If you know anything about Google Business Profile you know that people can leave a review for your company on your profile and that you can reply to it. Google actively measures if you respond to reviews and how quickly. While companies feel like they live or die by the overall rating number and the total number of reviews there is actually more to it than that.

What Google doesn’t really measure is what your response includes. Review responses fall into two categories, responses to good (or mediocre) reviews, and responses to bad reviews. In this article, we are going to take a quick look at both and provide you with some tips regarding how to respond and what your goal should be in providing your response.

Before we get to that though it’s important that you understand a bit of the psychology at work in all of this. Most business owners would be surprised to find just how often potential customers go to their “about us” page on their website and how often they read both the reviews and the responses on your profile and on other sites.

The psychology at play here is fairly straightforward, people want to know who they are dealing with. Nobody wants to have a bad experience, nobody wants to relate a nightmare to their friends and family, and nobody wants to look dumb for having spent money on a fly-by-night operation only to have their brother-in-law say “I told you so!”. If your business involves trust, health, appearance, personal space, safety, or a large investment, the stakes go up higher than you might fully appreciate.

Before you can be included on the short list of companies a person might interact with, you need to be telling them who you are and why you’re worthy of their business given all the potential downside risks people imagine during their selection process.

On your website this can be addressed with hand-picked testimonials, a great “about” page, and language, or a brand voice, that reinforces expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T). On your Google Business Profile, the space available to convey this is much more limited. It’s basically reduced to your business description and your reviews coupled with your responses. Most people won’t get around to reading your business description so that really just leaves the responses to convey a sense of who you are.

Today, with your profile often being a stop between the organic search results or map results, and your website, it’s critical that you use what little opportunity you have to make a good impression. Now that you know the stakes and the real mission behind your responses let’s look at how you can create great trust-building responses.

Responding to good Google Business Profile reviews (and even mediocre ones)

It seems simple right? Someone reviews your business and says nice things about it and in response you thank them, then it’s on to the next review to thank them as well. You might be aware that not responding is a small strike against your profile’s ranking so every now and then you just blast off a ton of “thank you” responses until you’re caught up. If all your responses to positive reviews are simple variations of “thank you” you are missing an opportunity to influence potential clients and you’re just mailing it in (probably because you have a million other business tasks to perform).

The point of reviews (beyond just your average rating and the number of reviews you have) is to inform potential new customers of what their experience with you might be like based on what are generally considered to be unbiased reviews. Positive reviews allow people to picture their own desired result from you, they want to get an overall sense of what the outcome is going to feel like for them. Potential new customers are actually looking for a source of security and trust in this process, being put at ease enough to take the next step is the actual goal of your responses to your previous customers.

Here are some tips for crafting a response for each good review

1. Obviously don’t use the same response twice – no cut and paste ever. If there is little verbiage or just a star rating for a review then make sure to use plenty of variations in your responses. “Thanks so much for the kind five-star rating, we truly appreciate it and it was a pleasure to work with you!” is better than “thanks”.

2. You can write a response that’s twice as long as the review but don’t get crazy and write a book, it looks contrived and unnatural.

3. Repeat language from the review – if they said your restaurant was clean then extend it by saying “thanks for noticing how hard we work to keep the dining area clean, it’s one of our top priorities and we keep a record of making cleaning passes every 15 minutes”. Another example: If they say “After the roofers were done, we didn’t find so much as a single old roof shingle on the lawn” add some more meat onto the bone with a detail like “We try to leave everything just like we found it, we even run a magnet roller over the lawn to grab any old roofing nails so the area is 100% clean and safe”. These are details that say to the NEXT customer “we are ahead of you, we anticipated the concern you might have and solved the problem or implemented a system, ages ago, so this is an item you can remove from your imaginary bad outcome list” If they didn’t even think of the issue and they see you have an answer for it your E-A-T goes up with them.

4. I already gave this away but – You aren’t writing for the previous customer you are writing for the NEXT ONE. Be humble, appreciative, graceful, grateful, honest, personal, and expert. Be relatable and write in a voice or style that the reader will again find on the website for the sake of continuity.

5. If you received four stars, respond like you received five, if you got three stars make sure you indicate that you will reach out to them (you should, they may edit the review if you make good and ask). If it’s a three (it’s never a three) or less, keep reading.

Responding to bad Google Business Profile reviews

We’re all human, we make mistakes, you or your business will make one that will end up becoming a negative review at some point if you haven’t gotten one already. Any business with 200 reviews and no 1-star reviews is hard to believe, even Google knows nobody gets hundreds of reviews that are nothing but 5-stars.

Here’s the truth about bad reviews – you will get more of them than you will make mistakes that deserve them. You already know why, it’s because your customers are human as well. You will also get more of them when you first start your business (and can least afford the hit) than later when you have all your processes figured out.

Bad reviews are often written with a great deal of emotion, they often overstate the degree to which things went wrong (although not always) and they are likely to include uploaded photos or in extreme cases, the reviewer will go full “scorched earth” and leave them everywhere they can think of imagining they are going to cancel you with their wrath.

Before you ever think of responding in kind just know that people reading it also understand that there are people out there who simply can’t be pleased, who are angling for a free lunch, or who are just overreacting to a subjectively too-hot cup of coffee. They are going to be quite curious to see how you respond though and it’s possible that you can not only recover but shine with a well-crafted, professional, and un-emotional response.

Here are some tips for crafting a response to each bad review

1. Never adopt a combative tone – there is no “Oh yeah well…” You have an advantage here – you have the last word. You have it because these reviews only consist of what they wrote and your response – it’s not ping-pong. Never counter-attack, it’s a career-ender.

2. Without getting into details, you want to craft a humble response that admits that you could have done better or that by your own estimates the results were not to your standards but don’t get specific, don’t mirror their specifics (your lawyer is already thanking me).

3. State that you intend to contact them if you are able, to work to make things right as best you can. Offline. Even if you know it’s a waste of time. If you can contact them and make it right, ask that they edit their review as part of your fix.

4. If you humbly fall on your sword and mention how you dropped the ball and it wasn’t how things normally turn out, also say that “it’s a mistake we learned from” or “we are going to adjust our procedures or communications to prevent this from happening again going forward”. You learned from your mistake – everyone loves that, it’s human, it’s real, it’s the only thing you can do because failure is the best teacher and you show you’re learning.

5. Lastly – The semi-nuclear option – The review wasn’t just unfair, it’s a shakedown, and it’s 99% BS, the customer already said they were thrilled so you’re wondering where this review even came from. In this case, you have to completely write for the NEXT customer by saying directly to THEM “We tried to contact this customer because this wasn’t at all the case at the end of our service, we were told directly that they were happy with the results (or) we made every attempt to resolve the issue to our mutual satisfaction but it simply wasn’t possible.” No details, no saying anything negative about the customers, no defamation, or slander, etc. just “we tried everything to make it right”. This is the “professional but out-of-options” response, it’s on target and not one of those totally robotic, bloodless corporate responses. Keep it short and sweet and then try to get a few good reviews to bury it with.

6. There is no nuclear option (see tip #1). If you read a review and it sends you off the deep end then don’t write the response, let someone else who isn’t emotionally invested in any way write it for you, or wait a while and write, edit, and rewrite the response elsewhere until you cool all the way down.

If you don’t have the time to do everything as I have described above then focus on mixing the responses up a bit and every now and then go the extra mile but write so that a bit of personality shines through and remember you are really writing to shape the next customer’s impression of you.

Knowing that Google measures the response time, the missing responses, and a lot of other factors surrounding reviews, if this doesn’t sound like a task you want to stay constantly on top of then consider getting in touch with GBP Pilot for a quick overview of what we can offer you and leave it to the folks that can make timely and on-point responses to do it for you.