How Bad Reviews Affect Your Business

Get the latest on how bad reviews affect your business and what you can do to restore your reputation. 

We’ve all been there, right?
You’re intrigued by the trendy taco place you’ve passed by a hundred times. You get home, Google it on your smartphone and scan through results to see if it’s worth your time.

And though you don’t claim to put much stock in online reviews, you can’t help but take a quick glance at that one bad rating popping up on your screen.

(Don’t feel too bad. Like it or not, you’re among the 86% of online consumers who make purchasing decisions based on a negative review).

The next thing you know, you’re scouring the Web for other local dining options, quickly forgetting tacos and trends in the process.

Negative Reviews and the Law of Attraction

As it turns out, that one negative review was all it took to turn you away from a potentially paradigm-shifting dining experience. The decision was nearly instantaneous, based on little more than the perception of and potential for a bad experience.

As a consumer, you’ve probably done this hundreds of times, and for many of those instances, it was probably just a reflex. The attraction to negative information, is, after all, a very human trait, and one bad review is sometimes all that is needed to grab your eye and influence your decision on where to eat, shop or fix your car.

On the Other Hand…

As a small business owner, such behavior makes you cringe, and has potentially devastating consequences for your company. One bad review can haunt your business online, showing up during every local search, scaring away countless customers, and creating a negative association that seems to grow with each passing day.

For your business, that bad review has resulted in yet another lost customer, as well as the opportunity to make a positive impression and earn an invaluable word-of-mouth recommendation.

Such an online blemish can slowly eat away at the integrity and viability of your brand, regardless of anything positive your business may have online.

But when you how bad reviews affect your business, you can begin to retake control of your online footprint, earning back the trust and authority you need to dominate search results and grow your bottom line.

How Bad Reviews Affect Your Business

Smearing Your Reputation

Bad reviews and online reputation go hand-in-hand. The failure to deal with bad reviews in any sort of substantive, measured manner, can help transform your company’s online reputation smear into an indelible scar, something that consumers associate with your company for months or years to come.

Online Reputation Management is essential to the health and success of your business. Leaving a negative review unmanaged can erode your company’s image and create an association that is hard to overcome.

Scaring Away Talent

Employee review sites like Glassdoor have more influence on job seekers than ever. Procuring the right people for your company is difficult enough as it is, and the presence of negative employee reviews can make it verge on the impossible.

“After seeing negative reviews on your company’s (Glassdoor) page, top talent could decide that it’s simply not worth their time to try to land a job at your company,” says Justin Reynolds of TinyPulse.com. “Since your company will only be as strong as the employees that power it, even a few negative reviews can fester into a very serious problem.”

Without the right people, how can your business provide your customers the best experience possible, the one needed to garner positive reviews in the first place?

Smashing Your Bottom Line

As you know, all business comes down to the bottom line. It’s cliché, but your small business is in business to make money, and bad reviews can be a major roadblock in your quest to make a profit and stay afloat.

“Businesses risk losing as many as 22% of customers when just one negative article is found by users considering buying their product,” according to Moz.com, the marketing analytics company. In other words, nearly a quarter of your potential market is at risk because of ONE negative review. In addition, “if three negative articles pop up in a search query, the potential for lost customers increases to 59.2%.”

These numbers are staggering, but they serve to highlight the role bad reviews now play in the lifespan of your business, as well as the need to take action as quickly as possible.

Breaking Bad Reviews with Online Review Management

Negative reviews hurt your business in numerous ways. When left unchecked, a bad online review can cause irreparable harm for your business reputation, your ability to hire the best talent and your potential for growth and profitability well into the future.

The impact of negative reviews on your business can be severe. Fortunately, we have the tools, technology and expertise needed to help you manage your business reviews and improve your online reputation. Our advanced review management solution gives you the power to manage your reviews and build a stronger and more positive review presence online.

Break the stranglehold bad reviews have on your business. To learn more about our customizable, cutting-edge review management solution, call us today at 941-259-4554.