It could happen to any businesses: an unhappy customer posts a negative review and it could ruin your reputation and cost you loss in business. Whether it is posted on a local reviews site such as Google local or Yelp or a social media or blog posts such as on Reddit and Medium, negative reviews on the web can damage your online reputation and have consequences on your income.
While companies have had to deal with disgruntled customers long before the Internet, the web adds insult to injury by keeping a permanent record of negative or unflattering content. Unfortunately, negative reviews on the internet are especially damaging because they appear easily in search results.
So, how do you get rid of negative reviews? Well, the answer isn’t that simple. Unfortunately, there’s no surefire way to get rid of negative reviews or content from the web. But there is some hope.
The first thing you can do is Flag or report the review to the platform or contact the site’s customer service and explain why you think the review is false. Unfortunately many platform will only remove a review if it violates their policies and guidelines, so you must first familiarize yourself with them. For example, a person cannot leave a review for their friend or relative. On most review platforms, the review must be personal. This is one reason you can use to get a review removed. Other reasons include, cyber harassments, racial discrimination, sexual discrimination, information or content involving as child, or disclosure of personal information.
If none of the above reasons can be used, unfortunately your chances of removal are very slim to none.
The only other solution is try to do suppression of the results via online reputation management (ORM). With a combination of SEO and social media profile creations, you can suppress the negative content and reviews.
There many social media sites that naturally rank high, so make sure you have profiles on all of the major ones (i.e FB, Instagram, X, TikTok, Linkedin, Medium, Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, to name a few). You can also submit press releases and but premium articles on some well known sites, which may rank well. After you have social profiles, you will need to SEO the content with your brand name and do backlining to them so they can move up higher in teh search results.
Keep in mind that in certain circumstances hiring an ORM company may be the best option, as it would be very time consuming to do it yourself and you may not have the expertise to do it.
Our company offers full on ORM services, including social media profile creation service. If you would like a quote, make sure to contact us.