Over 90% of consumers read online reviews before even thinking of buying a product or service. It is widely understood that a single negative review is enough to offset 10 good ones. Honest, online positive reviews left behind by real customers create an environment of transparency that differentiates quality businesses from less reputable ones.
Yet in this very same environment, given the huge business that online reviews can drive, most reviews are falsified to either drive traffic to certain businesses or redirect traffic away from competitor websites. Quite a few people on the internet have the motive to engineer fake reviews that you should start taking it seriously. It is very easy to create multiple fake profiles and type out negative reviews with little regard to the truth.
The good news is that your hands are not tied and you can take control of your online reputation management by choosing the Best ORM companies in Chennai.
Types of Reviews That Violate Google’s Content Guidelines
Generally, there are four types of fake Google reviews that you can term as inappropriate:
Fake and spammy content:
Google’s content guidelines stipulate that the content must be genuine. If you can prove that the complaint is spammy and fake, Google will remove it to improve your rankings.
Prohibited Content:
Google will neglect any content that is illegal, offensive, dangerous, or derogatory. This includes personal tirades against the business and hates speech.
Conflict of Interest:
Google makes it clear that you should not review your own business, your employer, or a competitor’s business.
Off-Topic:
To leave a review, the customer has to be precise by sharing their experience with the business. Irrelevant content that discusses personal, political, or social experiences will also be removed.
If the Google my Business Reviews fit the above descriptions, then you can flag them as inappropriate and hopefully get rid of them soon
How to Spot a Fake Google Review :
The first and foremost step is to verify any sales records of the reviewer. If you can’t find any matching or relevant transactions, you’re probably dealing with a fake/negative complaint. Here is a list to help you identify negative reviews:
- You do not have any business of transactions with this buyer
- The transaction data does not match with their review.
- You can’t find any customer service calls.
- The complaint raises without any specifications.
- You’ve started getting a surge of negative reviews.
- Your competition seems to have a connection with the reviewer.
- The review has recommended your opponent company in their complaint.
- The customer’s account newly made and has no history of reviews with other companies.
- Their profile picture does not contain an actual picture of a real person
Read Also; How Do EON8 Helps in Removing the Negative Reviews?
What to Do When You Can’t Remove the Review
It’s not a cup of tea for you to handle this stuff. If you have got negative complaints left behind by disappointed customers the best thing you can do is to improve your customer service and pushing down Google’s search engine results by promoting positive content.
This requires the adoption of SEO practices and content creation strategies. You can enlist the services of an SEO company that also specializes in reputation management such as the one we provide to hide negative posts.
i) Boosting Your Presence on Social Media
One of the most effective ways to manage Google reviews is to improve brand management through social media. This means becoming active on YouTube Channel, Instagram business page, Facebook business page, Pinterest page, and Twitter page. You may need to hire the services of an experienced social media management teams to properly handle all your profiles. This opens up the different ways of communicating with your clients which inspires confidence and encourages new sales of products and services.
88% of marketers believe it is important to have social pages for their business.
Remind your customers to leave positive reviews on each of your social media pages. The point is to create so much content that it removes the negative complaints. Being this accessible on the internet also makes you more trustworthy to customers. It gives you more than one means of protecting your brand’s reputation and monitors other businesses.
But before you can start removing negative complaints, you have to first actively monitor and fish out what is being said about your business in the various corners of the internet. If you are unaware that some negative reviews exist, you would find it tough to improve anything at all. Without access to the right tool, fighting negative reviews is like shooting the dark; your aim will almost always miss.
Monitoring your online reputation depends on your website’s business model. For instance, if you run a tourist operation, restaurant, hair salon, or similar business you will have to spend time monitoring the online review site such as Google Reviews. If you run an online store that sells physical goods, you will have to keep an eye on Amazon, and any other online retailers that let customers write reviews.
Next in line are popular review sites, forums, blog posts, news sites, and social media pages which are a dime a dozen these days. You can’t realistically hope to keep track of them all because your conversations will quickly become a problem depending on the scale of negative reviews left behind.
If you are relatively popular in online circles, you may need the help of online reputation management experts, to keep tabs about you on the internet. Most governments, celebrities, and political personalities adopt a similar strategy.
ii) Start “Review” Acquisition Campaigns
One bad review can undo 10 good reviews. This is why you should fight bad reviews with the good ones. Ask your customers and umpteen happy fans to give five-star reviews to bury negative reviews deep. Just make sure to unnecessarily insist your customers write positive reviews, you may end up irritating them just enough to leave a couple of bad reviews!
The successful thing to do is to target all your customers via different channels, such as email, social media, and even text. This won’t be easy if you’ve got a whole lot of customers. The effective thing to do instead is to make use of tools that let you inquire review acquisition campaigns, allowing you to request positive reviews from you’re the list of clients.