Many businesses have a love-hate relationship with consumer review platforms like Yelp. On one hand, user-generated content presents a great opportunity to leverage positive feedback and spread the good word about your brand to the masses. On the other, there’s also a fine line between constructive criticism and outright defamation. There are also fake reviews to worry about, with some studies claiming that these make up as much as a fifth of all reviews on Yelp.
One of the central goals of online reputation management is to ensure that positive reviews outshine any negative ones. For the most part, this means proactively taking steps to mitigate any damage to your brand image by addressing customers’ concerns. An important part of this process involves responding to reviews responsibly and constructively to give other potential and existing customers the opportunity to see that you care about their opinions.
Nonetheless, as we’ve already seen, a lot of reviews on Yelp are fake, and many of these fake reviews are published by unscrupulous competitors. While Yelp has no legal obligations regarding what people can and cannot post on their website, they do have a set of rules that reviewers must follow. If you see a review that you believe to break these rules, you can flag it for evaluation by taking the following steps:
- Create a business account and claim your business if you haven’t already
- Go to the Reviews section of your business account page
- Locate the offending review, and click the flag icon to report it
Yelp may take up to a week to decide whether to remove the review, and you’ll receive a notification by email informing you of their decision. If their decision doesn’t turn out in your favor, you can either try to mitigate the damage by responding to the review or taking legal action if the content is defamatory.
Here at Reputation Resolutions, we understand the importance of building a strong brand image and leveraging positive content to spread the word about your company. If you would like more information about how we’ve helped clients remove negative Yelp reviews, please contact us today at (855)239-5322.