“Someone wrote a bad review about my business! What do I do now?”

“They point the cannon at you” .. John Fogerty - Fortunate Son

First step is to take a breath and consider the options. Ill considered action might make the situation worse.

Next step is gather some information. Here are some things to look for:

how old is the review? There’s a big difference between posted yesterday and posted 2 years ago. Some reading the review will pay little attention to it if it’s old, particularly if it’s the only review or only bad review.
how many other reviews of your business exist on this site and what’s the mix of favourable to unfavourable? Read everything objectively. There’s a huge difference between “these guys suck” and “I didn’t find what I was looking for”. Again smarter readers can tell the difference between them and one bad review amongst many glowing reports.
does the site showing the bad review have a policy on how to handle disputed reviews? You might need to look for a support or FAQ page to get this information. The good sites do and these are the ones more likely to influence buying decisions. You may be able to get the review suspended while you resolve the issue with the reviewer. If all goes well you may be able to get them to withdraw the review or even better change it or supplement it with news of a favourable resolution.
how important is this site for traffic to your site? If the review is old and you are still receiving traffic, perhaps it isn’t influencing readers. Some bad reviews are just unbelievable and are generally ignored.
is the bad review page found ahead of your website when you search for some “brand” or “vanity” searches (your business name or domain with and without your suburb or primary product e.g. Acme Widgets, Acme Widgets Refern, acmewidgets.com.au, etc). If your domain is ahead of the review not all searchers will see the review. The exception to this might be a searcher looking to see what else they can find out about you. It’s hard to guess how many people might take this action. If they’ve already made contact with you or have largely made their decision to buy from you they may not be significantly influenced by the review.

If you’ve made it this far there’s one more factor to consider when assessing the damage. Some searchers will go directly to a directory site like TrueLocal when they are looking for service providers. For those searchers if your page is in the results, the chance of the review being seen is high. But I don’t have any information to know how many people are in this situation. I do know that few of my customers have much traffic to their website directly from TrueLocal (even those that don’t have bad reviews), but they get plenty of traffic straight from the search engines.

As I’ve argued directly to my customers and here on the blog - prevention is better than cure. Start a process to regularly ask new customers to provide feedback. Making a habit of it will make it easier and is more likely to provide a steady stream of positive reviews that should be sufficient to dilute even the most venomous review.

You need to be aware some review sites will tend to discount reviews where it is the reviewer’s one and only review anywhere on their site. So identifying customers, who are already active on the review sites, could pay dividends. But as a friend of mine repeats at me often - don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. (No my friend is not Voltaire, just someone who quotes him. Personally I’m more comfortable with John Fogerty.) By this I mean, still ask even novice reviewers. They might like the process and start providing more reviews for other businesses. That will raise the credibility of all their reviews. Even if that doesn’t happen, the review sites still have to pay attention to the number of reviews being accumulated. They will filter out some reviews. They can’t filter out all of them.