Can customer reviews on Google be removed?

With a staggering 95% of consumers reading online reviews before making a purchase ⁽¹⁾, and 88% of consumers trusting online reviews as much as a friend’s recommendation⁽²⁾, it’s no wonder many business owners want to know whether bad reviews on Google can be removed.

Can anything be done to remove bad reviews?

If the review is just a legitimate customer’s complaint from a poor experience, the short answer is
probably not. Google will only remove reviews that violate its content policy.

More importantly though, this article will explain why legitimate negative reviews shouldn’t
necessarily be feared, but in fact provide a great opportunity to both retain customers as well as
demonstrate to prospective customers your commitment to service excellence.

Google’s review content policy

First lets quickly cover off content Google will remove.

If you’ve ever written a review yourself, you may have noticed that the review does not always
immediately appear. Google moderates all reviews (either manually or more often nowadays with
AI) in an attempt to detect inappropriate content such as fake reviews and scams.

Google will also remove reviews that include inappropriate or illegal content – the list for this is
extensive and includes some obvious content such as hate speech, harassment, profanity, adult-
themes and violence, and some perhaps less obvious such as personal details, advertising or social
commentary as well as personal rants.

How to report a review that violates the content policy

If you have a review that you believe violates the content policy, you can flag it as inappropriate by clicking on the 3-dot menu to the side of the review within your Google Business Profile Manager account.

Though you don’t need to be logged into your account to flag. In fact, anyone can report a review directly in the Google Business profile. Again, just click on the 3-dots and click ‘Report review’.

You’ll then be sent to a page to select the reason why you believe the review contravenes their content policy. Once completed you’ll receive an email confirming your request. If after up to 3 days you have not heard back from Google, or Google has not removed the review you can escalate your complaint through their support menu.

Why bad reviews may not be quite as bad as you think

Ok, let’s be honest, if you service or product sucks, then your reviews will probably suck. Your business is in trouble with or without bad reviews. But, most business leaders work incredibly hard to ensure customers have a great experience. You can’t get it right all the time though and there will inevitably be some unhappy customers no matter how hard you try. And you know what? That’s ok. Why? Because as the saying goes “that’s life!” Consumers, even those reading reviews, do not expect you to be perfect. In fact – research shows that more than half of consumers believe that a rating of less than 5 is more authentic⁽³⁾. Google’s algorithm works the same way and will (everything else being equal) rank a business with a 4.5 rating from 30 reviews higher than a 5 rating from 3 reviews. A rating between 4.2 to 4.7 is believed to be the most credible ⁽⁴⁾ so you do not need to fear the occasional bad review so long as you have a program in place to regularly ask your customers for reviews (assuming the majority are happy!).

Whose reviews look most credible?

Bad reviews provide an opportunity to retain the customer. Research suggests that only 1 in 25 customers will bother to tell you why they left⁽⁵⁾, the other 24 just go, never to be heard from again. By asking customers for a review, you can identify unhappy customers. This has three potential benefits:

You have a chance to retain the customer
The customer may change their review if their issue is resolved – research shows that of the customers who received a response from a company after posting a negative comment, 33% turned around and posted a positive review, while 34% deleted the original negative review⁽⁶⁾
You demonstrate to prospective customers that you care about the customer experience and proactively look to rectify issues

Guidelines for responding to bad reviews

First, what you should not do:

Argue
Be dismissive, defensive or aggressive
Ignore the key points raised
Be generic or self-serving
Fail to offer a solution
Reply late (more than a week)

Reviews can feel unfairly harsh. Customers can exaggerate and not get all the details right; emotions can run high on both sides. But review responses are not the place to argue with the customer. This is potentially your last opportunity to save the customer. As important is the opportunity to demonstrate to prospective customers that this is not the regular experience and that you take the customer experience very seriously.

What you should do:

Address the customer by their name
Explain that online reviews are critical to your business and you take feedback very seriously
Show empathy and sympathise with the problem
Apologise
Offer a solution
Offer an alternate channel i.e. phone or email address to continue the discussion offline

The number 1 reason most consumers leave a company is because they believe they haven’t been listened too. Negative reviews provide an incredible opportunity to show to care, to both your current and potential customers.

If you successfully resolve the issue, we recommend you ask the customer whether they would change their review – we find that many will.

Templates for responding to bad Google reviews:

Sample 1:

Hi [NAME], thanks for sharing your feedback. We’re sorry your experience didn’t match your expectations. This is not the type of service/product we aim to provide to our customers.

Please feel free to reach out to us through [CONTACT INFORMATION] with more details/information you want to share with us and we would love to make things right if you give us another chance.

Sample 2:

“Hi [NAME] Thank you for your review. I’m sorry to hear you had a frustrating experience, but I really appreciate you bringing this issue to my attention. We will be looking into the incident and make sure this does not happen again.”

Sample 3:

“Hi [NAME] I’m so sorry to hear about this. We’re normally known for our exceptional attention to detail, and we regret that we missed the mark.”

A process for managing reviews is essential

Reviews play a vital role in the today’s decision-making process for your potential customers and are a key ranking factor for Google. Both your prospective customers and Google, consider your rating, the volume of reviews, the recency of reviews as well as whether reviews have been replied to or not.

To win at reviews, you need to be continuously requesting and replying to reviews. If that sounds like too much effort to include in your business practice, that’s where a digital solution can help.

Review Juice is an easy-to-use review management platform that uses customer reviews to drive more sales.

Used by hundreds of businesses across Australia and New Zealand, Review Juice helps clients request, reply to, and amplify customer reviews.

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Esteban Kolsky
MackCollier.co