How To Reply To Negative Google Reviews

How do you handle negative Google reviews that impact your online reputation?

I recently had a client who got an extremely negative Google review on their Google My Business listing, as well as on their Facebook Page. The client believed they were falsely blamed for a transaction that didn’t go the way the reviewer wanted it to go.

It happened to be a real estate deal where a potential buyer’s offer was rejected by the seller because of a higher offer from another party interested in the same property. Because his offer was rejected in favor of the higher offer, this person decided to take it out on my Client, the realtor representing the seller.

Regardless of the legitimacy of the review, we had to decide the best course of action to do damage control to my Client’s online business reputation.

Negative Review Mistakes To Avoid

By the time we were made aware of the situation, critical mistakes were made in handling the review on the Client’s Facebook Page. The biggest mistake our Client made was taking a defensive position while in the throes of an emotional reaction to the bad review.

Others who picked up the offense were also posting using inappropriate language, only adding insult to injury.

Never reply to a review when your blood is boiling!

Either ask for help from someone not emotionally connected or wait until you can get full control over your emotions.

We had no choice but to remove our Client’s Facebook Page, because the damage had already been done for the whole world to see. It would have been better to adopt the same approach that we did for the negative Google review.

Our Review Solution Can Work For You

We decided to reply to the review on the Google My Business page in a professional and polite tone of voice, and then eclipse it with a stream of positive reviews. This would be possible because of our Client’s exceptional service over decades of doing business in the same location.

Plus their Google My Business Page only had two reviews. One 5 star and then the 1 star negative review. So it would be easy enough to drown out a single negative review by adding a number of positive reviews.

After replying to the review, we recommended our Client send a short email to many of their clients asking if they would be willing to leave an honest review. We wanted to make it super easy for people to leave reviews, so we created a link that was included in each email request.

When the person receiving the review request email from our Client clicks on the included link, it takes them directly to our Client’s Google review page. This makes it much more likely for someone to follow through.

With each new review, we made sure our Client replied thanking the reviewer for taking the time to review their business.

Provide a Direct Link to Google My Business Review Box

To create a review link for your Google My Business Page, try the following steps. Because Google is constantly changing how reviews work, this may not work. We will try to keep it updated as much as possible.

Grab your smart phone. Open up your browser of choice, go to Google.com. In the screenshots below, I am using the Safari browser on an iPhone  but the process is the same on most smartphones and browsers.

Search for your business name exactly as it appears on your Google My Business listing. Your business’s Knowledge Graph should show up with all of your business information. If you don’t see your business, just modify your search a little – include your city/state, phone number, address, etc. – until your business pops up.

Hit that round blue button with the down arrow.

Scroll down a bit, find the “Review and Rate” section. Tap that 5th star at the far right. Make sure you hit that 5th star, this will be the default rating that will be copied over in the URL you share with your clients and customers.

Now you should be at the review screen. Press and hold in the address bar until the option appears to copy the URL.

You now have a universal link that will work on desktop or mobile.

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-us&ei=Ii3kV_yPCajajwTJvpHYDQ&q=dsprindle&oq=dsprindle&gs_l=mobile-gws-serp.12…8994.11636.0.13865.7.7.0.2.2.0.185.795.1j5.6.0.foo%2Cbruas%3D1%2Cbrua%3D1%2Cbrapml%3D1…0…1.1.64.mobile-gws-serp..1.3.210…0j0i10k1.KzXoBnAldFc#fpstate=lie&lrd=0x5353bb11fc572ef7:0xfb9d394fa00dbb8d,3,5

You can email it to yourself and start to use it exactly how it is right now. Because it’s such a long ugly url, the best option is to create a professional URL like – dsprindle.com/review/, which redirects to the big-long URL above.

That’s what we do. Click the link to see it in action.

You can create this redirection in the .htaccess file of your web host. The .htaccess file is in the root of your website. You can usually access it through your hosting control panel (or cPanel) or via FTP. Because this is usually a hidden file, you must enable the ‘view hidden files’ option.

In your .htaccess file, add the redirection in the format below on a single line replacing the highlighted Google link with the one you just created.

Redirect 301 /review/ https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-us&ei=Ii3kV_yPCajajwTJvpHYDQ&q=dsprindle&oq=dsprindle&gs_l=mobile-gws-serp.12…8994.11636.0.13865.7.7.0.2.2.0.185.795.1j5.6.0.foo%2Cbruas%3D1%2Cbrua%3D1%2Cbrapml%3D1…0…1.1.64.mobile-gws-serp..1.3.210…0j0i10k1.KzXoBnAldFc#fpstate=lie&lrd=0x5353bb11fc572ef7:0xfb9d394fa00dbb8d,3,5

Now you have a link that will make it easy for your clients to post a review on your Google My Business Page. Because this makes it so simple for people, they will be much more likely to follow through with your request.

In a short time, the negative Google reviews became insignificant for our client and resulted in positive action that may not have happened without the pain inflicted by the negative review. I hope you can turn your negative into a positive as well.