How to Remove Negative/Bad Google Reviews Fast? Google My Business Tips!

In this video we're going to discuss what to do when you get that one star review. I know it's very, very frustrating and people work so hard to get a positive review and reputation. But all hope is not lost. In this video we're going to go through how you can report the review and ultimately get it removed. What you should do as far as responding goes and then some strategies to cancel out that review. And so I'm going to hop into Google and we're going to look at this together. So on your Google my business, the first thing that you're going to want to do when you get a bad review and it might not even be about your company, and we're going to look at some examples of what this looks like, but you're going to want to open up a new tab and go to google.com business and then you're going to want to sign in. And when you sign in, it's going to take you to a dashboard that looks like this for your business. And over on the left side you want to click on reviews. And what this is going to do is it's going to pull up all your reviews here and let's say that this is a one star review. You're going to click on this right here and you're going to flag as inappropriate. And then what Google does is it's going to give you options to say why is this inappropriate? So let's say that it's off topic. Review doesn't pertain to an experience at or with this business, which we've seen that this happens frequently or the it's a review from maybe a disgruntled employee or a competitor for whatever reason. So you're going to want to click on one of these things and it's going to go and it's going to, when you click on this button it's going to say, okay, this has been reported. We will look at it over the next 72 hours and if we decide that it needs to be removed, we'll remove it. So what you can do is go through and select the 1 stars that if they are not legitimate reviews, you can go through and report them. Now what if it is a legitimate review and maybe you messed up? What I want to let you know is that it's not the end of the world. And this happens a lot of times with businesses that we work with is that, you know, maybe the estimate was too high or maybe the services didn't go the way that it was supposed to go. You Know there's always going to be a situation that happens and that one person that's going to end up leaving you a bad review. So what exactly do you do? And first, it's extremely important to respond to the review because what people do is when they search for a product or service that you offer, they literally go to your business, they are reading through your reviews like this and they click on lowest and they're going to read, well, when things do go bad, why are they going bad? Like, what do I need to look out for for things going bad? And if it does go bad, what is the company doing to resolve this situation? And so I'm going to show you some examples of ways that you can respond. One example is, okay, things did just go bad. And so what do you respond? And then the second thing is, this is not even a review about our company, but for some reason Google is not removing it. And what do you say? Because at the end of the day, it's your perception, your brand reputation online. And so let's look at this first one here. This is going to be, you got a one star review about not even your company. You, you don't even know anything about this specific situation. You could look up the person's name in your database and see if they're in there. But this review clearly is talking about a completely different business than what this business is. So they're talking about, you know, I store my belongings at this place and this place and all this stuff and it's a terrible experience. And so here's a response example that you could use if this is the situation that you're in. Hi, we did not have a customer in our records matching your name. This is really important to say because even if it is a legitimate person that's used your business quote unquote, but they're not in your records, it puts doubt on this review. And so a prospective person reading this review says, oh, it's not even a customer of theirs, right? This is probably some crazy person that's out there. So we do not have a customer in our records matching your name. Right? We've looked it up. We don't even know who you are. Also, we have no affiliation or knowledge of these other companies. And, and we believe that this review is meant for a different company. Can you please remove this review for our business? So we went a step further and actually asked to remove the review because it does hurt us. And they, when you respond, they do get a response message through their Gmail account that says, this review has been responded to. So if you see a prospective person reading this review would say, okay, this is not even really a credible review because they're not in their records. They obviously don't even know who these people are. They don't know what this is. They think that this review is for a different company and they're trying to resolve the situation. Another thing you could add in here is if this is about our company, please call us here and we want to resolve this issue. So that could be another thing that you put here. All right, let's look at this next review here. And this one's going to be, you did the service and things just went bad. So the team was very nice. However, I'm still working on cleaning behind the team days later. There's debris everywhere on my shelves, all over my bathroom, just everywhere, my baseboards, you know, the whole thing. Never again. So look up this customer and say, hey, Ms. Potts, we are extremely sorry that you are experiencing dust in your house. That is not normal. We just left you a voicemail to find out what happened and to find a solution. We will reach out again within 24 hours. So again, as a prospective person reading these reviews, I would say to myself, okay, wow, they looked up this customer, they see that clearly, they're upset, they, they recognize that this is not a normal situation. They even called the customer and left a voicemail to try and rectify the situation and find a solution. And if they don't hear back, they're going to reach out again in 24 hours. That tells me as a prospective customer, that they are all about trying to resolve the situation and that again, they take customer service very seriously. And reputation is all about taking customer service very seriously. Whether you get a five star review or a one star review and how do you respond? Because customers know that things can go south with any situation, regardless of what it is. And they want to know that if things do go south, why do they typically go bad and what is the customer, what is the business's response if things go bad? What you don't want to do is come on here and blow them up about why they're a terrible human being and they, it's all their fault. Because then that comes very defensive. And then also prospect of people reading this are going to say, wow, they don't even own up to their issues. They don't try to even find solutions. They just blame the customer on everything. So there's a tactical way to do it and hopefully those two examples will explain it. To you. Now, the whole reason that you don't want one star reviews as a business owner is because it's gonna pull down your rating, right? If you're at 5 or 4.5 or 4 and you get another bad review, it's all an average, right? So just like if you have 10 five star reviews and you get one one star review, if you add all them up and divide it by 10, it's going to give you what your average score is, which is what literally shows on Google. And so what you could do if you wanted to figure these numbers out, some of our clients are very interested in where their reviews are, is you can go here and you can see your reviews. So you can see that 42 five star reviews. You can see how many fours, threes, twos, ones, and then you can figure out, okay, how many more 5 stars do I need to get to this number? If that's what you're shooting for now, this is why it's so important to have a review generation system in your business. And we have made videos about this before. But I'll give you two really, really quick examples of ways you can do this. The first one is to arm your technicians with a card like this where they can scan a QR code and they can get reviews when they're out in the field. Most people leave reviews about people, not about businesses. So my name's Phil. If you had a great experience with me, do you mind leaving me a review to let my boss know that I'm doing a great job? My name is Phil. If you could put that in the review response, it would really help me out. Right. Because they're interacting with Phil and obviously I work at a company, but they want to review their experience with Phil. So that's a very important distinction. A lot of companies will just have it fire off in the background and hopefully they get some reviews. It is good. But if you want to take it to the next level, that is what you can do. The second thing you can do is if you do next day calls. So the service just happened yesterday. I'm going to call them today just to follow up and see how everything's going. Hey, how was the service? Everything was great. Okay, awesome. How is your technician Phil? Oh, he was so great. Awesome. One of the ways you could help him out, getting some recognition in the office is if you could leave him a Google review. Can I text you a link so you can leave him a review? Oh, absolutely. Then you shoot over a text and there's a bunch of platforms for that. We have had extremely good success with the companies that we work with. Some of our clients have over 2,000 Google reviews and over a three year span they started with 30 and now they're over 2,000 other clients. We have 200, 300, 400, 500 Google reviews. So if you're interested in increasing your positive Google reviews, that's something that we could possibly help with. There's other videos that we've shared about ways that you can do that as well. So we post content about growing local service businesses. And if you're interested in growing your local service businesses, be sure to hit like and subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.