Consumers are savvier than ever. They no longer trust advertising, so they look for ways to learn what are good products worth buying and which ones to skip.
About 91% of consumers between 18 and 34 trust online reviews. Consumers look to see how many reviews there are, and reviews can increase your revenue.
What happens if you get bad reviews on Google? These can impact your SEO, and they may cause consumers to skip your business.
Read on to learn what happens to your business listing because of bad reviews.
Google and Bad Reviews
Google’s search algorithm is made up of hundreds of factors. These factors are split up into on-site factors and off-site factors.
On-site factors are the things on your website, such as keywords, headings, metadata, and load times. Off-site factors are the social signals that make up your online reputation.
Bad reviews are part of that. How does Google’s algorithm treat bad reviews? It’s pretty normal for a business to have a few bad reviews from customers. After all, no business is perfect.
In that case, Google doesn’t treat a few negative reviews in a way that hurts your search results.
In cases where you have a lot of negative reviews on Google and there are negative comments about your business elsewhere, that’s a different story. You have a negative online reputation, which will hurt your rankings.
How to Handle Bad Reviews on Google
A few bad reviews on Google doesn’t necessarily have to doom your business. You do have to find a creative way to handle them, though.
Remember, you have to appeal to consumers and search engines. If consumers see that you don’t respond to negative reviews, they’ll think that you don’t care about your business.
The best thing you can do is to respond to bad reviews gracefully. This isn’t always easy, especially if the customer is wrong.
You need to acknowledge what the customer says, own your mistakes, and ask the customer to contact a specific person in your business to resolve the issue.
You don’t want to blame a customer or publicly make accusations. That attempt to make the customer look bad only reflects poorly on you.
Your business may have a legitimate claim to remove bad reviews from Google. This can be done if the review is fake, offensive, or meets other criteria set by Google.
Clean Up Your Online Reputation
You need to clean up your entire online reputation, not just the reviews on Google. You should search for your business on various search engines and social media channels to audit your reputation.
You can delete old posts, and get your new customers and biggest supporters to write positive reviews about your business.
Over time, that will help your online reputation.
Reviews and SEO
Your business depends on positive reviews to thrive. Don’t worry about your search rankings if you have a few bad reviews on Google. Instead, focus on keeping your customers happy and get them to write positive reviews about your business.
For more business tips, head over to the SEO section of this site.
