Online reviews on sites like Yelp or Google are a great way to establish credibility and visibility for your local business.  However, many business owners wait until it’s too late to start asking their customers to review their business online.  They wait until they’ve already received a bad review, because they’ve heard that the best way to make bad reviews less visible is to receive many good reviews. However, it’s much harder to ask people to post good reviews for your business when there is a bad one visible for everyone to see.

The reason why some businesses only receive bad reviews is not because the business is necessarily bad. It’s because most people are only motivated to review a business when they’ve had a bad experience or have a complaint.  For businesses that have a large customer base it’s almost inevitable that you will receive a bad review at some point in the lifetime of your business.  Many times it is unfounded and unfair, but there is a way to prevent these types of review from hurting your business.

The way to counter bad reviews is to have a large number of good reviews. So don’t wait until it’s too late. Go out and ask your happy customers to review your business online. Do this on a regular basis and it won’t be such a big deal if you should receive a critical review in the future.