How to Overcome Negative Reviews On Google+

Every business will get one. The unfortunate truth is that many of your customers will not leave a good review out of their own accord, not unless you have completely blown their socks off. However, if they receive a bad customer service, you will most likely find a negative review on your Google+ within a couple of hours.

Why are Reviews Important

When people are going to spend money on a service or product, they want to be assured that what they are about to purchase is good quality for the money and for this assurance they look at previous customer reviews. Below are the results of a survey carried out by the guys at Bright Local:

• 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
• 67% of consumers read 6 reviews or less before they can trust the business
• 73% of consumers say positive customer reviews make them trust a business more

So as you can see, trust plays a crucial part in the decision of a consumer and reviews are the easiest but also most powerful ways to gain the trust of your customers.

Another benefit of collecting reviews on Google+ is the visual attraction it provides in the Google search results.

Once you get about 5 positive reviews on your Google+ page, your page should start to display the golden stars in the local pack as shown below:

The business that stands out to me from the local pack is YooHoo Photography. This is also a great representation that being #1 on Google is not always going to generate you loads more clicks than the ones below. Just like it does for you, me or any other human being… spotting those golden stars immediately makes you want to click on them first.

Solutions To Negative Reviews

Reply to the Reviews  

Another great feature of claiming your Google+ page is the ability to reply to reviews that have been left on your business page. Just to make things clear, this is not an opportunity to tell your customer how you really feel. Instead, you should reply politely, apologising for the problems that occurred and ask them to email you so that you can address the problems.

This shows other viewers that:

1.  You care about your customer’s experience
2. You are willing to investigate and fix the problems so that they don’t happen again.

Pile Good Reviews On Top 

As explained earlier in this post, constantly collecting good reviews is crucial for improving a reader’s opinion on your business. When I am planning a holiday abroad, I always check the reviews on TripAdvisor and I have noticed that nearly every hotel will have at least one bad review. Do I trust the bad review? Well to answer the question it completely depends on the other reviews surrounding the bad one. Ultimately if a majority of the reviews are positive with very few being negative, it makes the bad ones less believable.

So let this be a lesson to you…care about your reviews. Not only will it allow you to see where things are going wrong, but it will also highlight the things people love about your business which will allow you to develop it even further. If you do have any question regarding reviews please leave a comment below.