Google reviews are very important for any business, and bad ones can have a severe impact.
Google reviews are very important to your company or business because they carry a lot of weight with many customers. Although Google reviews are mostly positive sentiments from your previous customers there are days when you will be faced with a bad review from a potentially dissatisfied customer. Such a review may be very demoralizing and may even affect your reputation if not carefully dealt with. So what would you do if you find yourself in a situation where someone has left a bad review for you or your business? Here are some steps that will guide you on how to take control of the situation.
8 Steps to take control
Stay calm
The most important thing in such a situation is to stay calm. A bad review may make you so angry that you want to lash out at the reviewer especially if the complaint is not entirely your fault. Take time to calm down. Do not respond to a bad review with high emotions because you are likely to use rude or aggressive approach towards the client or complainant. You should keep in mind that bad reviews get more attention from future customers because want to see your approach towards a dissatisfied client.
Check out the authenticity of the complainant
Competitors or even simply mischievous people may write a negative review about your company simply to hurt your business’s reputation. It is, therefore, a good idea to check whether the complainant is actually a real customer whom you served. Verify details of the complainant’s transaction or the service that was provided to the customer and the attending personnel. If the reviewer is a fake and does not exist within your accounts, move quickly to flag the review as false and ask Google to remove it. Meanwhile, comment on the review and note that you cannot find the reviewer within the business account history. However, you should also apologize to the reviewer for any inconveniences that may have been caused by the situation. What this does is that it shows any potential customers that you are willing to own up to any issues that may arise and that you are willing to respond quickly.
Contact the reviewer personally
In a case where the complainant is an actual client that your business served, then the next appropriate step is to contact them as soon as possible to own up to the issue that the client has raised and then assure them that the issue will be dealt with as soon as possible. This can be done through their email or maybe their account messaging section. You should ask them to give you full details about the issue they faced. Communicate with the personnel involved
Once you have heard the client’s side of the story, it is best you talk to the personnel who served the client and understand the issue fully from both sides. By doing this you will have a clear idea of the cause of the problem and can then resolve it.
Take action to rectify the issue or compensate the client
The next logical step is to take measures to solve the issue raised by both parties. This may involve replacing a defective part sold to the client, sending personnel to the client to help them with setting up or understanding the purchased object, compensating the client by giving them subsidies or discounts in future, training your personnel on how to handle customers in future or even laying off personnel who misbehaved. Whatever step you take, ensure it tries to solve the issue raised.
Communicate back to the dissatisfied client
You should then communicate back to the client and inform them of the steps you have taken to resolve their complaint. There are chances that this client may change their view and change, delete or add a positive review that would further enhance your business’s reputation.
Comment on the public review
Once the disgruntled client is satisfied, you should then move back to the public review and comment on it. Your comment should own up to the issue raised by the review, express your apology for the situation and the inconveniences it has caused, explain the steps you have taken to resolve the issue and assure the client that you have taken measures to ensure the situation never happens again. This shows future potential customers that your business responds quickly and positively to their client’s complaints.
Seek as many positive reviews from your satisfied customers as possible
Although positive reviews do not swallow up the negative reviews, having as many positive reviews as possible will help to dilute the effect of bad reviews. You should, therefore, request your satisfied customers to leave you a review. A business that has many positive reviews appears reputable and attractive to potential new clients.
Learn from the review and stay on top of the situation
There is nothing as bad as having two negative reviews from different clients complaining about the same issue. It shows that the business has not learned from their mistakes and are repeating them, therefore, are likely to offer you poor services as well. It is therefore important that you learn from a bad review and try as much as possible to never repeat the mistake.
Consumers depend on Google reviews, which also impact on business ranking.
An Introduction to Google Reviews
The Internet has transformed the way businesses operate and how they interact with their customers. Increasingly, consumers look to the internet and its most popular search engine, Google, for information and feedback prior to making their purchase decision.
Google reviews appear like rich snippets under the links on the search page. Nothing warrants more care and attention from the business owner. These reviews have a tremendous impact on the businesses. They affect the way potential clients find, reach out to and react with the business.
Consumers Depend on Google Reviews
Nearly everyone around you and possibly all your potential customers are making Google searches right now to find nearby businesses and the relevant information regarding the products or services that they seek. In a recent study, Google found that 72% of these consumers depended on reviews to decide whether or not to trust a business.
The impact of the consumer trust factor is huge in any organization, and when Google reviews can inspire or break the consumer’s trust in a business, one can never downplay the importance of this factor in achieving success.
SEO Rating and Ranking
The way we communicate with businesses has changed dramatically over the last decade. If you are a business, you must be visible in the search results.
Your SEO rating in Google determines where you are placed in the search engine results, and hence your visibility to your potential customers as they look for information. Your ranking in Google depends on the number of reviews and of course, the positive reviews you have among them. Simply put, a review on Google will help the search engine determine the relevance of your business to the consumer. If you are not visible on the first or second page of the Google search results, the business is effectively invisible to the majority of consumers looking for you.
The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and Reviews
Studies have shown that businesses with good Google reviews have a better CTR. This means that there are more visitors to your domain and more consumers looking for information about your company and products. Of course, this has an significant impact on your business: provided the consumer finds what they think they are looking for, web visits may well translate into sales.
An improved CTR would also mean that you stand to improve your ranking in Google search results even further. You can call this a closed positive-feedback loop that has a tremendous impact on your business performance.
More Time on Your Website
Google rates your site and gives you a ranking based on your relevance to the consumer using the search engine. The amount of time the consumer spends on your website is one of the highest rated factors in determining your relevance. The more reviews you have, the longer the amount of time that visitors spend on your website. It has been found that an average customer reads at least 6 reviews before forming their decision. And they tend to read more if you have many. This means that visitors will spend more time on sites that have customer reviews and this again improves the website ranking in Google and hence your visibility.
Each Review is Content
More often than not, consumers posting reviews on Google mention the name of the business or the products or services that they consumed. The reviews then become additional snippets of distinctive content for the search engine and hold a treasure trove of keyword references to your business and your products. Google crawlers track the keywords in these contents actively and the search engine determines their increased incidence as a reason to improve your website ranking, thus raising your visibility to the consumer.
Customer Engagement
These reviews are a good way of improving customer engagement with your business. Today, when you need to occupy the mind-space of the customer as constantly as you can, there is no better avenue than getting your delighted customers to review your business on Google. Every tool at your disposal that can improve customer engagement with your brand is precious. More customer engagement translates to more brand recall and subsequent purchases!
Long Tail Keyword Targeting
Did you know that different consumer’s reviews have great similarity in the way they choose words and describe services? And did you know that many of the consumer searches use the same words to describe the service or product they are looking for?
The more Google reviews there are for your business, the more there are the chances for Long Tail Keyword targeting and thereby for improving your search ranking and your chances of being found by that consumer who is looking just for you!
