Pawan KumarGoogle reviews for your google local business listing (GMB)
When there is a bad Google review for a business, it creates chaos in the owner or authority’s minds. When you have negative reviews you start searching for how to remove google reviews. And this situation panics you, but don’t worry now this guide help you how you can come out from this mess, it tells you the different reasons to have bad google reviews, the right approach to handle the bad google reviews, different ways to remove the bad review from google, how to report google reviews, how to dispute a google review with examples here. Here we will also discuss the impact of such bad google reviews on the business, recent Google policy update regarding reviews and last we will learn about the most common and important questions searched by people to handle google business reviews and complaints.
Handling such a bad reputation comes under “Online reputation and brand management” now it is so crucial for the success of a business.
Different reasons to have bad Google reviews
- Bad Google reviews by customers
- Bad Reviews by Competitors’ conspiracy
- Fake reviews
Step by step process to handle bad google reviews in your local business listing
How to write an excellent response to the customers
How you can flag a bad google review step by step process here
How to Report, if you don’t find an appropriate reason or want to report Google specifically
The impact of negative reviews on small and large businesses.
Common & important questions are always searched by people
Different reasons to have bad Google reviews
- Bad Google reviews by customers
- Bad Reviews by Competitors’ conspiracy
- Fake reviews
Bad Google reviews by customers
Most of the time bad reviews are given by the local customers who have visited your business premises or purchased your products or avail your services. When a customer gets dissatisfied with any part of your services or products, he gives bad reviews on google. When he visits your premises, he gets a notification to review your business. He gives a bad review or negative review when he gets dissatisfied with your product or services.
In the hospitality industry, bad google reviews affect a lot because service is intangible in nature and can only be rendered when coming in contact. So it plays a very crucial role in it.
Reasons for bad reviews can be
employees behavior,
products malfunctions,
the ambiance of the business place,
convenience to find the place of your business
Inaccurate charges
Incorrect orders
and many more.
Bad Reviews by Competitors’ conspiracy
It happens mostly in the hospitality industry, one of my clients came to me and ask me about the bad reviews on his Google Business Profile. He got disturbed with bad reviews. When we search for we realized that it is done by his competitors only.
You can identify such reviews by identifying the pattern of reviews like what time reviews are given and how many they are. The profile was only created to give bad reviews because there was no review before. This was a clear indication of the conspiracy by the competitors.
Fake reviews
Sometimes you found a bad review on your google business listing. When you go back and check your visitor list, you found the reviewer has not visited your place or you haven’t rendered your services to him. But it damages yours over google ratings. Such reviews are generally given without any ill intentions but to pertain reviews genuine to gain local guide points. Things become worst when they don’t have a real profile name and image because, in such a situation, you can’t identify such reviewers.
In such a case, if you identify such a person on other social public profiles then ok otherwise you have to be dependent only on the positive reviews that you gain. Good things about this are such reviewers only give a rating and sometimes just write a word only.
Step by step process to handle bad google reviews in your local business listing
When you have negative reviews, you generally get panicked but you should now. Here we help to handle the bad reviews wisely. As a business owner, you can’t avoid such bad google reviews. Here we tell you how you can control them. And save your business by affecting such bad reviews.
Step-1. Be Analytical for such reviews.
When you get such bad google reviews, you need to identify the reason for bad reviews whether it is from a genuine customer, competitors, and spam.
You need to go to your order book and visitor book to identify whether he is your genuine customer who reviewed you or any spam
It is an excellent practice to keep the customer’s contact details like his phone number, address, and email ID.
Once you identify it is a real customer, now you should identify the reason why he gives you bad reviews on your business profile. This could be dissatisfaction with your services or products. Generally, dissatisfied customer mentions the reason for dissatisfaction with the lowest rating. It is also possible he just give you a bad rating.
After all the analysis you have two challenges
One make your process or product correct not to have bad reviews in the future
Second to take corrective actions to either remove or convert bad rating to positive 5-star rating
If you have bad reviews from a fake account then you can identify the person by his profile photo (if it is there), you can search it on different social profiles.
Step-2. Find the Accountability
As we have indicated in the first challenge to correct the process or correct the product-related issue, this could be anything that annoyed the customer. If you neglect this, it may affect you further and maybe cause more bad google reviews to correct the concern
If you have fake reviews or competitors’ conspiracy, then you can’t make anything accountable.
Step.3 Plan your response
If your review is genuinely given by customers
If a review is given by a customer and you have the contact details of him or her, you can request him or her to improve his/her review by given him some extra benefits. Tell him that you have resolved the issue. If there is an issue in customers’ products and services, you can solve it and ask customers to update his review.
You can have a positive reply to his review because google gives you options to respond to him. You can have a requesting response to him to resolve his concern and then ask him to update or remove bad reviews.
Honestly speaking it helps me a lot and my 80% of reviews are resolved by this method only
If your review is fake or conspired
You can reply on such negative reviews by asking them to resolve their problems because as we mentioned potential customer is much interested in your response as well. If you give a decent and humble reply then it may create you positive sense in the customers’ minds.
If you put your customer care number or any contact details to resolve the problem, it also helps your potential customers to understand how much you are ready for customer help
You can flag fake reviews it is said that 5 flags or objections force google to remove bad reviews, but those must be from different systems and different google accounts, but this sometimes works and sometimes don’t. In my cases sometimes it worked for me or sometimes not.
When a fake review has fake information and here are some ways to get them removed from google business listing.
Here are different cases in which you can go for flagging and google will definitely remove bad google reviews from your business profile are
A. Reviews made by old employees and
B. Reviews have a racist comment
C. The review has pointed out any name of a person with derogatory or foul or objectional language usage
Here in flag option, google gives you space to mentioned the objectionable part of the review with the local law or country-specific law You have to mention the sections of the law which are breached in the law and report it to google.
In my case, we have got removed lots of malicious reviews made by a conspirator to malign our business reputation.
Trust me guys, We have successfully got removed many bad and fake reviews form our google business listing.
to know more about the google review policy you can read here
Way without approaching to customers or fake review
You can also hire a review managing agency that helps you to get rid of such bad reviews and update google reviews for you.
You can ask your customers who are happy with your product and services to give a detailed review of your product and services because a comprehensive review always is displayed on the top. If you have a bad review and you found you are unable to get the issue resolved then you should go ahead and get some positive review immediately. Because the newest review must be positive, these should not be negative; otherwise, it may affect potential customers.
How to write an excellent response to the customers
Some examples of responses are here.
Hello ____,
We are really very sorry for such a bad experience of our services, and we never want to lose a customer like you.
We want to tell you that we have resolved the problem area you pointed out in our services. And we are very happy if you revisit us and feel our services. We offer you a 50% discount for your next visit.
Hello____,
We are very sorry for such an inconvenience, and we really want to help you and want to replace the product| send a free visit to your place | get repair your product. You can call on +91-XXXXX-XXXXX number anytime to resolve your product-related problems. We will be happy to help you and never want you to feel bad about our product.
For bad fake reviews, you want to report to google
Here is a report I have made to google to remove bad google reviews and google after a review has removed the bad review from my business listing.
Prima facia “Mr. ___________” has never been part of the organization and nor has visited _________. as per our records.
This review has been initiated just to malign the organizations’ image and is activated either by any competitor or a fake account.
If this is an actual account, we would need the details on the identity to pursue this act of defamation legally.
Here are the following sections according to the Indian law that would like to pursue this case against this individual if this is not a fake account.
In his first statement “________any hypothetical _______” is a hypothetical statement and not the factual information and also do not meetings review guidelines by google of sharing only personal experiences.
As we mentioned above that he has not been the part of our organization, there is no point to believe in whatever he has stated in his review here. Whatever he mentioned is having an ill intention and malicious thinking to defame ___________. And damage the brand value of the organization.
As per Section 499 in The Indian Penal Code which states about the Defamation has an explanation “It may amount to defamation to make an imputation concerning a company or an association or collection of persons as such.”
We observe that this Google ID is created having ill intention and malicious thinking to defame _________________. And damage the brand value of the organization.
Harassment via a fake public profile on social networking site
Provisions Applicable:- Sections 66A, 67 of IT Act
In his review, he stated “I pity them as they are working under a set of IDIOTS. “
it is clearly the online abuse which comes under Section 66A in The Information Technology Act 2000 (amended in 2008) [Section 66 A] [Punishment for sending offensive messages through communication service, etc.]
(Introduced vide ITAA 2008).
Section 67 – Punishment for publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form
Question 2
To ensure specificity, please quote the exact text from each URL above that you believe infringes on your rights. If the allegedly infringing content is a picture or video, please provide a detailed description of the picture/video in question so that we may locate it on the URL in question. *
Answer 2
“I am sure ___________ is banned in many countries”
Section 499 in The Indian Penal Code
“I pity them as they are working under a set of IDIOTS. “
Sections 66A, 67 of IT Act and Section 509 of the Indian Penal Code.
Fake Google ID is created having ill intention and malicious thinking to defame _____________. And damage the brand value of the organization.
Sections 66A
How you can flag a bad google review step by step process here
Step-1
Log in your Google Business Account
Click on Google My Business or type your business name
Step-2
In sidebar click on “Reviews” option
Step-3
Just against the bad review, you click on three vertical dots
Step-4
A pop-up is telling you due to high demand or high numbers of requests your review may be delayed. Here you can find a Google’s content policy link to learn more about the Google content policy
Here you click on the “Continue” button
Step-5
Here is Report a policy violation
Here you need to mention your email address and select the right violation type. After it, you submit your request.
This may be one flag in this way
How to Report, if you don’t find an appropriate reason or want to report Google specifically
Now if you find a very derogatory comment, you feel this is very harmful to your business. Fake or can say to malign your brand or business reputation. Here is “Report other legal removal issues” a legal firm to get removed the review from your business listing.
https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_legalother?product=googlemybusiness&uraw=
How to fill this Legal form to get removed your bad google reviews which you feel is subject to legal action?
Before filling this form, you should know that Google is considering that you don’t get the right category to file your complaint
If you want to know more how to submit this form, you can write to me on conceptdigitalmarketing18@gmail.com
The impact of negative reviews on small and large businesses.
Bad Google reviews always create panic for business. It affects average ranking when they are low, but when the numbers of reviews are high, it affects the reviews, but when there are a large number of negative reviews. You can say a number of reviews are directly proportionate to the number of bad google reviews.
So you can draw a conclusion that bad Google reviews affect small business high. When any small business gets a negative Google review, it is really a concerning issue for them. But it doesn’t mean that large companies should not care about the reviews because any negative write-up about any part of services or products may create doubt in your potential customer’s mind. because there are options which are
Newest,
Most relevant,
Highest rating
and the Lowest rating.
Most of the time, users filter and read “Newest” reviews so we can say it also affects the large businesses as well by creating doubts in the customer’s mind.
Bad Google reviews can be anything between 1 start to 3 stars, but 4 and 5-star reviews are good like for online reputation
management
1-star to 2-star reviews are considered bad
3 to 4-star reviews are average and require improvement
5-star reviews are good
The previously, an old employee could give the review to the business which affected the business in terms of human resources. Bad google reviews also create a feeling of distrust in potential employees’ minds, and they avert to join the business which has bad google reviews. But now Google policy has changed the policy and said that an old employee of the company can’t review the companies.
The potential customers who desire to buy your products or services want to see the reviews before buying, they find followings while seeing your negative reviews.
They read bad reviews to identify how you handle them?
What can be the worst level? And will your product or services meet his/her requirements?
Common & important questions are always searched by people
How to delete google reviews posted by others?
The answer is you can’t delete google reviews with your choice for removing such bad google reviews or negative google reviews you must follow the procedure which is mentioned below in details.
How to remove google reviews from the map?
Right now, there are no options available in google local business listing. Even if you want to remove your listing from google it can’t be deleted from Google, and it will exist, but you would not be able to manage it in the future so going to remove listing is always be a bad idea until you have lots of bad reviews.
How to turn off google reviews or can I turn off google reviews for my business?
Below screenshot is showing that you can’t turn off google reviews from your google local listing dashboard so you can’t stop a user from doing this. But you can report google or complaint google to report any conspiracy.
How to hide google reviews?
No, you can’t hide any google review, but you can generate positive reviews from your customers to get your negative or bad google reviews to get down.
Conclusion
The conclusion is you can not delete your local google listing. You can’t turn off your reviews and delete them. But you can manage them in different ways. And make them a boon for your business to enhance it with growing footfalls and products sell.
Google reviews have benefited many businesses. They got an excellent response from their Google business listing locally. We always suggest being very careful with your Google reviews on the notification. When someone reviews your product and services on google map or your local listing.
For getting a notification to go in your Google listing and get into the settings here, you will find the option for getting a notification on just click on it like below
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