Marketing

How to deal with a bad Yelp review

Joshua Chapman reveals the best way to respond to bad reviews.

Photo: Adobe Stock

March 13, 2024 | Joshua Chapman, chatmeter

A bad Yelp review can be a real pain for your hard-working team. Even worse if it's inaccurate, untrue or blatantly from a competitor because online reviews make a real difference to your business. Unfortunately, if you didn't write it, you can't outright delete a Yelp review. There are several things you can do, however, to stay on top of bad reviews and limit their impact on your business.

Alternative options for businesses

If you're a business that's received a negative review, you can't just delete it. Yelp has content guidelines that lay out what isn't appropriate to include in reviews, and if the review in question doesn't break any of those guidelines, unfortunately, you just have to accept it's going to stay on your page.

Instead of deleting a review, take some practical steps to respond to it and reduce its impact on your business going forward.

Respond to the review promptly.This shows the customer (and potential future customers) that you take their review and opinion seriously and care about their experience. Chatmeter's reputation management solution alerts you to negative reviews as soon as they come in, helping you to reply quickly. It can also help you identify trends and common themes in your reviews.
Apologize for the poor experience. It's tempting to get defensive — especially if you feel the reviewer was unfairly harsh or critical of your team. But a simple apology goes a long way and makes your business look better in the long run. To help, we've put together a list of customizable review response templates.
Drum up more positive reviews. One negative review amongst ten will stand out, but when you've got 20 or 30 reviews, that critical one loses its impact. Encourage your team to proactively ask for reviews from happy customers so the glowing feedback outweighs the bad.

How to report a Yelp review

It's important to note that you can't report a Yelp review and get it taken down just because it's negative. It needs to specifically go against Yelp's content and review guidelines, otherwise no action will be taken.

But If your business has received a review that goes against Yelp's content guidelines, you can report it to get it removed from your page. In rare, extreme cases, a business could be flooded with a wave of negative reviews from bad actors, which fill up your Yelp page and drown out genuine, positive reviews.

Some other examples of when reporting a review might be the best option include:

If the reviewer has a conflict of interest — for example— if they're a competitor.
If the review contains inappropriate content, such as threats, harassment or hate speech.
If the review is inaccurate and doesn't give a true representation of the person's experience.

To report a review, log into your company's Yelp account and follow these steps:

Go to the Reviews section of your account.
Locate the review you want to report and click on the "More Options" icon (which looks like three dots).
Click on "Report review" to report it for content moderation.

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How to edit a Yelp review

A business can't edit a review someone's posted, but if you're a user who's left a review of a business, you can edit that review after publishing. You might want to do that if the company's response or actions have changed your opinions from what you shared in your original review. Alternatively, you may have just spotted a few typos or want to add a bit more context to your review.

To edit an existing review, log into your Yelp account and follow these steps:

Go to the Reviews section of your account.
Find the review you want to change and click "Edit."
Make changes to your review.
Click "Post" to save changes and publish the edited version of your review.

How to update a Yelp review

A business also can't update a review someone's posted about their company, but a user can update their review to add more information after publication. You might want to do that if you've visited the same company several times instead of leaving multiple reviews. That way, your review stays up-to-date and continues to provide an accurate impression of your experience with them.

To update a review, log into your Yelp account. Then:

Go to the Reviews section of your account.
Find the review you want to update, and click "Write an update."
Write your new review and add a new star rating based on your latest experience with that business.
Click "Post" to publish the update to your Yelp review.

Bad Yelp reviews don't need to be bad for business

While you can't delete negative Yelp reviews from your page as a business, you can take defensive action. Your best bet is to be aware of these reviews as they occur so you can respond quickly and work to improve the experience for your customers — hopefully helping them change their minds so they edit or update their reviews based on your response.

Rise Brands did just that. The company, which owns 16-Bit Bar+Arcade, Pins Mechanical Co., No Soliciting and Weenie Wonder, boosted its local search rankings, elevated its online search visibility, and increased the number of 5-star reviews on its business pages.

"In the early days we could do most of our online listings and review management manually, but as we started to open more locations, and as we scaled across all of the elements of running and operating multiple businesses, we realized we needed help," Rise Brands' Director of Engagement Erin Frum said.

That was when she partnered with Chatmeter to help the business streamline its listings and reputation management and access customer sentiment insights to drive its brand intelligence and improve customer experience. The platform enables end-to-end visibility for local store managers as well as executive leadership, which increases operational efficiency when responding to reviews and repairing listing errors.

When Rise started working with Chatmeter it ranked on page 1 of Google search for one word, "bar," but now ranks on page 1 of Google search for 11
unique phrases.

From 2020 to 2023, Rise captured a 4.5 average star rating across all providers, and • 92.8% of its reviews indicated positive or neutral sentiment.

"Chatmeter allows us to drill down to the most granular level of customer experience so that we can be very specific in our actions," Frum said.