How Much do Negative Reviews and Comments Impact my Business Online?

In an ideal world, your business would provide perfect quality of service and every customer would leave glittering reviews. The reality is that mistakes and factors outside of your control can result in bad customer experiences, which lead to negative comments and reviews online.

As a business owner or even a manager, it can be easy to dismiss a bad review as someone’s personal preference, or it can be difficult to keep track of negative comments when they can appear in multiple places on the internet. However, ignoring negative reviews and failing to rectify the situation can damage your business’s reputation.

In this blog, we’ll be diving into the impact reviews have on brands from an online search perspective. Additionally, we’ll demonstrate how engaging with negative reviews can actually benefit your brand.

 

The importance of public comments to online businesses

 

Reviews, social media comments, and complaints are all forms of customer feedback that serve as social proof for users. Many people actively look for these pieces of content when they’re thinking about purchasing a product, as they reveal previous user experiences.

While this has always been the case, it could be argued that online reviews are becoming more highly regarded by consumers, partly as we’re all becoming more aware of digital marketing and advertising. User experiences are often considered unbiased compared to company promotions.

 

Social Media

Nowadays, social media platforms provide a more direct line for consumers and brands to interact with one another. It’s often far easier for people to leave feedback by commenting on a post or direct messaging the brand account, rather than writing up an email. Sites like Facebook, X(Twitter), Instagram, and LinkedIn generate millions of likes and comments every day between them.

Users also value the public nature of consumer and brand interactions on social media, as it helps hold the latter accountable. For brands, however, this can make social media seem risky. A single negative comment can be shared hundreds of times, quickly damaging a business’s reputation among followers and new users. Screenshots and comment threads will also exist well into the future, causing a lasting impact. As a result, brands need to move quickly to respond to potentially damaging social media comments.

 

Reviews and Decision-making

Nowadays, consumers don’t just use Google to research products and services. Social media platforms, emails, forums, and physical ads can all serve as ways for people to interact with your brand. In recent years, it’s been estimated that 70% of online shoppers read between one and six reviews before making a purchase. As such, it stands to reason that many people could first learn about your brand through the lens of a customer review.

Reviews are particularly impactful for e-commerce brands, as people typically seek out reviews to judge whether or not their products work as well as claimed. Reviews can also offer insights into how previous customers have been able to use a brand’s products, along with any shortcomings which might make someone look elsewhere.

The star rating associated with online reviews can also have a big impact. For instance, users can easily be put off a brand if the average review rating is between 2 and 3 stars. On the other hand, people can also see red flags if a brand has only 5-star reviews across a high volume. This is because it might not seem authentic for a business to get perfect feedback, especially across hundreds of reviews.

 

Brand Awareness

Although notoriously hard to measure, we know that brand awareness comes from many angles. Oftentimes, people will have heard about your brand somewhere else before they land on your website. Being prominent and ‘visible’ within your niche is essential to attracting consumers, especially when you’re surrounded by competitors offering very similar products and services. The worst-case scenario is that people will choose not to visit your website after seeing negative reviews and complaints about your brand.

Even when someone comes to search your brand name, they can be met with results that include forum comments and review sites. Your Google My Business (GMB) profile is a prime example, as it displays your average rating from Google reviews, and users can click through to browse the reviews that have been left.

Reviews and AI-generated Answers

Reviews were already important as social proof that consumers could take upon themselves to seek out. However, thanks to the rise of AI search engines, negative reviews can also be used by these systems to create generative results. This is because they analyse a broad range of internet data to find information that’s relevant to specific queries, and summarise customer sentiment. Sites like Trustpilot and Tripadvisor have been heavily utilised by generative search engine crawlers, both to judge whether a brand should be recommended to users and to influence the nature of the LLM response.

The main takeaway is that managing your reputation online is more important than ever. Encouraging positive reviews from customers is a great way to help improve your reputation and overall perception. Generally, as long as you avoid negative reviews by prioritising user experience and quality of service, you’ll be optimising your business for generative search results.

Negative SEO contributions

Negative reviews can directly affect your business’s rankings in certain cases. For instance, the top results in the map pack tend to have high average ratings. If you end up collecting a large number of bad reviews and poor ratings, it could drag down your overall score. This can be hugely impactful for businesses that rely on local search traffic, as people searching on mobile might not take the time to go beyond the top 3 / 4 map results.

 

What is negative SEO?

Sometimes known as ‘adverse SEO’, negative SEO concerns any efforts to harm a business’s visibility within search engine results. This can manifest as content scraping, link spamming, hacking, fake link removal requests, smear campaigns, and more. The latter point can include negative reviews about your brand, claiming to have come from past customers.

Intentional negative SEO isn’t very common, partly due to improvements in search engine algorithms, but it’s still worthwhile knowing how your site’s rankings can be damaged. That being said, if you notice short-term drops in keyword rankings, this is more likely due to competitor efforts in SEO/paid ads, or other external factors such as core algorithm updates, more so than just negative reviews.

How to use negative comments to your advantage

Customer feedback of any kind is a valuable resource for owners, and arguably, negative feedback is the most valuable of all. This is because your customers aren’t having their expectations met, some of which you might not have been aware of if it weren’t for their review/comment.

Firstly, you should always respond to negative reviews and other forms of user-generated content that explicitly target your brand. The only thing worse than negative customer feedback is negative experiences that go unresolved. Even if it’s just to apologise, your response shows that your business is at least responsive and cares about providing a good quality of service.

After you’ve apologised for their experience, it’s important to provide a clear solution, explanation, or actions the user can take. For instance, providing a personal contact email or phone number that the person can use to contact you for an exclusive discount code. If you handle it well, you could secure the lasting loyalty of customers and signal to other people that your business can be trusted to make things right.

Can my brand benefit from review and discussion forums?

Maybe, but it’s often difficult. Let us explain. You may have noticed that forum content has increased in SERP visibility in recent years, probably because Google has chosen to place a high value on the authenticity of user comments here. Sites like Reddit and Quora typically feature in the top 5 results for informational queries.

This is especially important for online businesses, as these queries tend to be asking for advice for solving a problem, or around products and services. The forum results then often feature people discussing their experiences in using specific products and working in specific industries. If you operate in a niche, you can increase your brand awareness and reputation by commenting on discussion threads.

However, the catch is that many of these forums (Reddit, especially) have strict guidelines around promotional and advertising content. Any users who are thought to be openly promoting a brand they’re affiliated with risk having their accounts permanently disabled. This isn’t to say forums should be ignored entirely, simply that businesses need to take a measured approach.

Conclusion: Negative Feedback Isn’t Just a PR Issue

Behind every bad review, there’s a customer who was expecting more from your brand. It could be an interaction they had along their journey, a failed product, or a promise left unfulfilled. Regardless, their experience represents an opportunity for your business to improve. Failing to acknowledge or interact with bad reviews, on the other hand, can worsen their effect.

You can also use your responses to further emphasise your brand values and commitments. For instance, if you’re positioned as responsive, then you should always aim to reply within a day. While keeping on top of negative comments is important to maintain some level of control over your brand perception, search visibility, and AI responses, it can be a huge time investment.

Nowadays, this isn’t just about your website content. Social media management and features on forum sites are just as important for maintaining a positive reputation. If you want more clarity on how your business is perceived online, along with a clear strategy on how to move forward, get in touch with Mayfly today.