Responding to Reviews

Q: What is an owner response?

A: A function on local business review platforms which enables you to reply to the sentiment consumers are leaving about your business. Interacting with reviews via owner response fields is a core component of reputation management.

Owner responses represent one of the greatest assets your local business has for becoming an active contributor to your online reputation, rather than a powerless bystander. Take a fully-informed approach to this major facet of reputation management by considering the following:

1. 90% of consumers are influenced to either a moderate or extreme degree by owner responses.

2. 64% of negative reviewers expect a response to their reviews, but only 40% of positive reviewers have come to expect a thankful response for their taking the time to leave praise for the business.

3. Owner responses are free advertising. Unlike pay-per-click campaigns, or even website hosting, for which you have to pay, owner responses are free screen real estate on some of the most influential, visible platforms on the Internet. While owner responses should never feature sales pitches, wise owners make every word of this free space count in order to create the maximum favorable impression of the business’ quality, professionalism, accountability and exceptional customer service.

4. Owner responses can directly protect your customer acquisition budget. It’s been estimated that it can cost up to 25x more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Because of this, reviews which contain legitimate complaints represent a lifeline being thrown to the business to fix a problem and “save” an existing customer. When an owner response solves a cited problem, 62% of customers will give your business a second chance, and an additional 28% say that they might do so. Keeping existing customers happy instead of having to replace them is cost efficient.

5. Owner responses are public relations media. The responses you write to happy or unhappy reviewers aren’t just for a single customer to read - they’re for all future potential customers to read. What you say to one customer signals to all others how they can expect to be treated by your business.

6. Owner responses are social media. While review platforms aren’t all quite as real-time in nature as major social platforms like Facebook or Twitter, the speed of your response times still matters. 60% of review writers expect a response from the business in two-or-less days. Reviews and owner responses form a social interaction, and each local business must regularly monitor their most important review platforms in order to be effectively responsive.

7. Owner responses are customer service. Customers who voluntarily write good press about your business want to be thanked. Customers who voluntarily write bad press about your business often want to be heard. Just as you wouldn’t authorize sales staff to ignore the thanks or complaints of consumers face-to-face, your local business shouldn’t dismiss written sentiment by withholding replies. To neglect reviews and owner responses is to give up control of an internal component of the customer service ecosystem.

Data Source: The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report - Moz

Whether a review is of the ideal five-star or the dreaded one-star variety, classifying consumer sentiment into types and matching that to an appropriate tone of response will make you adept at this form of reputation management. It can help to categorize reviews into five broad types, as follows:

1. 1-2 star reviews typically stem from a poor customer experience and require a fast response to apologize, solve any problems cited by the customer, offer to make things better, and win back the customer. Only 3% of customers will give a business with a 2-or-less star overall rating a try. Legitimate negative reviews require a swift response and a best effort to rectify the situation with an apology and offer to make things right again for the customer.

2. 3-star reviews are a signal that the business needs improvement. They may contain a mix of positive and negative sentiment. About ⅓ of customers will give a business a try if its overall rating is 3 stars, and that may give you a short grace period to fix problems customers are citing in reviews to begin to improve your reputation. Respond quickly to 3-star reviews and implement solutions to resolve stated problems.

3. 4-5 star reviews can be viewed as good or excellent. The majority of surveyed consumers cite star ratings as the most important aspects of reviews. 51% of customers require a minimum 4-star overall rating to consider trying a business, and 13% will only patronize brands with a flawless 5-star overall rating. Respond to every positive review with thanks so that the public sees you are engaged with your customer base and paying attention to what your customers say about your business.

4. Some negative reviews will feature complaints you feel are inaccurate, unfair, and even unkind. It can be tempting to argue with customers or accuse them of lying, but the majority of the review-reading public will either definitely or potentially avoid businesses where owners use these tactics in owner responses. It’s a far better strategy to take the high road, empathize with customers’ stated pain, take responsibility for customer experience at your business, apologize, and offer to fix problems.

5. Finally, some reviews are spam and get published in violation of review platform guidelines and national regulations. If your business has unknowingly posted reviews of itself, had staff or former staff do so, or has incentivized reviews in any way, or has paid a marketing firm that is breaking platform guidelines, don’t respond to this content. Instead, do all you can to remove it from your profiles to avoid reputation damage, punitive action on the part of the platform, or even litigation. On the flip side, your business may receive spam reviews from competitors and bad actors who are not your customers and, therefore, not eligible to review you. Again, don’t respond to this type of content. Instead, report these reviews to the relevant platform in hopes of removal. And, should any review allege illegal practices on the part of the business, don’t respond. Instead, you may need to document what is happening and seek legal advice.

When local business owners learn that 96% of US adults read local business reviews, it’s natural to be a little nervous at how much a company’s reputation is at stake in this form of online content. It’s normal to feel like this, and very helpful to realize that you actually have an extraordinary amount of power to improve your reputation, customer retention, and revenue when a negative review shows up on one of your profiles. Remember that more than 6 in 10 negative reviewers are willing to give your business a second chance if your owner response resolves their complaint.

Take comfort in the idea that managing negative reviews is a largely-predictable process that works like this:

1. The business receives a negative review

2. The owner reads the review for clues to what went wrong at the time of service. The more clues, the better.

3. The owner comes up with the solution to any problems cited by the customer.

4. The owner responds to the review with an apology, mention of what they’ve done to fix a problem, thanks for the important feedback the customer has taken the time to leave, and an offer to make things right.

5. When the owner response is skilled, the customer hopefully gives the business a second chance and updates their formerly-negative review and rating to reflect their improved opinion of the business.

6. The review-reading public sees how well the brand takes care of customers when something goes wrong and derives trust from this that they, too, will be well-cared-for if they experience a problem with a transaction.

7. The owner logs the complaint and resolution in a living document for the purposes of quality control and sentiment analysis at the businesses. By tracking review management over time, brands can gauge increases in customer satisfaction as well as identifying deeper structural issues that require greater investment to fix.

With a logical process like this in place, the business has little to fear from a moderate amount of negative reviews. However, there are two cases - one common and the other one less common - in which successful reputation management becomes more difficult for local brands.

The more common of the two scenarios occurs when platforms like Google allow consumers to leave ratings without text. When a business receives a rating of a single star, or two stars, or even three, and there is no text clueing the owner into what went wrong for the customer, the owner can still respond, but they can’t offer to fix a problem that hasn’t been stated. Instead, the best practice is to respond by asking the customer to please contact the business directly to explain their dissatisfaction and to give the company a chance to make amends for their poor experience.

The rarer scenario is a troubling one in which a business may become the victim of a large-scale negative review attack during which they receive dozens or hundreds of poor reviews and ratings within a short time frame. Some cases like this have occurred when there has been news coverage of some kind of the business, angering some members of the public, but negative review attacks can also occur because unfair competitors have hired unethical marketers to carry out these actions.

In extreme cases of review spam, Google has sometimes temporarily shut off the review portion of local business listings during highly-visible attacks, but in most scenarios, the business will need to report the reviews as spam, per usual, and hope the platform takes action to remove illegitimate content. If the platform fails to act on these requests, the business owner may need to publicize the issue to prompt the platform to action. A last resort would be to seek legal advice.

In most instances, however, local brands do not experience large-scale attacks, and the process of review management is simply part of daily operations.

Larger enterprises can and should task staff to manage the owner response function of review sites, but for the small local business owner, finding the time for this work can be a genuine challenge. Here are 2 things that can help:

1. Review monitoring takes time. Automate this part of the process via a tool like Moz Local which will track new, incoming reviews on major platforms, lifting that burden from your shoulders. Then, you only need to take a minute or two to write the owner response.

2. Be aware of the typical velocity at which you receive reviews. If your business only gets 1-2 reviews a week, this means you only have to block out 15 minutes or so one day per week to write your responses, rather than having to worry about this on a daily basis. Unlike a large, multi-location enterprise, you typically aren’t going to be receiving dozens of reviews a week you have to manage. You just have to make it a brief, weekly task. Larger enterprises should be prepared to invest substantially in both review management software and time to fully benefit from the existence of reviews and the power they have to drive traffic and sales.

Going back to where we started, owner responses = free advertising, lifelines, PR, social media and customer service. Rather than being an addendum to your marketing strategy, they represent a fundamental opportunity for local businesses to help monitor and contribute to their own reputations. Without a good reputation, no business can expect to succeed, making it only sensible to make maximum use of the power of the owner response.

• Getting Reviews
• Do You Need Professional Reputation Management?
• The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report - Our local business review survey outlines key takeaways regarding the impact of reviews on consumer behavior and local business success. Learn more about the fundamentally important inclusion of online local business reviews in any local SEO strategy.
• Building a Local Business Website
• Content Planning for Local SEO
• Local SEO Certification - In this six-part Certification, you’ll receive nearly six hours of on-demand, instructor-led content, covering the fundamentals, local competitor research, location data management, reputation management, and measuring and tracking success.
• In Real Life: Local SEO Tactics - In this course, local business owners learn how to get the most out of their SEO strategy using skills and knowledge they already have.
• The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide - A comprehensive beginner's guide to SEO marketing for small businesses.