This case study reveals how you can remove a Google review left on your Google My Business profile as a mistake. Dive in and learn how to remove Google reviews, respond to negative feedback, and more.
If your business has a Google My Business profile, you may know what it feels like to receive a not-so-stellar review. But what if that review was not intended for your business? It happens more often than you would think. When businesses have similar names and offer similar services it’s easy for reviewers to leave feedback on the wrong business profile.
As you probably already know, a consumer’s first impression of you is often created by what comes up when they look you up online. If the reviews of your business aren’t promising, consumers aren’t likely to find out if that’s true for themselves. Instead, they trust what other people have to say about their experience working with you. So it is, in fact, important that your Google business profile is accurate and healthy.
Recently, we had a client who had received a number of negative reviews meant for another company. When the client reached out to us they had already attempted to have those reviews removed by reporting them to Google. This is where things got a little muddy. They received an auto-response from Google advising them that the reviews did not violate their policy and would not be removed. In looking at Google’s response, it was clear that it was a standard auto-response and it was a “no-reply@” email to boot.
After searching online for a way to fix this, we came up with little more than a contact form you have to fill out. Which we did. And not surprisingly, we received the same auto-response. But, with a little ingenuity and a reasonable amount of tenacity, we were able to bypass Google’s clever AI and get some results for the client.
And after identifying all the available escalation channels (available at the end of this post), we got to work!
We also developed a roadmap that we thought other small businesses could benefit from. We hope it proves helpful!
The Roadmap To Removing Negative Google Reviews
First, a disclaimer: There is no guarantee that this particular roadmap will work for every business, but we believe it’s a darn good place to start because, in this instance, it worked. And it can work for other business review platforms.
The roadmap has a two-pronged approach. The first is to build a case to prove that specific reviews were not intended for your business. The second is to actually AVOID getting reviews intended for other businesses by optimizing your business profile and making it harder for reviewers to confuse you for someone else.
Building Your Case
1Document as much information as you can that demonstrates that the companies are two different entities. Create profiles of both companies that include their location, established date, website, social media profiles, review platform profiles, services offered, branding, and other relevant details.
2 Read through all the reviews and identify those that mention specifics, such as services or products that your company doesn’t offer. Focus on pulling the ones you can PROVE, based on details that reviewers include in their feedback. Those that only have stars and no comments, are harder to prove unless you’re able to get in touch with the reviewer.
3 Finally, review Google’s policy and quote the section that directly relates to your particular issue, demonstrating that the reviews you want to remove violate their policy.
Once we built our case for the client, we put it all together and sent it to Google’s support team. Within a day we had a response from their team (a real human!) saying that they were reviewing the case. And within two days we were notified that the reviews had been removed. Success!
Optimize Your Google My Business Profile
While we were building our client’s case for Google we simultaneously got to work on optimizing their business profile. This is your offense strategy.
1 Start by responding to the reviews you think were intended for a different company. Politely point out that the reviewer intended to leave their review for another business and kindly ask them to remove it. Doing this will also demonstrate to future visitors that there is, in fact, another company with a similar name/services.
2Make sure your Google My Business profile is optimized by adding all relevant categories, services, business information, images, videos, and even add some posts. This will make it easier for visitors to clearly see who you are.
3If your business name closely resembles that of another, consider changing the naming convention. For example, if your business name is “Carol’s Cupcakes”, and there’s another business with the same name in your vicinity, you could use “Carol’s Bakery”—allowing visitors to pause before leaving a review to make sure they have the right Carol.
4Once you have optimized your profile, ask existing clients to leave a review. This will increase your average score and push the negative reviews down, while you wait for Google to take action.
Final Musings
A lot of small businesses and entrepreneurs can sometimes find it difficult to navigate the digital world mostly because they don’t have the time.
Don’t be discouraged by what may seem like an uphill battle with a big organization. And remember that this roadmap can be (and has been) applied to other review platforms like TripAdvisor and Yelp.
As with anything else in life, sometimes it just takes a little research, imagination, and determination to get things done!
Resources
Here are some of the resources we used and reference in this case study:
👉 Google Support Ticket System—https://support.google.com/business/answer/7667250
👉 Google Chat Support—https://support.google.com/business/contact/business_chat
👉 Google My Business Twitter—https://twitter.com/googlemybiz?lang=en
👉 Google My Business Facebook—https://www.facebook.com/GoogleMyBusiness/
Have you had negative reviews? Are there other things you did to remedy negative reviews? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below!
