How to Reply to Reviews (Including the Bad Ones)

Getting reviews is the bit everyone worries about. I wrote a whole post on asking for them without feeling like a pest. But there’s a second half to it that hardly anyone does, and it costs nothing at all… Replying.

Go and look at a few local businesses on Google right now. Pick a village, Bottesford or Cropwell Bishop, doesn’t matter. You’ll find plenty with a decent handful of reviews and not a single reply underneath any of them. Years of people saying nice things into the void.

I think that’s a waste, for three reasons I’ve listed below. So let’s find out how to reply to reviews!

Nobody is reading those reviews the way you think

You imagine a customer reading the five-star ones and feeling reassured. Some do. But a lot of people go straight to the bad ones first. It’s human. We want to know what goes wrong here, not what goes right.

And when they get there, what they’re really reading is your reply. Not the complaint. The complaint tells them one person had a bad day. Your reply tells them what you’re like to deal with when something goes wrong, which is the thing they actually want to know before they hand you money.

A calm, human reply under a two-star review does more for you than three more five-stars. I’d genuinely rather a business had one bad review answered well than none at all.

Google is paying attention too

Replies are a signal that your Google Business Profile is alive and being looked after. Google has said outright that responding to reviews can help your local visibility, and it makes sense. A profile someone tends is more likely to have correct hours, real photos and accurate details, which is what Google wants to hand to a searcher in Bingham at half past six on a Friday.

It matters for AI search now as well. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI for a good plumber near Radcliffe on Trent, those tools read the whole picture, including the conversation in your reviews. A business that answers looks like a business that cares. That reads well to a person and it reads well to a machine.

The good ones deserve better than “Thanks!”

Here’s my honest opinion on replying to a positive review. One line is fine. Two is better. But make it sound like you wrote it, not like you copied it.

The trick is to mention the specific thing they mentioned. If someone says you sorted their boiler on a Sunday, say something about the Sunday. If they praise the lemon drizzle, mention the lemon drizzle. It takes ten extra seconds and it stops your profile looking like a wall of identical “Thank you for your kind words” replies, which honestly looks worse than saying nothing.

And you can slip in a useful word or two while you’re at it. “Glad we could get you booked in over in Orston” is a natural sentence that also happens to tell Google where you work.

Now the bad ones

This is where people freeze, so here’s the order I’d do it in.

Wait. Not days, but don’t reply in the first hot ten minutes. Nothing good has ever been typed in that mood.

Thank them anyway. Sounds mad, but “thanks for letting me know” costs you nothing and immediately sets the tone.

Say sorry for their experience. You can be sorry someone had a bad time without agreeing you did something wrong.

Don’t argue the details in public. Even if you’re right. Especially if you’re right. A long point-by-point rebuttal makes you look like hard work, and every future customer is reading it.

Take it offline. Give a phone number or an email and offer to sort it properly.

Keep it short. Three or four sentences. Anything longer starts to sound defensive.

What about the ones that are flatly unfair, or from someone who has never set foot in your place? You can report those to Google, and sometimes they come off. Sometimes they don’t, and you’re stuck with it. If it stays, reply politely saying you can’t find any record of the visit and you’d love to hear more. Everyone reading knows exactly what that means.

How often

Once a week, ten minutes. Stick it in the calendar, do it with a coffee on a Monday. That’s the whole job. Most small businesses across the Vale of Belvoir are getting a handful of reviews a month at most, so it’s never going to be a big task.

The odd thing about this is that it’s completely free, takes almost no time, works on Google and on the AI tools people are starting to ask instead, and nearly everyone ignores it.

If you’d like to know how your reviews and your profile look to somebody searching for you right now, message me for a free visibility check. I’ll look you up the way a customer would and send you a plain one-page report.