What If Your Company Has Negative Reviews?
You believe that your company offers tremendous value to your customers. You have high-quality products, your staff is friendly and knowledgeable, and you always go above and beyond to make sure customers are fully satisfied.
Unfortunately, your company got a handful of negative reviews online. Sites like Google, Yelp and Facebook all allow people to leave these reviews from their own profiles. You believe that these are holding your company back and reducing your sales, but what can you do about it? Sometimes it feels like you don’t have any options and you desperately want people to know everything that makes your company great.
Fortunately, there are a lot of different options to consider. We’ll break down a few of them below.
Respond Quickly to Those Who Leave Negative Reviews
You may think that keeping your mouth shut is the best option so that you do not make things worse, but it’s usually best to at least respond to the review. Try to be kind and civil, never insulting the reviewer or escalating the situation. Simply state your side, express regret that they had a bad experience, and stress why your company works so hard to make sure things like this don’t happen. The response that you leave doesn’t get rid of the review, but it may mean that some people who read the review will still come to your business.
Find Out if You Can Have the Reviews Removed
In some cases, there are ways to have fraudulent reviews removed. Maybe you think that the review was left by a bot. Perhaps your company is catching bad press from people who have never even been there, and they are leaving reviews despite knowing nothing about your products. Maybe you think someone just accidentally left a review for the wrong business. If you can show that it’s not real in some way, it may be removed.
Bury Those Negative Reviews
Finally, if you can’t remove the reviews and you already responded, the way to increase your overall rating is to get more positive reviews. In many cases, the review ratings are averaged out. If you have two reviews and they’re both bad, a casual glance at your rating makes it look incredibly low. People may not even bother to read the reviews. But, if you have 20 reviews and only two are negative, that makes your rating look far better overall. Readers will assume that one or two people had a bad experience, but that it doesn’t reflect what they should expect from your company as a whole. This is why it can help to reach out to past customers and ask them to leave a review if they’re satisfied with the products.
Can We Help?
As an online marketing and SEO company, the team here at Content Customs has a lot of experience with branding and reputation management. Please contact us now to learn more about how we can help.