Negative Reviews on Local Search Sites

Dealing with negative reviews.

There are many different websites offering people the ability to comment about a business. Keeping tabs on reviews can seem overwhelming. This article will provide a starting point to track what people are saying about your company.

Before you can react to a negative review, you need to know it has been published. Unfortunately there is no easy way to track all the different local search websites. I've tried Google Alerts, but it doesn't offer much help for businesses too small to be regularly mentioned on news or blog sites. Plus it doesn't tell you when a review is posted.

Step One: Find Current Reviews

Google Reviews of Your Company Name.

You might need to put quote marks around it to limit search results and make them more meaningful. Add the state or city where you are located, if you need the search narrowed.

This search will help identify websites where your company is already reviewed.

Step Two: Record Existing Review Sites

Create a bookmark  folder to place all the Local Search sites in, and then bookmark the sites, which have reviews, as your favorites.

Delicious, or a similar service, is a great way to organize your bookmarks, and have them available on any computer whenever you connect to the internet.

Step Three: Claim Your Listings

Go back to your list of sites with reviews and claim them. You will need to create an account for each website, some of them will verify your account by calling the listed business number and asking you to enter a numeric pin.

As mentioned last week, some businesses like to have a separate email account to use when claiming their local search business listings.

Step Four: Other Local Search Locations.

If you did not find reviews on these sites they are still worth claiming your business listing.

• Google Places
• Local Yahoo
• Bing Local
• Yelp
• Citysearch
• Insider Pages

Add those sites to your Local Search bookmark folder.

Step Five: Tracking

Some sites, such as Yelp will send an email when a review is posted to your business listing, although other sites don't. You will need to spend about 10 minutes a week, checking the sites you've bookmarked for new reviews.

If you'd like to see Google develop a tool that helps track local search reviews, follow this link to Google product ideas and vote for this idea.

Next week's post will discuss how to handle bad reviews.

P.S. If anyone knows of a good tool for tracking Local Search Reviews please let me know.