The Local Marketing Mixup | August 9, 2023
Your Weekly Briefing
Do This Immediately If You Get A Bad Google Review
Bad reviews on your Google Business Profile are inevitable even if you run a great business. Some people are just... how do you say... annoying online. Want to get a laugh at someone else's expense? Here's a Reddit full of funny Google reviews.
You might have received a bad review because you or someone on your team messed up, or because someone you served was having a bad day, or because someone doesn't understand how online reviews work, or perhaps just for the oldest reason in the book - you're getting blackmailed for iTunes gift cards. (If you are getting blackmailed by people leaving 1-star reviews and then emailing you demanding gift card payments, you can report that fraudulent review with Google here to get it taken down).
Here's what you should do if you get a bad Google review for your business:
1. Respond nicely. Take the time to let your upset customer feel heard, and suggest they call or email you so you can resolve the issue. Be sure to provide your phone or email in the response to make it easy. Your goal here is to smooth things over with the customer, then ask them to update their bad review. It's worth offering them a juicy deal to get the review changed or taken down since your reputation on Google is incredibly valuable.
2. Report it to Google. Using the same link above, you can report any review to Google that you'd like. There are a variety of reasons why Google may take down a bad review, including:
Harassment or threats
Hate speech
Offensive content
If it includes someone's full name
Information not related to your business
Tons of other stuff you can find here that's pretty rare and obvious.
Just be patient with Google since it takes some time for them to review takedown requests. If you can get multiple people to also flag the review that may help speed it up.
3. Work harder on getting more 5-star reviews. Every time you get one 4 or below star, you should try to get five new 5-star reviews. The best way to overcome bad reviews is to flood them out with good ones.
On a somewhat related note, we've seen a dramatic drop in many business's review counts in the past two weeks. This drop is likely due to Google's improvements around catching fake accounts and their fake reviews, and taking them down.
We'll wrap up this newsletter by just saying a huge, from the bottom of our heart, THANK YOU for reading our newsletter and for supporting our release of ProfilePro! We just crossed the 5,000 downloads milestone which was quite hard to do as a non-VC funded company. If you think your network would find ProfilePro or our newsletter helpful, please share a link to it on your favorite social media platform. It'd really mean a lot to us :)
Here's the link to share: www.merchynt.com/profilepro.
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Wish you could respond to a hundred Google reviews across different Google profiles in a personalized way with the click of a button? So do we, which is why we built RoboReply.
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ProfilePro tip of the week:
Make sure you've responded to all of your Google reviews. If you responded to a negative one harshly, go and edit your response to be nicer and ask them to get in touch to make things right.
Update: The AI image generation feature of ProfilePro for Google Business Profile Updates just got a major upgrade. The images it creates now are pretty awesome!
Go to Your Google Business Profile
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We know a thing or two about marketing. Want help?
Google Business Profile management services
Listings/citation management software
Reviews management software
Reputation management software
Google Business Profile SEO AI tool
Bulk Google review responding AI
The best part? Everything can be 100% white-labeled for agencies
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Check out our guide on every possible ranking strategy for Google Business Profiles!
Google Updates You Should Know About
Google updates their algos regularly, and we check and then digest them for you. Here are the latest ones local marketers should know about:
You can find details on all algo updates here.