maps app from Google.

This is the most effective way. And not only just reviews, it will also allow you to get direct customer messages. If you have a  hair salon and someone asks, “Do you have someone great at this haircut?” Like, long bobs or angle bobs or, you know, any of those things, your customer contemplating whether they should choose you or another salon can send you a message on Google My Business. If you have the app on your phone, you’ll get that message directly on your phone, and it will also go to anyone else who has access to your Google My Business on their phone. 

So Again, the Maps app on the App Store or Google Play will be your best and easiest way to respond to reviews. Because you’ll be able to take your phone out, look at the notification, click on it, and respond to that review from wherever you are, doing whatever you’re doing. Very easy for you in your pocket super easy. It’s less effort than replying to a text message from a loved one, friend, or family.