Given that between 75 and 90% (depending on which vendor study you look at) of your potential customers are looking at the reviews on your Google Business Profiles, it’s totally scary to think of anything going wrong with this hugely powerful form of User Generated Content. If you grew up trick-or-treating in a rural area without streetlights, you well remember needing to take a flashlight with you so you could see where you were going with your little pumpkin bucket, and that’s just what we’re going to shine today on weird things that can go wrong with your GBP reviews, and what you can do to ward them off!
Reviews that…VANISH!
What could be eerier than knowing you’ve earned reviews and seeing them suddenly disappear? Local Search Forum Mod, Tim Colling, is just one of many noting a recent uptick in GBP review removal.
Typically, if you avoid violating any of Google’s prohibited and restricted content policies, you won’t be doing anything ghoulish like paying for reviews that would merit them being removed, but as we can see from Tim’s example, mystery can shroud review disappearance.
Yet, our flashlight reveals what may be a small clue in what Tim has documented. He’s noticed that his own good clients being impacted have an industry in common. This could indicate that Google is doing a category-specific review sweep, trying to crack down on a market that has become inundated with review spam. Sadly, allegations of elder care review spam have necessitated governmental inquiry, and one of the harms of shady review practices is that legitimate businesses in the same fields can sometimes be caught up in Google’s attempted clean-ups.
If you are confident that your review practices adhere to Google’s guidelines but your reviews either go missing or appear to be delayed in publishing, start by reading this resource. Then contact Google via this form, titling your request “Missing Reviews” and documenting what has happened to the best of your ability. You should typically receive a response from Google in about a week.
Masked negative raters
Something displeased this reviewer of a Halloween costume rental shop near them, but they hide behind a mask of never revealing the cause of their displeasure and their crushing 1-star review. Textless negative GBP ratings are ghostl
In civil society, a 1-star review means that a customer experience was without a single redeeming quality. It might be deserved if you book a hotel room that is full of creepy poisonous spiders (yikes!):
But what can a costume shop have done to merit a single dim star? Was the business unexpectedly closed when the customer arrived? Did they not answer their phones? Was the staff unhelpful? Was the store dirty? Were they lacking the Scooby Doo costume around which the customer had built their entire Halloween extravaganza? That’s the whole problem: textless negative reviews give the business owner no clue as to what went wrong and no specific problem to address in their owner response in hopes of getting back into the customer’s good graces.
I think that textless reviews are tricks instead of treats and wish Google would stop allowing them. If you end up coping with a negative rating which lurks behind the mask of zero explanation, the least you can do is respond and ask the customer to please let you know what went wrong and if you can make it right for them. Meanwhile, the best you can do is to start actively engaging your customers with professional reputation management software so that they feel inspired to actually write about their experience with your business instead of only leaving you a shorthand, mysterious rating.
Gross-out reviews
9.2 k viewers have approved this video for making glow-in-the-dark spider slime for Halloween, but what no customer will ever approve of is finding slime, grime, or filth of any kind at your place of business. A mere 10% of surveyed consumers don’t find it useful to sort your reviews to see the worst ones first, meaning that many potential patrons are eager to read any horror stories that might exist in your GBP review set to protect themselves from making a mistak
I find this information to be especially critical in any industry that has anything to do with food. As waitstaff advocate Darron Cardosa puts it in his article entitled Gross Restaurant Bathrooms Make Me Question Everything:
“Even if the food and service are impeccable, a filthy restroom can ruin the whole experience.”
If you are marketing a restaurant, a grocery store, a farm store, a catering company or anything else in the eatables industries and the restroom on your premises is not being kept spotless, it will almost certainly show up in your reviews. A single really negative mention of unsanitary conditions could cost you customers for decades. Even if your brand has nothing to do with food, dirty public amenities trigger disgust and show a lack of care for customer comfortBecause of the extreme reaction dirty bathrooms and premises can cause, your best defense of your review corpus is janitorial. If cleaning practices slip and you get a negative review about it, you’ll need to apologize sincerely via an owner response and immediately implement better practices. Do everything you can not to run into this icky problem. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Sleuthing staff blasts phantom positive reviews
One of the scariest things about late-stage capitalism in the US is that unscrupulous employers rely on the fact that staff are desperate not to lose their jobs and associated health insurance. But brands dabbling in prohibited and illegal review behaviors should beware of assuming all employees will keep mum about it. You definitely do not want to own the company whose team had to become The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew to blow the whistle on it, alleging that you’ve been posing as a phantom customer and posting fake positive reviews of your own business.
Since 2017, Google has been adamant that reviews of local businesses should not be left by their employees or former employees, and reviews should never be posted on behalf of customers. If you work for or know of a company that is engaging in forbidden review practices and doesn’t seem scared enough yet about potential outcomes, please share the news with them that the FTC can now fine a business for $51,744 per violation.
Employees are tech savvy these days, and quite likely to know if their employer is engaging in suspicious online practices. Your best defense against serious reputational and financial loss is to honor the review guidelines of all platforms on which you’re listed and obey the laws of your land.
The case of the ghosted owner responses
What you see above is a typical negative review. What you also see above is the owner of the business ghosting their legitimately dissatisfied customer. If having to go pick up their own order after paying for delivery isn’t enough to convince this patron that the business is failing at customer service, then crickets following a negative review certainly will.
Every year, fantastic new local business review surveys and reports come out attempting to quantify which aspects of owner responses to reviews have the greatest influence on consumers. These studies look at how quickly customers expect a response, the degree to which they are impressed by the presence of responses, and other factors, but in all my years as a local SEO, I’ve never seen a statistic which suggests that the majority of consumers want their reviews to be ignored by businesses.
It’s a spectral experience wandering through the GBP landscape and bumping into brand after brand letting complaints go unanswered and unresolved. Customer retention is generally agreed to be a priority KPI for most commercial enterprises because it is less expensive to keep existing patrons than to have to replace them with new ones. Reputation, budget, and conversions are simply draining away for any local company that doesn’t view owner responses to GBP reviews as a critical marketing strategy. To protect your brand, be sure that ghosting your customers isn’t undermining your customer service policies.
The invisible SMS + email review request comb
We text our spouse to remind them to pick up Halloween candy on their way home from work. We email our mother photos of our kids dressed up as little ghosts and goblins and princesses. But it makes my hair stand on end that our recent survey of 23,000 business locations found that just 6% of local business owners are remembering to combine both technologies in asking for reviews.
It’s uncanny how, as human beings, we can use platforms on a daily basis without ever stopping to ask how they might be applied to the companies we own and market. It’s just plain good horse sense that if we are constantly texting and emailing everybody in our personal life, our customers are likely doing the same. Our recent report found that brands using only SMS for review acquisition are receiving an average of 20 reviews per 100 texts. Brands using only email for the same activity are earning an average 15 reviews per 100 requests. Meanwhile, free candy awaits those business owners who take the smart step of a combined approach, averaging 26 reviews when both SMS and email is built into the acquisition process. Those numbers will quickly add up to assist you with your competitive review volume goals.
Please allow us to treat you to a ton of fantastic review tips in the full report: Unlock The Power of Online Reputation. I know I’ve shared some scary stories today, but the truth is, there’s little to fear in the wild world of reviews once you turn on the lights of some good stats and a strong management strategy!
