I’ve spent decades in local SEO advising local business owners on how to handle receiving negative online reviews, but today, we’re going to flip the script.

Following a very bad experience with a nearby business, an acquaintance recently asked me if their best option was to leave a negative review of the establishment. Being asked that question made me look around the web to see if others were debating whether or not taking such an action is the right thing to do, and sure enough, it’s not an uncommon forum topic:

SEOs and marketers are also consumers, and nearly everyone we know is going to have a poor experience at a local business at some point, so today, I’m going to walk you through getting into the most productive mindset when a transaction is unsatisfactory. I’ll show you how to write a really good negative review from the best possible motives and with the best chance of seeing results from the time you invest in the task. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this topic tackled quite this way before, and I hope you’ll share this piece with your circles because it’s something nearly everybody can relate to.

If your face is still hot from having a really poor experience at a local business, you can forget to ask the most important question. Before you take to your phone or keyboard to dash off a negative review, ask,

“I’m about to invest more of my valuable time in this business that failed to serve me well; what do I want the result of spending this time to be?”

Do you want:

• A response from the business owner?

• An apology?

• Your money back/your product exchanged/work to be redone/a replacement experience?

• Assurance that something has been fixed so others don’t experience the same issue?

• A good reason to give the business a second chance?

• To prevent an important local business from failing by letting them know what’s going wrong?

• Something else? If so, can you name it?

While there may be scenarios that are so absurd that your best option is just to walk away and try to forget the whole thing for your own peace of mind, deciding to leave a review signals that you are still somewhat invested in the scenario you experienced.

Take an additional minute to examine your possible motives:

1. Leaving a review for the sake of revenge

This is the worst possible reason to leave a review and the least productive use of your time. While you might enjoy a brief sense of relief from the process of venting by harshly upbraiding a nearby business in hopes of damaging its reputation in the community, it’s unlikely to lead to a good-feeling resolution of the problem you experienced.

The urge to make a dramatic declaration of your anger via a review is likely to arise from the feeling that you’ve been treated especially poorly. I see the word “ripoff” being thrown around very carelessly in reviews, and think it’s a useful practice to gauge whether it’s truly accurate in a given scenario:

• Have you actually been ripped off by a company with nefarious business practices, such as intentionally overcharging, intentionally not providing a service as agreed upon/advertised, deliberately using tactics like bait-and-switch or price gouging? An example of a ripoff would be a chain of businesses that intentionally lists one price on shelves while secretly charging customers a higher price at the register.

• Or, is what you experienced possibly the result of a one-off mistake, an unusual failure at the business, a lack of staff training, a misunderstanding, or a business that just isn’t run very well and needs to improve if they don’t want to fail? An example of a non-ripoff would be your pizza arriving cold because the delivery person’s vehicle got stuck in a traffic jam; your bad experience wasn’t the result of someone trying to defraud you. Most businesses do not operate on the basis of ripoffs.

If you suspect that something illegal is occurring at a business, taking revenge via a review is your weakest possible option. Instead, you may wish to contact a lawyer and local reporters or consumer protection groups to explain your experience. This may then lead to local or national reporting that blows the whistle on alleged practices. Where enough money is involved, it may also lead to a legal settlement.

2. Leaving a review as a PSA

A better motive than revenge is leaving a negative review because you want to warn your local community that something is dissatisfactory about a neighborhood business. In fact, Moz’s own review survey found that telling others about their experiences (both good and bad) is the #1 reason consumers write reviews. 73% of respondents are motivated by this impulse, meaning it’s basically the main reason online reviews exist.

It’s laudable if, after being treated poorly, you want to make a public service announcement that protects your neighbors from having a similar negative experience. However, in the spirit of fairness, ask yourself,

• Do I need to use blistering language to let my neighbors know that when I ordered a pizza, it arrived cold? Am I meeting my goal of advising others with language like, “These utter fools can’t even deliver a hot pizza”? Or can a PSA use milder words like, “The one time I ordered, I was disappointed that the pizza arrived cold and no one seemed to care, and I’d like to know why that happened before I’d consider giving your business a second chance”?

• Will my community be better served by my warning them directly via this review or by using my review to make an effort to get the attention of the owner, which I didn’t receive at the time of service?

It’s a sad fact that there are, indeed, careless or uncaring business owners who won’t act on public feedback no matter how hard you try. Particularly in the case of large brands, leadership is frequently so far removed from the customer that no amount of effort on your part is going to succeed in getting policies and practices changed at the local level. In this common scenario, a PSA may be your best bet for contributing your unfortunate lived experience to the pool of community knowledge so that others can read it and decide whether or not to give the business a try. If this is what you choose to do, try to be as detail-oriented as possible about what went wrong and to show your wisdom, rather than your anger, in hopes that it may help a neighbor make an informed choice.

But in other cases, where the owner of a business is accessible and empowered to make positive changes, a PSA may be only a second-best option; instead, a review that takes your complaints straight to the top may be your best hope of achieving your desired results.

3. Leaving a review as an opening to dialogue with the business owner

While our survey found that nearly ¾ of review writers leave reviews to share their experiences with the public, I think it’s a real problem that only 38% write to tell the business it needs to improve, and only 21% write in order to receive a response.

Too often, this is the timeline of what happens during a dissatisfactory local business transaction:

I empathize with any customer who so loathes confrontation that they find it really difficult to speak up the moment a problem occurs. I suspect that many negative reviews are the result of this quandary, with the reviewer only able to comfortably find their voice afterward and online, instead of when face-to-face with a service provider. Sometimes, too, we may feel rather shaken when suffering very rude treatment at a business or by suspecting that something is really going wrong with an experience or transaction, and it can take us a bit to process what happened.

Ideally, you should try to speak up at the time of a transaction and escalate directly to the business owner or manager when necessary so that a complaint can hopefully be immediately resolved instead of becoming a weight on your mind. But that’s not always possible.

I recall when I was seated in a doctor’s waiting room and was shocked to hear his front desk staff openly gossiping and complaining about patients they were phoning, within the hearing of everyone present, giving the worst possible impression of the practice. However, my mind was focused on my own medical concerns rather than voicing a complaint once I reached the examining room. In another instance, the only person available to speak to at a quick oil change shop was the staff member who had just treated me with unusual disrespect. There was no manager or owner in sight to whom I could mention the incident.

Online reviews can be utilized in cases like these as the opening to a direct dialogue with the business owner if you write them well. If you go into this process with an openness to being satisfied and even won back if the owner resolves your complaint, the outcome can be a big relief for you and even a beneficial experience for the company, helping them to continue operating in your community. These are the best motives I know of for writing a negative review.

We all have the ability to choose to be generous and gracious in the face of a negative consumer experience. Before you write your review, it can help to recall as many details as you can about what transpired and then measure out the amount of slack you’re willing to cut the brand.

The above graphic is a rough approximation of my own personal slack-cutting scale. I tend to be less forgiving when I feel my poor treatment resulted from the kind of uncaring policies that can only occur when brands have become local monopolies/too big to fail. I’m more forgiving of small businesses messing up when I consider the economic and societal pressures under which they operate. In fact, one of my chief motivations for writing reviews is that I never want SMBs to fail. And I’m almost always understanding when it comes to somebody making human errors on a bad day. Determine what your own scale looks like.

The one thing I would urge you to incorporate into your value system is this: never blame employees. Why?

• Staff at most brands have little or no control over customer service policies. The person behind the counter is simply struggling to earn a living, just like you. Don’t attempt to name and shame them in any review. They are not the business they work for.

• When it is a staff member who has been unhelpful, unprofessional, or rude, this is typically the fault of brand leadership failing to adequately train them. It is up to the brand to hire employees who are not only capable of serving the public well but who are supportively trained in customer service, company culture, and complaint resolution.

• Never forget that everyone who serves you at a place of business has a whole life outside work. Someone who treats you rudely may be barely getting by that day in their personal life. They might be suffering from a chronic medical condition, have just experienced the sad loss of a pet, be coping with an uncivil boss, or maybe worrying about a family member. They may leave work that day feeling ashamed at their own lack of professionalism. We all have bad days and should be able to hope to be forgiven by others for being imperfect and human.

In writing an effective negative review for a local business, you have two important components at your disposal: your star rating and your review text.

Star rating

As shown above, your star rating will contribute to the overall average rating. While it can be tempting to blast a business with a one-star rating if you’re particularly dissatisfied, it’s important to realize just how powerful the star rating is and how much power you wield.

The fewer reviews a business has, the more your single-star rating will damage its overall rating. The average star rating is the most important component of online reviews. When consumers are deciding whether to try a business, according to Moz’s review survey, only 3% will risk a transaction with a company that has a one or two-star rating.

Given this, ask yourself:

• Was my experience so egregious that it truly merits a one or two-star rating? Was the entire experience an utter disaster?

• Or were some components of the experience normal and okay?

An example of an utter disaster meriting a single star might be getting food poisoning or arriving at a hotel room that is filled with bugs and encountering no help from management. Where you might be more generous and give a less severe three-star rating could be visiting a pizzeria where the premises were clean, and the staff was friendly, but the food was bland or cold.

The point here is to be judicious when an experience isn’t great and award stars on a scale that reflects your sense of fair play and values.

Review text

This is where I’m hoping to teach you to write a negative review in a tone you may never have tried before. Instead of going the common PSA route, write directly to the business owner with the expectation of resolution.

Start by gathering these facts in your head:

• The date and time of service

• The exact order in which the parts of the problem occurred

• What you would like to have happen next

It can also help you think of what to write to look at the “people often mention” section of the Google business profile. If the language you use in your review matches a topic that a bunch of other customers are mentioning, it can reinforce to the brand that a particular subject is coming up in their reviews due to a structural problem that needs to be fixed.

For the sake of this experiment, we’re going to draw on my experience at the oil change spot and draft a sample negative review.

While this fictitious example does act as a PSA for anyone else who might be considering the business, the main thing is that we’ve calmly provided the details of the bad experience, addressed directly to the owner, and stated our openness to speaking with them further. The ball is now in their court, and unless they are entirely neglecting their reviews, there’s a good chance we’ll receive a response and an offer to make things right.

In my sample review, I’ve given a generous three stars for work on the vehicle being done properly but have docked two stars for the incorrect time estimate, untidy/uncomfortable premises, and the unusually rude behavior of the employee.

Once you post your negative review, you enter a phase of waiting to see what happens, with the understanding that reviews are living documents that can be edited at any time. Review surveys indicate that most people expect a response within a couple of days, but if you can, again, be generous, give it a week.

Next:

• If you receive an owner response inviting you to further dialogue and the in-person exchange meets your criteria, you can choose to update the rating and review to explain how the business made things right after an initial poor experience. The owner’s sincere apology might be enough for you, or it might be that you feel you need your money back, or the offer of a discounted/free next transaction to achieve a sense of resolution about the experience. If the owner does everything in their power to make it right, your sense of fairness will help you update your review, PSA-style, to let your community know the business was responsive to your complaint and did its best to resolve it.

• If you receive zero response to your review in the time you’ve allotted, you might make a last-ditch effort to phone the company and ask to speak to the owner or branch manager. If you are put through to them and explain the issue, don’t forget to tell them about the review you left and your disappointment in not receiving a response. All too often, local businesses simply don’t manage their reviews, sometimes due to fear of reviews or because they’ve yet to modernize their customer service and marketing practices to include online reputation management. Based on your phone conversation, you still might choose to update your review to mention a more positive second experience.

• If, however, you receive zero response to the online review and no offer of resolution from trying to contact the owner/branch manager at the business, it’s fair to conclude that the company is failing to prioritize customer experience and is not one you can recommend to the public in good faith. At this point, you might also decide to update your review to detail the attempts you’ve made to converse with the company and the lack of response you received. You might decrease your review stars on the basis of this serious service failure. At this point, you’ll likely have to simply walk away from the experience and resolve not to transact with the business again. You can also let your family and friends know what happened so they can avoid the place.

While outrageous, uncivil behavior may make headlines in 24-hour national news, few of us want to live in hometowns that operate on hostility. The anonymity of the web has proven an unfortunate gateway to some people writing things online that they’d never say in person, and I’ve seen too much evidence of this fact in the overheated tone of many reviews where the extreme language of the reviewer appears to be an overreaction to a minor disappointment.

The fact is, we all depend on the local commercial infrastructure of our communities and need nearby businesses to thrive so that we can access goods and services. So, rather than going from 0 to 100 MPH in a review when our meal was too salty or our plumber didn’t fix our leak the first time around, we can try to learn to take a step back and become more analytical about what went wrong and how it might be fixed so that the business can keep operating instead of closing due to repeat customer experience failures. Instead of further polluting the sea of the internet with more people angrily snapping at one another, reviewers can become local business advocates by extending the benefit of the doubt and offering second chances for neighboring businesses to get things right.

You will be ignored sometimes, and you’ll even encounter some owner responses that indicate that the person in charge probably shouldn’t be serving the public. Still, there’s also a good chance that a response to your complaint will restore your good faith in the business (and possibly humanity?). Then, you’ll not only have the satisfaction of knowing that your neighbor who runs the local hardware store heard your concern without them having to go home that night feeling awful because a customer was uncivil to them but also realizing you live in a city or town where your own needs can be heard and met appropriately.

Consumer feedback is an essential gift to local businesses, helping them continuously improve customer satisfaction and their chances of longevity, but it can be both effectively given and gratefully received with a little extra care for civility on both sides.