Managing your Google reviews is crucial to protecting your website’s bottom line in the digital era. More people than ever are relying on reviews to help them make a decision about who to shop with, so ensure that yours present the most accurate and positive view of your company possible.

Google reviews appear prominently on search results next to your business name and are often a make or break moment for potential customers. If you’re searching for a plumber, and two are rated over 4.5 stars and one is below 3.0, you’re going to call the first two and forget you ever saw the third. Ensuring that your rating is as high as possible allows you to clear that first, vital hurdle on the way to an enquiry.

Secondly, Google reviews are given significant weight in rankings. For local SEO campaigns, a business’ ranking can make the difference between prominent placement on the Local Pack – complete with one-click call functionality on mobile – and being buried on page two, three or ten.

Google does not automatically delete reviews after a certain period of time. With reviews being such a key part of how potential customers judge a business, Google has ensured that legitimate reviews persist online for as long as possible. To delete a Google review, the shop owner must flag the review and prove that it is fake or inappropriate to Google’s moderation team, who will then remove or hide the review at their discretion.

Additionally, it’s not possible for businesses to simply close their Google My Business page and have the reviews disappear. Once a Google My Business page has been created, it’s almost impossible to simply delete. Even marking the business as ‘Permanently Closed’ doesn’t delete the reviews, meaning business owners cannot simply recreate their Google My Business page under a slightly different trading name.

Bad quality Google reviews can have a definite negative impact on your keyword rankings, especially in your local area. Studies by SEO technicians have determined that Google places significant weight on a business’ reviews when determining where to display them in the results page. They play an even greater role in determining who shows up in the coveted three Local Pack spots.

A large number of bad reviews will definitely hurt your keyword rankings, but with unhappy customers more likely to leave a review than happy customers, it can be hard to start rebuilding your score. Impressive can consult with you on a range of tactics and strategies to encourage happy customers to leave reviews – talk to us today.

Repairing a Google reviews reputation takes time, effort and a clear strategy tailored to your needs. Every business and every business’ reputation is unique and requires a unique approach, which will affect how long the reputation repair process takes.

For businesses with severely damaged reputations, full repair could take as long as year. But even for businesses that are already reasonably well-positioned, it can be months before they begin to see the results they want from the campaign. This is largely because Google reviews reputation management requires changing the behaviour of individual customers, encouraging them to leave good reviews when they have a positive experience with your business.

In most cases, this will be the only option. Google will only remove a review if it violates one of four guidelines – it’s spam or fake content, it’s off-topic, it’s illegal/offensive/sexually explicit, or it’s a conflict of interest (from a current or former employer or employee, or from a competitor).

Instead, you should rely on a quick response and some good customer service to get the review replaced. You yourself cannot edit the review, but if you’re able to comprehensively address the customer’s complaints and rectify the situation, they may be willing – but are under no obligation to – change their review.

In those cases, the best you can do is present your side of the story as a response to their review. Impressive can help you monitor for bad reviews and draft an appropriate response.

Choosing not to engage with unhappy clients is effectively giving them licence to say whatever they want about your business.

Replacing or removing Google reviews is possible, but this is a process that you have to be involved in. With hundreds of millions of users writing billions of reviews, there’s no way Google is policing review content by themselves. Business owners are required to initiate the process by flagging fake or inappropriate reviews.

More generally, choosing not to engage with unhappy clients sends the message to potential customers that you are disconnected from them. A reviews page where the owner is thanking people for writing good reviews and proactively and constructively responding to bad ones sends the message to potential customers that this is an owner who cares about fostering good relationships.