The Positives of Responding to Negative Reviews

Over the past five years, online reviews have emerged as the primary method used by consumers to make decisions about products and services. Reviews directly affect placement and ad selection on Google, Amazon, Facebook and YouTube — but more importantly, the perception of your potential customers. While positive reviews make selling easier, negative reviews often have an even more powerful effect.

While positive reviews help customers close the deal, negative reviews often become a deal breaker. The majority of people weigh good reviews against bad reviews when making a purchasing decision. However, some people choose to let the few negative reviews outweigh the many positive ones. It is important as a company to take all of your reviews very seriously.

Many review websites — including Google, Yelp and Facebook — make the process of removing bad, fake or misleading reviews difficult. Fortunately, there are several proven techniques you can use to remove or respond to them, hopefully minimizing their effects. Often, a well-written response to a negative review can be just as beneficial as a positive review.

Customers enjoy seeing how businesses respond and interact with legitimate client issues. People typically forgive companies that deal with customer service issues properly. In any type of business there are bound to be some negative reviews. There is no pleasing everyone and competitors can become ruthless.

It is essential to be continuously aware and keep in control of your companies online reputation. The steps to do this include reading through reviews and identifying the ones that are real. Next make sure to take action and minimize reviews that are negative, fake or in violation of a site review policy. Finally, begin to build a strong foundation of positive responses to minimize any effects of possible future negative reviews. Over time the strength of your companies reputation will improve therefore reducing the impact of any negative reviews.

For more information on dealing with difficult reviews from the experts at Spider Marketing Group, please contact us here or call us directly at 616.406.9695.