How to Remove Google Reviews: 6 Steps for Removing Bad Reviews

As the Internet is almost an indispensable part of everyone’s life, people tend to read Google reviews about a brand before buying their products or availing themselves of their services. Keep in mind that your target customers would go through all your products and services reviews.

Positive reviews can always work well for your business. But what about the negative and bad ones? Unfortunately, they are not good for your brand as they create a poor impression on target customers and deter them away forever!

Brand reputation management is crucial these days to survive in the crowded marketplace. You can never stop people from posting negative reviews, but you can always remove them from your Google Business profile. Wondering how to remove Google Reviews?

Here, you will learn to do so by following certain simple steps. Keep reading.

How to Delete Negative Google Reviews Posted by People

Negative and fake reviews affect the bottom line of businesses. One bad review might not take the business down but it may lead the potential customers to your competitors. Though Google allows reporting fake Google reviews, they check the review first. Take these steps below to report fake Google reviews:

• Visit your Google Business Profile account.
• Select “Reviews” from the left-hand menu.
• Choose the fake review.
• Click on the three-dotted bar in the right corner.
• Choose the fake review. Lastly, click “Flag as inappropriate.”

As soon as any business owner notices a bad review on Google Business Profile, they immediately want to delete the negative feedback. No one wants to hear anything negative about their companies as that ruins their image in the marketplace. However, removing Google reviews is not easy as you don’t get appropriate options.

Google prioritizes both positive and negative reviews as that helps in maintaining the authenticity of a website. Many people rely only on reviews and ratings (as shown in the screenshot above) when purchasing. You may be surprised to know that 80% of people say online reviews have influenced their purchasing decision.

As reviews largely affect the buyer’s journey, Google doesn’t allow brands to delete bad or mixed reviews from the Google Business Profile local listing. You get to remove a bad review only if it’s fake.

If you follow the steps above, you will send the reviewer’s feedback to Google. Google then evaluates the review to ensure if it’s fake.

To remove fake Google reviews more directly, contact Google. Visit your Google Business Profile dashboard and select “Support” from the menu. After doing that, you can communicate with Google through phone calls, emails, or chats. This option helps you get in touch with Google quickly to delete the fake review.

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Google won’t remove a review if it is genuine. If you want to remove a genuine review that is not good for your business, you can request to remove it from the list of reviews.

Remember, 86% of customers will hesitate to purchase from a business with negative reviews. Trust in your reviews is equivalent to trust in your brand. 72% of customers said positive reviews make them trust any business more. So, you should always aim to attract only positive reviews from customers.

Deleting negative Google reviews is not as easy as deleting a portion of text. When the reviews are genuine, you need to implement an alternative approach to delete those reviews. One of the best things you can do is identify the reviewers and attempt to fix the negative aspects.

Do you want your business to always stay unaffected by negative reviews?

Follow the tips below to smartly deal with and remove Google reviews posted by people:

1. Never Give Negative Reactions to Negative Reviews

Once you see a negative review, you tend to lash out at people who posted such feedback on Google. As you are serious regarding your business, you feel bad whenever anyone criticizes your products or services.

When dealing with negative Google reviews, you should always react positively. In case you react negatively to customer reviews, it harms the reputation of your business. Your target customers may feel that you are unprofessional and never choose you over competitors.

People tend to feel sceptical about your brand when you don’t realize the issues that customers’ issues with your offerings.

The screenshot above shows how a person posted a negative review to show their dissatisfaction with a brand. The owner may not be happy with what the customer said but has reacted positively. Remember, your response to any review leaves an enduring impression on customers. You may feel good or bad about what a customer said, but you should never react negatively to their reviews, scaring potential customers away.

Running a business tends to attract positive and negative reviews, but you should not feel disheartened by their sayings. When all the reviews have only four to five stars, people would be sceptical if the comments were genuine. Target customers trust your business more when you have good and bad reviews as your brand appears more authentic.  

People care about your customers’ negative experiences, but they tend to notice how they respond to their negative feedback. So, you should never take the negative reviews by heart and react positively no matter how you feel about their opinions.

2. Assess the Reviews

When it comes to removing Google negative reviews, you should assess them. Make sure at first the reviews are genuine. You will get fake reviews from people or rival brands many times who have never purchased anything from your business. You may also get reviews from people that are not even meant for your company.

If the reviews seem fake, you should take the right initiatives to report and flag false reviews. For instance, you can see above that someone posted a review regarding a haircut on a florist’s Google profile. Even if you feel a customer review is affected, you should draft a proper reply.

Evaluate the review content to understand if they are genuine or fake. Google takes five to twenty days to remove fake reviews. Many people who may view your profile during that period may not understand that reviews are fake. You should verify if the people filing the complaints are real customers. When you have a track record of what those buyers have purchased from your brand, you can easily assess their experience.

Understand the situation explained in the negative reviews. Scrutinize the details so you can easily draft a genuine reply to their reviews. After you assess the bad Google reviews, you can write your replies.

3. Draft a Direct and Genuine Response

To delete negative Google reviews posted by your previous customers, you should draft a direct and genuine reply. Your customers should feel you have heard them. Make sure you give a short reply addressing their issues and providing a solution.

You should respond to reviews quickly to show that you value their opinions. You should reply to a negative review within a day after it gets posted. A quick reply reflects your dedication to offering the most satisfactory customer support. If you don’t have the time to respond to negative reviews, you should opt for review management services. To stay in customers’ minds, you should reply to positive and negative reviews.

Here are the things you should do to manage reviews and give a direct response:

• Own the Claim
  Own up to the complaint if you want to learn how to remove negative Google reviews posted by others. You should never pretend that a review is invalid or anything like that happens. When you don’t take any responsibility for the customer complaint, they tend to get angry with you and may even boycott your brand for life! Would you ever want that? So, own the claim always.
  
• Ask for an Apology
  You may not have committed any mistake, but you should apologize for the negative experience your customers had. Never accuse them of lying about your products/services or blame them. If you apologize for offering a poor customer experience or defective products, it helps you delete and convert negative reviews into positive ones.
  
  After posting a review, people want you to understand their problems and show your concern. With an apology as a response, you can show your customers that you listen to them and think about improving their negative experiences.
  
• Provide a Solution
  Once you learn your customers had a negative experience with your brand, you should take immediate action. To learn how to delete Google reviews that share a poor experience, you need to solve customer issues. You should try to fix their issues through reconciliation or solutions.
  
  Posting a comment like, “We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you”, is not enough. You should offer solutions or suggestions to fix their issues. After offering solutions, you should follow up with them.
  
  Never promise to do something and then do absolutely nothing. Such empty promises would harm your brand reputation in the marketplace. You should follow through to help delete negative reviews from your Google profile.
  
  If you offer the perfect solutions to previous and current customers, your potential customers get impressed too. They prefer to choose a brand that can deal with dissatisfied customers effectively. When you offer reconciliation and solutions, the target customers who check your Google reviews would feel like choosing you over your competitors.
  

4. Improve the Condition

You will have to fix the condition if you want to learn how to delete Google reviews that adversely affect your brand. Fixing the condition can be the most challenging part as it mostly requires process evaluation or customer service modifications. Sometimes, you may not feel the need to accept problems in your company. But if you consistently keep on receiving similar negative reviews, you need to think about fixing the issues.

For instance, you sell earphones at quite a reasonable price. People who buy and use your affordable headphones post reviews frequently about how the wires get torn or the sound breaks after a few days.

When numerous people have the same kind of poor experience with specific products, you should review and enhance specific products. If you do so, it saves your time in the long run. Once you improve your earphones’ wire and sound quality, you get the least negative reviews and increase your sales.

It’s worth the investment to improve the quality of your products as that boosts your bottom line and customer experience. You need to implement the same strategy with your services.  You should adjust service charges when people post reviews and repeatedly write that they charge a lot and have wasted their money. Make sure you offer services to customers at the best price so they get excellent assistance at a reasonable price.

5. Be Proactive About Your Reviews

You need to stay on top of your reviews if you want to delete negative reviews from Google Local listings. Otherwise, you won’t be able to remove poor Google reviews. Check local listings frequently to find out if you received new reviews.

If you are proactive about your business reviews, you can enhance your brand reputation. People will like that you invest time in addressing and solving customer issues.

Your proactiveness encourages previously dissatisfied customers to edit their reviews. When those customers prioritize your concern, they would feel like saving your brand reputation in the marketplace.

When you stay alert and resolve issues quickly, it helps Google delete negative reviews posted by others that highlight the negative aspects of your business. Though this strategy won’t help you delete all negative reviews, it helps convert unsatisfied customers into satisfied customers.

6. Submit a Legal Request to Google

Lastly, you can follow this tip to delete your brand’s Google reviews for your brand, but it works only for some cases. Google helps people send a formal request to delete a review if it’s illegal. Navigate to the “Content Removal Tool” and choose Google My Business to report an illegitimate review. Google asks you questions about that review and your complaint regarding specific content on the subsequent pages.

Google specifies that legal notice copy they receive “may be sent to the Lumen project for publication and annotation”. They also say about sending the genuine notice to the alleged infringer or rights holder (if they have a reason to suspect the validity of your complaint). They may also post the same information from your notice to their Transparency Report.

The search engine giant takes your complaints very seriously and with valid reasons. When you submit one of such reports, you might be alleging an illegal or wrong activity. Thus, Google needs to ensure you have several complaints that you want to file via this system. You will have to submit each complaint separately for every Google service where the content is displayed.

The Bottom Line

No business owners want negative Google reviews, but you can’t stop dissatisfied customers’ profiles. A poor Google review is a black spot on your brand image as you tend to lose potential customers and sales.

Thus, you need to modify and optimize your Google Business profile to boost ratings.  If you manage negative reviews and deliver the desired solutions, you can convert bad reviews into good ones.

When you don’t have the time to reply and manage negative reviews,  you can hire skilled professionals as they can give tactful replies and handle profiles the way you want. They can do everything that helps you stay on the top of reviews and leave a good impression on maximum customers.

Frequently Asked Questions