Negative press is a fact of life in business, particularly when the business in question is a big one. Big business may have the clout to overcome negative press, and the resources to push bad reviews off the first pages in the SERPs. The question is, do they really need to?

The natural first reaction to a negative review is to want to take it down. A smart business will aim to avoid bad press in the first place, and many business sites feature a customer service function to nip complaints in the bud. Any business that has entirely positive reviews, however, is not necessarily a business that is doing well- at least, in the eyes of most internet users.

You should consider it carefully. You perform a search for a local restaurant and two competing businesses come up. One business has four five-star reviews in Google Local Search, all raving about the restaurant. Another has three five-star reviews, plus a four-star review and a one-star review. The reviews for the second business are balanced, with criticism and praise. The first business sounds like it’s doing better, but all of the positive press adds up to a suspicious image. The second business has balanced press, and on reflection may come off as more trustworthy.

Big businesses like Dell agree. At a mid-year internet conference this year Stuart Wallock, global community and personalisation senior manager of the computer giant, reported that all reviews are good reviews from Dell’s point of view.

Wallock also discussed the importance of giving users a voice throughout a site, to reinforce their importance to the company. Dell try to integrate customer reviews into every aspect of their site. They also post multiple reviews on each of their products pages, in order to provide a range of views for users to sample. The company finds that posting up to 50 reviews on products pages invokes more trust than just posting one review.

The senior manager advised businesses to show all types of feedback, without editing. This ’show all’ approach shows the company’s users that it is listening. Not only does it go some way to smoothing over upsets with individual complainants, it reflects a general attitude that the company genuinely listens to customer feedback. This further enhances its relationship with users.

Getting reviews is one thing when you’re a big business, but they can be as elusive as inbound links for the average website. Wallock revealed that Dell periodically boost flagging review rates with competitions, resulting in an influx of comments and up to a 20% lift in sales. The results are also used to inform Dell’s keyword research to better target users in the search engines.

Competitions are one of the many effective methods possible for garnering reviews, and garnering reviews is what a smart business should do. Only positive reviews can outweigh negative ones. In order to turn your negatives into positives, your site needs to incorporate reviews into your search engine optimisation plan. If you’re interested in pursuing reviews, contact our experts at SEO Consult.

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