Managing a good online reputation is a hard nut to crack. People nowadays blindly believe on online reviews, and if you mull over for a second, what other options do they have?
Online review sites meant nothing prior to 2008, but have gained a lot of traction now. With the kind of competition that each industry is facing today, it has become very important to remove your negative reviews from prominent review sites.
Here are a few steps you can take to get rid of them and thereby mitigate the damage:
- Contact the site: Negative reviews can be posted by one of your competitors too. If the review that is giving you nightmares has been posted by a competitor, you will have to prove to the review site how did you find this out. It is thus a strenuous task and especially so if you’re a small businessman. Note that the removal of a negative review from the site is totally up to the website’s discretion.
- Join the conversation: If you have made a mistake and you think you need to correct it, you should make your customer/s realize that their concerns are your priority. You can join the conversation on the review site and apologize to them for your mistake. Online reviews can be updated, the reviewer can reply or delete their thread if you’ve addressed their concerns well.
- Contrast bad reviews with the good: A very good technique to obliterate the bad reviews is, getting more of the good ones. You should encourage your satisfied customers to review your business. Provide links for some of the famous review websites on your social media page and on your website. A large number of positive reviews can easily eclipse even the most acrimonious ones.
- Highlight positive reviews: Reviewing sites use a myriad of algorithms to determine the legitimacy of a review. If a review doesn’t match their criteria, it will get hidden from the public view. You can create a public response and draw their attention towards these positive reviews. These reviews must be there in the ‘Filtered review’ section. You can also post some positive review blogs on the internet about your business. By using SEO techniques you can make these blogs rank high. You can learn more about these techniques by reading blogs published by Blurbpoint on its website.
- Understanding Review culture: The fact of the matter is, even when you try to carry out your job with the utmost care, you may still get a negative review. It all depends on what expectation did the customer carry. But you need to understand that a review site is not run only by negative reviews. These review sites have policies to rate and determine how legit a review is. These policies can differ from site-to-site. Understanding the mechanism will help you cleaning up the bad reviews.
Should Negative Reviews Concern You?
Definitely. Customers turn to internet review sites to know if your business can give you what they are looking for. You might not know how much potential customers you are missing because of negative reviews posted on a review site. It is very important to continuously check what reviews your customers have posted. You should take time to read all of them and make a note. If there are some patterns in the online reviews, you should make amendments to make sure such reviews don’t come up again. This can help your business grow to newer heights.
Concluding words
We live in a digital era and it is important that you take measures to remove your negative reviews from these sites since nearly 88% of customers are now influenced by online reviews. One negative review can indeed bring a bad name to your business, and can blemish the image that you had created over so many years!
