It's a fact. To succeed in business in the present, you must manage your company's online reputation, a large portion of which is dependent upon what kind of reviews are displayed when a potential client conducts a Google search for your company. There's no reason to worry if your company has a handful of fight fake reviews reviews, you must take steps to reduce any harm caused by unflattering reviews and take steps to remove reviews that are especially harsh or defamatory.

Why should I worry about negative reviews?

Poor reviews directly impact the bottom line of your business by making customers leave. A ReviewTrackers study found that 94% of users claimed that they were convinced to write reviews that were negative online. This is a worrying number because online reviews are one of the most important ways to learn about a business.

Besides turning away potential customers, bad online reviews can harm the SEO of your business. In a recent survey conducted by Moz, online reviews accounted for up to 10% of the local search engine rankings decisions. So, having a large number of bad reviews can cause your company's website to appear farther down the page on an Google search.

What alternatives do I have in dealing with bad reviews?

Before you begin to address your bury bad reviews, you'll need to know which ones are most troublesome. You can conduct several Google searches on the name of your company to determine what negative content you can find. When choosing which reviews to tackle first, it is important to consider the position they appear on in your search results. Potential customers are more likely to look through reviews if they're higher on the page. Additionally, you must look up your business on the most popular online review websites like Angie's List and Insider Pages.

Check all of your reviews with care, looking for common complaints that you must resolve or issues you've already fixed. Are there unhappy customers that are the reason for most of the negative reviews? Is it possible that the reviews are fake?

Once you've decided on which deal with negative reviews to focus on then you'll need to determine what you'd like to do about them. There are a variety of choices. You can either fix the business and get rid of negative reviews, or respond to the reviewers to solve the issue and make them amend their review. Or you can post enough positive reviews so that they overpower the negative ones. The best results, though typically, come from using all four strategies.