Today’s column was inspired by a recent conversation with friend and fellow local SEO — Greg Sterling of NearMedia. Greg was speaking with a restaurant owner who didn’t regularly monitor or respond to her online reviews because they sucked her into a place of negativity. I’ve had similar exchanges with small business owners over the years. Revelations like these matter because they signal how many human emotions exist beneath the slick technological surfaces that SEOs may take for granted as our daily workspace.

Let’s embrace being human today. I want to validate the very reasonable fear most of us experience in any environment where our hard work may be criticized, and let’s try to get at the heart of this problem and arrive at a sense of more control for local business owners. My goal here is to empower you to take the necessary steps to both protect and benefit from having a good online reputation because those benefits can be central to the overall profitability and longevity of your business. I’ve created a free PDF of all the one-sheets in this piece to facilitate sharing with clients and friends. Let’s walk down this road together.

Start by taking in these three home truths:

1. You’re not wrong… some people’s online behavior can be anti-social

If, like the restaurant owner, you don’t want to look at your local business reviews because it just doesn’t make you feel good, know that you’re not alone in being sometimes appalled by people’s behavior on the internet. You can post a photo of cute kittens curled up in a bed of roses, and some stranger is sure to come along and post, “I hate all kittens and all roses, and I hate you for posting this photo!”

To varying degrees, we all encounter extreme behavior on the web every day. Some of it stems from people in personal crisis, some of it is the result of individuals being paid by entities to harass anyone with views that oppose a particular agenda, and some of it isn’t even human but is automated spam.

As a small business owner, try thinking of your own version of this statement:

“I acknowledge that it is unpleasant encountering rude language. A stranger’s account containing outrageous/impolite/unkind/unfeeling/anti-social words is not my ideal customer. Their language is a reflection of them, not me. I am building as many good relationships as I can with the neighbors I want to serve.”

2. You’re not wrong… review platforms limit the control business owners have

It is an ethical dilemma that the business model of review platforms is to earn money from representing and promoting opinions of brands without being authorized to do so by the businesses whose names they trade on. But this phenomenon is not new: the Michelin Guide is over a century old now, and Duncan Hines published his first book of reviews in 1935. Money is to be made in telling the public what people think of businesses, and professional reviewers seldom let brands know they are secretly being reviewed. At least in the online world, it’s all out in the open. But where things become concerning is that local business owners have insufficient recourse when review content isn’t factual.

The major review platforms want to earn profits, not mediate disputes between business owners and customers. Platforms send you traffic, phone calls, web visits, and real-world visits from neighbors who might not otherwise have found your enterprise, but there is rarely any type of live support for when things go wrong. It isn’t that you have no control over your reputation being hurt by online review platforms, but it is true that your control is limited.

Try coming up with your own words like these if they fit the bill:

“I acknowledge that lack of control makes me feel afraid. That’s a really common experience for most people, and all my local competitors are in the same boat on this one, with limited responsiveness from the review platforms representing us. Given this reality, I’d like to be more open to learning what I can control. I bet the more I learn, the more control over my reputation I’ll enjoy.”

3. You’re not wrong… your livelihood is at stake in how you manage your business

The reputation of your business isn’t a game. It’s the roof over your head, food on your family’s table, and, in the US, medical care for your staff. No one should diminish the fear you may have that a damaged online reputation could have a major negative impact on your business’s profits and longevity and on you personally. You are right if you worry about this, but thankfully, if you are like most small business owners, you already have the skills to make good on this scenario.

You resolve in-person complaints daily at your place of business or when out in the field serving customers. The good news is that the best way to resolve online complaints is to turn them into offline resolutions, inviting the unhappy customer to come back to you for things to be made right. This re-sets the stage back on your home turf, where you will often be given a second chance to prove how excellent your customer service is in the real world rather than through the cold glass wall of the internet.

Try finding your own wording for a statement like this:

“I acknowledge that I work hard to resolve in-person complaints every day. I’ve developed skills in this area, and if a customer complains online, there’s a good chance I can bring them back to a state of satisfaction by offering an offline solution. My online reply is just a notice that I want to make things right for them in the real world. I want to be more open about learning to control this online-to-offline customer service transition well.”

Now that we’ve validated common fears and reframed them in hopes of creating an atmosphere of openness to learning more let’s identify three actions you can take to start enjoying more control of your online reputation.

1. Create a complaint-friendly business plan

You can reduce the fear you feel by learning to take as much control as possible over your online reputation. By training every staff member so that they know how to resolve and escalate complaints, by hanging signage on your premises that invites customers to ask for in-person help rather than complaining later online, including after-hours support options like text numbers or website forms, and by preparing a set of perks like a replacement meal or no-questions-asked returns that your staff is authorized to offer to make things right, you’ll be taking a proactive approach to reputation management. And, always pay attention if multiple patrons begin making the same complaint about something like cold food, a rude server, or broken fixtures. The sooner you resolve issues like these in-house, the fewer customers will experience them.

If ignoring reviews in the past has caused them to pile up and add to your fearful feelings about addressing them, set a date to make a new good habit of scheduled review-reading. How often you have to do this is based on the frequency with which you receive new reviews, but know that the majority of reviewers expect a response from your business within two days. Regular activity will prevent you from ever facing a heap of reviews all at once. Whenever a legitimate negative review appears, use all your customer service skills to apologize and ask the customer to contact you at the business so you can make things right. The majority of negative reviewers will have an improved opinion of your business, give you a second chance, and update their review to reflect a better second experience… and that is really great news!

Finally, your plan should include the steps you want to take to encourage a steady stream of fresh, incoming reviews. The more positive reviews you receive, the less the impact will be on your overall star rating of a few negative reviews. It’s when businesses have few reviews that negative reviews have the worst effect on the rating average.

2. Reframe negative reviews as free business intelligence

If you look at the above graphic, your first reaction to the sample of reviews may be to sympathize or empathize with any hard-working business owner who is having to receive this many complaints about their coffee being too weak and their cups seeming small for the price. After 10 hours on your feet serving the public, it just doesn’t feel great to earn grumpy-seeming remarks instead of thanks.

But when we train our eyes to see it, we can look at reviews grouped by similar sentiment in a new light. Taken altogether, these low-star reviews are telling us, for free, that this customer base has an appetite for larger, stronger coffee and would be glad to buy it if we offered it. We didn’t have to invest in an expensive survey or conduct a lengthy experiment to receive this valuable business intelligence — we just had to brace ourselves to read the complaints and then think of how to flip them into a plan of improvement that will earn our enterprise more money!

Your most common complaints can often be reframed as a ready-made plan for increasing customer satisfaction. Just don’t overlook the vital step of responding to each complaint as quickly as you can; with an owner response something like this,

“Mary, thank you so much for taking the time to write this out. I’m really sorry that the coffee you had at my cafe just wasn’t strong enough. I really took that to heart, and I want you to know that I’ve just brought in an amazing new extra dark French roast that I would really like you to try. We’ve got a larger cup size now, too! Please come in and ask Paul for a cup at the house. I’m eager to know if you like this new variety as much as I do. Your taste testing would mean a lot to me. Thank you! Paul, Owner”

3. Have spam reporting guidelines at your fingertips

Facts can often be the best tools for reframing fears you’ve acknowledged. Knowing the difference between what constitutes a legitimate negative review (a genuine customer complaining about a real experience) vs. a spam review (anything that violates the guidelines of a review platform) will give you a greater sense of control. Each of the major platforms has its own guidelines and methodologies for reporting spam, and I’m going to give you a short list of these here. If there’s a platform that’s important to you and not on this list, add it to your personal version:

• Google — Here is Google’s policy on what constitutes review spam, and here is their documentation on how to report review spam.

• Yelp — Here is Yelp’s definition of review spam, and here is how to report it.

• TripAdvisor — Here is TripAdvisor’s review content policy. To report a spam review, log into your profile there, go to the Business Management section, and then click on the “reviews” section and “report a review.” You will be able to fill out a form there explaining the violation of the guidelines.

• Facebook — Go here to report a Facebook Recommendation that you feel violates the guidelines on this page.

• Nextdoor — Here is Nextdoor’s main page on their Recommendations feature and their page on how to report spam.

With these links in your back pocket, you’ll have the confidence to know that you can take whatever steps are available to report any review/recommendation that violates a platform’s guidelines.

That being said, we’re validating real fears today, and so I won’t sugar-coat this particular issue. There is no guarantee that platforms will remove reviews you know are spam, even if you have thoroughly documented a guideline violation with screenshots and other evidence. As we’ve covered above, local business owners don’t have all the control they deserve over this process, given all this is on the line for them.

If you have a seriously bad spam review or suddenly experience a wave of negative reviews/ratings and the platform will not take this content down despite you following all of the necessary steps to report, you have three main options:

1. Attempt to escalate the issue by earning local or industry media coverage of it. If the scenario is bad enough and the coverage is loud enough, it may get syndicated and noticed by the platform. The platform may then act out of a sense of embarrassment and remove the content. This has happened repeatedly.

2. If a spam review alleges illegal or dangerous behavior, don’t respond; consult a lawyer to understand your options.

3. Let it go. You can choose to let a negative review ride and determine you will decrease its power by earning many more new positive reviews. Typically, local businesses should not respond to spam reviews; they should report them. But if reporting fails to result in the removal of review spam, and you’ve decided to let it go, you are welcome to leave a short owner response explaining to the public that you believe the review is in violation of the platform’s guidelines and that you have reported the matter to the platform. Resist the temptation to tell a long story. Keep it short, mention it’s been reported for violations, and move on.

Finally, if fear of reviews has led to neglect, which has undermined your overall rating, plan your comeback by reading How to Repair and Improve Local Business Reputation via Google Star Ratings and Reviews.

I applaud if reading this article today has helped you connect with the inner resources you need to reframe your fears and start actively managing your online reputation. There is no gainsaying that it’s ideal for local business owners to be in direct control of this incredibly vital aspect of your business. Please bookmark today’s column to keep reminding yourself of empowering thoughts as you go about your reputation management tasks in the days to come.

But ideals aren’t always attainable. We aren’t meant to be perfect. If, despite your reading this today, and everything else you’ve done to cope with the fear you feel about online reviews, your stress level over this aspect of necessary work remains high, let’s find an exit together.

As the above graphic suggests, if you can either train staff or hire someone to do the bulk of review checking and responding for you on a day-in-day-out basis, your relief should be substantial. If you are a solo entrepreneur, perhaps you have a family member or close friend who might tide you over with this until your business grows to support staff.

Delegation is one of the most powerful choices business owners can make. It’s not giving in to your fear. It’s making a firm plan for going forward in a positive way. The plan matters a lot, though, whomever you are delegating this task to, and you must provide firm guidelines and expectations on:

1. How often review profiles must be checked — Read this section of Moz’s review survey to understand customer expectations surrounding response times and factor in the frequency with which your business typically receives reviews.

2. What your brand voice is — Define the appropriate tone for your business, whether formal, informal, cheery, professional, etc. Give examples of how you talk to customers.

3. How you want your delegate to respond to each type of review — Read this article on responding to the different types of reviews you’ll receive and then provide a written example for your delegate to follow in replying to each variety. Do empower them to use their own words so that each response is personal and different, but give them the necessary training to know what to offer when complaints arise in order to attempt to restore satisfaction.

4. When you want to be brought in — You are delegating to enjoy distance from the daily stress of review management, but no local business owner can safely be completely detached from their company’s reputation. Signify when you want your delegate to alert you to an emerging problem. For example, you could set a parameter like, “bring me in if there are more than three reviews mentioning the same problem in a month,” or “bring me in immediately if any review mentions illegal or dangerous behavior,” or “loop me in at once if we ever experience a large-scale review spam attack.”

5. When and how you want reporting — If you are hiring professionals, they may already have their own review management software, and if you are training staff, you may want to invest in software like Moz Local so that your delegate is quickly alerted to incoming reviews across multiple platforms and can respond speedily and receive trending sentiment analysis. Set a schedule that feels as comfortable as it can be for you to receive reporting on high-level learnings from your reviews. For example, you might request a quarterly report detailing the number of reviews you’ve received, the top sentiment in them, and whether your overall ratings are trending up or down on the platforms. In some quarters, you might not need to take any action, but in others, it will be up to you to decide to investigate further if a concerning trend has emerged. You are in complete control of how and when you do this.

I want to be sure to emphasize that you are not alone if you decide to delegate. Here is a paraphrase of what the restaurant owner told Greg Sterling when he was speaking with her:

“My assistant manager handles review management. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve looked at some of the reviews. I've seen some good ones, and I've seen some bad ones, but I don't make it a point to go in. I don't want to buy into the negativity. I just want to continue to pour out the positivity, like focusing on community at the holidays. This past Christmas, we fed 500 homeless neighbors.”

Any person of goodwill would both empathize with the delegating approach this business owner has taken in not wanting to get trapped in a negative-feeling place and applaud her contributions to her community.

I’d also like to take a minute to address a question I’ve already seen that is bound to become more common: What about using AI to automate responses to reviews? It’s true this might relieve some stress, but I would advise proceeding with caution in this direction. I’m wary of anything that puts distance between business owners and their customers, and local businesses, in particular, are prized for the personal service they provide. As a last resort, you might investigate this emerging option, but I’d be much more in favor of training or hiring real human help, if at all possible, rather than relegating valued customers to the bots.

I hope that if you’ve learned one thing today, it’s this: no business can safely ignore online reviews because they’ve become foundational to reputation and business success, but owners experiencing fear and stress have multiple options for relief. Please download this free PDF of all four of the one-sheets so that you can share them with clients who need a little extra help embracing review management.

You can reframe and may even discover you’re enjoying the free money-making tips you glean from complaints. Or, you can delegate to distance yourself from a daily confrontation with fear, controlling what you want to know and when you want to know it. Everyone experiences some kind of fear, and that certainly doesn’t disqualify you from running your business well. In fact, your lived experiences can be the best teachers for identifying workable solutions to common problems.

Download the free PDF

If you know a local business owner with a neglected review corpus, I hope you’ll share today’s column with them in case it helps, and if you’re ready to dig deeper into some really interesting data about the fascinating world of online reviews, please read The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior.