How to Respond to Negative Google Reviews with Sylvia Ho

How to Respond to Negative Google Reviews with Sylvia Ho

Welcome to this episode 250 of The Determined Mom Show. I am your host, Amanda Tento, and in this episode, you’re going to hear an interview from one of my clients, Sylvia Ho, an attorney, and she is going to interview me about how to respond to negative reviews. 

Sylvia is a past optimization client, and she’s had huge success with her optimization, and she reached out to me and asked me if I would talk to her about negative reviews and how to respond because she had listened to a previous podcast episode. So it’s a little longer than normal, but I hope you enjoy it.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to my office today. We have a very special guest Amanda Tento, who is a Google business profile expert I know she’s an expert because I was directed to Amanda by a lot of Marketing social media marketing people as a person, so you did you don’t know Amanda your names have been spread among social media and Google professionals when they’re looking for somebody in the area of Google Business Profile. 

Did you know that? No, I didn’t know that. That’s great. That’s what I heard. That’s how I contacted you because they referred to you as the guru of Google Business Profile. So kudos to you. Thank you. It’s exciting. Why don’t you tell us a little about your background, how you got into your Google business profile, or what it used to be, Google my business? A world because I understand that you understand that world well. And right now, Google reviews are generating lots of business for people. And then, from our attorney’s perspective, it’s also hurting some people. 

Could you tell us about your background?

So years ago, I was a credit union manager and was pregnant with our third child and what we thought was our last child. And it turned out to be not, but that’s another long story. So I decided that I didn’t want to go back to the credit union after I had the baby and decided that I wanted to work from home.

I decided to be a VA I started out as a VA virtual assistant, and I ended up working for a marketing agency in Tacoma, Washington, and I still do some work for him to this day. He put me in charge of his customers, Google Business Profiles. And at that time, it was called Google, My Business. And I started posting to them and doing some updates and changing some things like updating pictures and just descriptions and things like that.

And I saw this huge immediate jump in their views in so many different metrics. And I was like, what is going on here? So then I thought this is getting them to the top of the maps, and this is about six years ago, but This is like shooting them directly to the top of the maps.

And I was like, what is going on? I’m onto something here, so I just started delving into that world and focusing on that as my primary focus of learning, experimenting, and creating, and it has been an amazing journey since then.

 I’ve dealt with hundreds of businesses like yours over the years. And it has just been an absolute joy to help people. It is my passion. It’s what I love to talk about. If you have ever listened to my podcast, all my solo episodes are almost all about Google My Business.

You, Amanda, have a podcast called the determined mom. And so it’s wonderful because it weaves your personal story along with great tips, just great tips.

And 1 of the podcasts I downloaded, because I picked out, was how to deal with Google reviews. Now, 1st, how to get good. Google reviews, but then that particular podcast talked about negative Google reviews. So from my perspective and my audience, they’re interested in both. 

How do I get good Google reviews?

How do I get moved up on Google? My. Google business profile is going to say Google my business. I wonder why they did this. And then what do I do with bad reviews? Because often my clients are not as concerned about the single bad review, but the vicious reviewer that. Defames them, so we’ll talk about that in a little while, but let’s talk about generally how Google works.

And you talked about Google Maps and I do know about that. And many people who have businesses don’t know that they might know that, but they might delegate it to someone to take care of, and some people are great. They have hundreds of. Great reviews and they shoot up to the top of the list and other people are not so good.

They might have one review. So why don’t you talk about that? So gathering reviews is incredibly important because Google business profile or Google my business is the number one ranking factor on Google. So if you’re a business, Google looks there first. Would you happen to have a listing? If you don’t have a listing, you must do it today.

First, you have to claim it or create it. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you likely already have a listing. You need to claim it. You can claim a service area business if you don’t have a brick-and-mortar. And you can create it. So you’re going to create it from scratch.

But Do that today if you don’t have one. That’s the first thing because that’s again the number one ranking factor. The next thing is gathering those reviews. Google takes a little snippet of that review and serves it to people that are looking. So I’m looking for a business startup attorney, or, someone to help with business certain business documents.

I searched for that. And a snippet of your review comes up, right? A review of whatever that service is that I’m looking for. That is how people are going to find you. The more reviews you get now, let’s say someone leaves just a star review. They leave a five-star review, no commenting, no nothing. But you know that person, it’s a client of yours.

You will want to reply to that review because the text you leave as a reply also counts towards those keywords that Google will be pulling up in your profile. So you’re going to say, Hey, thank you so much for working with me. It was great to help you with blah, blah, blah, whatever that service was.

I am looking forward to working with you in the future. Could you make it personal but also informative for Google and also informative for anyone else that’s looking for that service? So they are really. The SEO is proper in the review itself. So the thoughts you have, the more reviewers you have to talk about your business, the higher the ranking.

Suppose you say if you. If you make if you’re a donut shop and you make this fantastic donut and every 1 of your reviewers talks about that fantastic donut, the word fantastic donut will show up in the Google search and then. People will come to you because of your fantastic donut because they’ll show up at your bakery and ask you for that fantastic donut.

Is that how it works? That’s exactly how it works. Okay. How do people go about doing that? First, they claim their profile. And then I understand you did an inventory, you have an inventory and a checklist, and you check people’s Google reviews. Is that right? So you’re going to want to for collecting reviews.

I suggest a couple of methods to our clients, and I gave you one of these, a QR code. I don’t know if you’ve used that or not. But a QR code. Especially for in-person businesses is a great way to gather more reviews. So you’re going to want to put in place a strategy to gather more reviews, and then you’re going to want to make sure you reply to every review.

And replying to every review means positive, negative, and even the ones that are like three stars, four stars. Those are like the in-betweens, but every review needs to be replied to. And the quicker you reply to it, the better in that customer’s eyes. You’re going to look just for that individual customer but also for people that are looking to work with you in the future.

They can see that you’ve taken the time as a business owner. Could you reply to the people you’ve worked with and give them feedback about how it was to work with them too? And that kind of thing. It was great working with you. You always want to leave positive feedback for those clients, but give a glimpse into what it’s like to work with you.

Someone unhappy is probably unhappy for a reason or in their mind, a reason. And one thing that we as business owners need to make sure we don’t do, which is very difficult is to not take it personally, right? That’s the first step. And when you’re also responding to reviews, please think about it from the perspective of I’m not responding necessarily to this person.

I’m just getting back to all of my future potential clients and customers to see if they’re looking at how you handle your review reaction and your view response. If I see a business owner, that is I rate back at, the client or the customer, I’m not going to go there because I know that if anything goes wrong with that product or service, that is most likely.

They’re going to give me that same attitude, and I don’t want things to be resolved with professionalism, great customer service, and care for the customer. So that’s a choice. You’re making that choice for everyone to see when you respond negatively to a negative review.

So what you’re saying is, it’s an opportunity because when you respond to a review in a good sense, when I respond to reviews, it’s interesting. After all, I read myself. I have someone take care of my Google, my business. Still, I get messages and respond to them, especially with clients I know.

If you have an opportunity at that point, what you’re saying is you have an opportunity to show off your customer service. So I’ll give you a good example. I was looking for balsamic vinegar. And I always look at the worst reviews because the best reviews come out, right? So this is on Amazon, and in the best in the worst reviews, it was not a killer because everybody complained about a broken bottle.

And this is how we do things and we don’t have a return like this is our return policy this is the service that we provided, and there are no refunds or there’s You know just, yes, that’s are very harsh language. And in my experience with representing business owners that deal with the general public in terms of consumer situations, a lot of it has.

So if you reply to it emotionally at first and then go back and change it. There’s still the chance that screenshot is out there and That it’s just forever. The internet is forever, as we know, even though there are many lawsuits with deleted texts or yes, or screenshots.

People are still going to see them. It’s not buried, but what that does. Adding more reviews statistically lowers the chance that they will see it, but it also improves your overall rating score. So if you have four reviews and two of them are bad, then you are going to have two and a half stars.

We don’t have you in our records as a customer. But we look forward to servicing you or working with you in the future, something like that. To deflect whatever they’re saying, it’s, that’s interesting because it seems like the briefer you are with those people, the better it is.

And I’m like, no, go on. There are enough other things that you can do to get good reviews from customers who come to you and for you to increase the Google search. And I’ve just noticed that Google’s business profile is the number 1 search because they’re searching themselves.

It’s a pretty interesting search process that they have. And another thing that I want to bring to light as far as reviews go is going back to that. Step of having a review process in place or asking for reviews. You must build that into your onboarding and follow-up process, and send an email and say, hey, it was great meeting with you, even if it’s just a consultation and they don’t end up being a client.

Oh, and Google gives you one. They do. What are the issues with lawyers? , so much of what we do is confidential, so we can only do it if our client chooses to come and disclose that. Otherwise, we can’t disclose it. We can’t ask them to disclose it. So they have to voluntarily. And that’s also another example.

A lot of lawyers say. You will only see a few reviews for family law lawyers, but real estate lawyers and state planners will get tons of them because no one cares if you buy or sell a house. But so much of what lawyers do is confidential. And you don’t see a lot of doctors with tons of reviews either because no one wants to say that’s my doctor. So certain professions are not going to have a ton of reviews.

Different from the donut shop. No one cares about that. Or a hotel or stuff like that. Thank you very much, Amanda. That was fantastic. This is one of the most valuable interviews I’ve done. And I’m sure a few interviews on the internet deal with bad Google reviews.

So I really much appreciate it. So Amanda, how can people get in touch with you? What is your business’s and website’s name, and where are you located? So I’m located in York, PA, but I work with people all over the world. Most of my clients are in the United States, but we deal with clients of all types and sizes.

We’ve switched focus recently to dealing with businesses with lots of locations. Large companies with many locations because we found that it’s almost impossible for them to find someone to work with. The company is called TDM marketing and stands for the determined mom.

LinkedIn is the best place to contact me. I love being on there, sharing, and seeing what everybody else is doing.

It’s a great place to connect. Thank you, Amanda. Amanda Tento, TDM Marketing. Thank you very much. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Yes. Thank you for having me.