Digital MarketingCan I Edit My Google Reviews?

March 18, 2019

This is a great question, and we get asked all the time. Unfortunately, Google does not allow you to reassign or even remove reviews from your Google listing. If you find yourself in a situation where you have a bad review that you feel is false, you can do three things to try to lessen the blow:

  1. If you know the person that left the review, we recommend contacting this person to acknowledge their review, offer to resolve their issues and ask them to update or remove their review.
  2. In the case of customers reviewing the wrong location, this isn’t something you can move or reassign. The only thing that has worked for us is to send an email to those few individuals and asking them to leave their review on the correct locations listing. Since you are asking your customers to redo their kind act, you can use this link generator to help streamline the process: https://www.grade.us/home/labs/google-review-link-generator
  3. If you are not able to contact the person that left you the review or they are not a customer/client, we recommend responding publicly to the review through your Google account. You can locate the review once you are logged in and click “REPLY.”
    • Below is a sample response you can use to respond:
      • Hi, [NAME]. We appreciate your interest in our firm, although we have never had a client by your name, so we are concerned with the low rating you provided. If your rating was in error, we would appreciate you removing the review. If your rating was not in error, we would appreciate the opportunity to discuss any questions or concerns you may have. Please contact us at (XXX) XXX-XXXX. Thank you!
  4. Report the review to Google. You can “flag” the review and follow the prompts to submit your complaint. Google does not guarantee they will remove the review, but it doesn’t hurt to try!

 

What’s Next?

The best plan of action is to add positive reviews to your profile.

Ask recent (happy) customers to leave you a Google review. You can do this during the transaction or with a follow-up email. We lean toward email because you can send them a direct link to your Google listing, making it as simple as possible for them.

 

Below is a sample email you can send to your clients:

Subject: Review Request for [Company]

Body: 

Dear [Client], 

As always, we appreciate our relationship with you as a client of the [Company]. Periodically, we request feedback from satisfied clients via Google, which helps us to continue helping clients like you. We appreciate how valuable your time is, but if you are comfortable taking a moment to leave us a positive review and/or rating about our team or services provided, it would be much appreciated.

For clients who already have a Google account, you will simply click the link below to provide your feedback.

[Link] (you can use this link generator to help streamline the process)

If you do not already have an account, creating a Google account is quick and easy by clicking this link:

https://accounts.google.com/signup/v2/webcreateaccount?continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&hl=en&flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=SignUp 

Thank you in advance, 

[Company]

Google’s Rules

Keep in mind that asking for reviews is not necessarily frowned upon by Google, but you do need to make sure that you are not incentivizing these reviews. (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3474122?hl=en)

Increasing your positive, more robust reviews will help bury the negative one and improve your overall star ratings!