When your business gets a negative review, it can feel like a punch to the gut. After all, 78% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as they trust recommendations from people they know in real life. How do you know if that one negative review will be the deciding factor in losing a potential customer?
You don’t. So, your first instinct was probably to do a search for “how to delete Google reviews,” which led you to this article. Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution to deleting Google reviews. Keep reading to find out what you can do to make it better.
How to Delete Google Reviews: What Reviewers Can Do
The simple answer is that Google doesn’t allow business owners to delete negative reviews. While it may be frustrating as a business owner, it’s actually a good thing for consumers. It allows for a more unbiased space, where people who have bad experiences with a business can share them with others.
However, the user who wrote the review can delete it at any time. To do that, they need to take the following steps:
- Visit maps.google.com
- Click the menu
- Click “Your Contributions”
- Click “Reviews”
- Click the three dots next to the review they want to remove and click “Delete Review”
After following these steps, the review will be gone from the user’s Reviews section and it will no longer appear on a business’s listing.
Deleting Google Reviews: What Business Owners Can Do
Since individuals can delete reviews they’ve written, your best course of action is to respond to the negative review. However, your goal shouldn’t be to immediately ask them to remove it. Instead, your goal should be to make things right. Respond publicly with an apology and offer to contact the person privately with a solution to make things better.
This does two things:
- Shows potential customers that see the negative review that you care
- Helps to de-escalate the situation with the frustrated customer
Once you work to resolve things with the customer privately, you may then ask them if they’d be open to removing or revising their review. If they do, great! If not, and you believe that the review is against Google’s terms and conditions, you can flag it for any of the following reasons:
- It contains illegal, offensive, or irrelevant content
- You believe someone posted the review on someone else’s behalf
- The review has a conflict of interest, such as coming from a competitor
After reporting the review, Google will investigate and delete it if necessary.
Combating Negative Google Reviews
If they don’t want to remove or edit the review, then you need to come to terms with the fact that it will still show on your listing. However, hope is not lost. The best thing you can do to combat negative reviews is to get more positive ones. And, the simplest way to get more Google reviews is to ask.
After a transaction, send an automated email asking customers to leave a review about their experience. Or, post on your social media accounts, encouraging people to leave a review on your Google listing. The more positive ones you get, the less of an impact a negative one will have.
Google Reviews Help Businesses and Consumers
After reading this quick guide on how to delete Google reviews, you now know what to do. The best course of action is to try to make things right, dispute if necessary, and do everything you can to bring in more positive reviews for your business.
If you’d like to read more tech tips for your business, check out our other articles before you go!
