How To Handle Negative Reviews In Google Local

• Ugh! I just checked my Google Local listings and found some bad negative reviews that show up pretty noticeably for my business. What should I do about those? Can I get Google to remove them? If so, how?

Answer: Let's start by stating the obvious. If the complaints are legitimate, then be sure to fix them.

Otherwise, your best strategy is to bury them. In other words, see to it that enough positive reviews get entered so that the bad ones are greatly outnumbered and, hopefully, pushed to the bottom of the stack.

Be sure to bear in mind that if the complaints cited in the reviews are legitimate, they will likely crop up again and again from current and future customers. Therefore you should always start by using the negative feedback to help identify problems and then correct them.

Of course, it's always possible that a few bad reviews are the result of a customer misconception or a competitor trying to damage your company's reputation. Fortunately, when such is the case, a strategy to bury such unfavorable reviews typically works pretty well since legitimate customers doing good reviews will usually outnumber the mistakenly or intentionally malicious ones—unless the miscreants are unusually persistent.

By the way, unless the review is blatantly inappropriate, Google takes a hands-off approach to the reviews they post. Google states their policy on inappropriate review content specifically in their Google Maps help section simply...