How do I push down 1-star Google reviews?

0:00 Why One-Star Reviews Show Up First
You can't delete them and you can't hide them, but you can take the sting out and bury them. Here's four moves and order and I'll walk you through each of them. A restoration company owner emailed me this week and he said his one -star reviews are showing up first at the top of his Google Business Profile and some of them are even recent and he wanted to know how he could make those go away. So this video is my answer to him and if you are a contractor with the same problem, it's my answer to you as well.

0:33 The Honest Truth About Deleting Reviews
The honest answer first, Google will not let you delete a legitimate review. There's no setting that changes the display order and nobody can flip a switch and hide the bad reviews. I know that's not what you want to hear, but that's the truth and anyone selling you a remove bad review service is either lying or doing something that will get your profile suspended and that's never good. What you can do is make the one star reviews matter less. You can flag the ones that actually break Google's reviews. You can reply to the rest calmly and professionally and you can bury them under a steady flow of fresh detail reviews and on your own website, you control what people see. That's it. Before moves and let's go why one star reviews show up first?

1:22 How Google Sorts Most Relevant Reviews
Google's default sort on a Google Business Profile is called most relevant. Google does not publish exactly how it picks most relevant, but in my experience a few things drive it. Regency matters. A review from last month out ranks one from three years ago. Detail matters. A review that describes the service, the city, and its specific outcome ranks higher than a review that says great job. Photos help as well. In my experience, reviews with photos tend to show up higher. And here's the painful part. A one star review that specific and recent will outrank a five star review that just says, hey, I love these guys. You're unhappy customers often write more than your happy ones. That's what you're fighting. So your moves have to attack each of those factors directly.

2:14 Move 1 Flag Policy-Violating Reviews
Move one, flag the reviews that break Google's rules. Before you do anything else, go through each one star review and read it carefully. Google has a list of content policies and reviews that violate these policies can be removed by Google. And here's key ones to look for. A person who is never your customer. You have no record of them and the job description doesn't match anything you've done or you recognize it as a competitor or former employee with a grudge. That's a conflict of interest violation. The review itself is abusive, uses slurs, or completely off topic. The review is a duplicate posted by the same person more than once. The review contains someone's personal information or the review is clearly spam or a fake. If a review fits any of those, go to your Google Business Profile, find that review and use the flag button to report it. Write a short specific explanation as to why it violates policy. Don't just say this is fake. Say we have no record of this person as a customer and the incident described does not match any job in our system. So the thing is Google does not remove reviews quickly. It can take weeks and sometimes many flag reviews never come down at all. Real complaints, even unfair ones, almost never get removed. So flag the legitimate violations but don't count on removal. Move on to the next step immediately.

3:43 Move 2 Reply to Every One-Star Review
Move 2. Reply to every one star review. This is the move that most contractors skip and it's the one that matters most to the next person reading that review. When someone is deciding whether to call you, they read the bad reviews first, then they read your response. Your response is not for the reviewer, it's for that next customer. Here are the rules for a good response. Keep it short. Three to five sentences maximum, acknowledge the experience without admitting liability, take it offline, give a name and a phone number or email, and never argue the facts publicly. Never post job details or insurance information. Own the outcome even if you disagree with what happened. Keep it short, calm and professional. That's what the next customer wants to see. A measured response from a business owner tells them, this company handles problems like a professional. An argument in the reply tells them the opposite.

4:42 Move 3 Bury Them With Fresh Detail Reviews
Move three, bury them with fresh detail reviews. Now this is the long game and it's the most powerful move that you have. If your one stars are old, you can bury them with new reviews that are more recent, more detailed and have photos. Google's most relevant sort will push these to the top. The only way to get a steady flow of abuse is to ask them every single time. Not just jobs where you think the customer is happy, ask for reviews on every job, at the close of every job, and I'll show you exactly what to send in a minute. When you ask, tell the customer two things. First, ask them to describe the service and their city. Not because it sounds nice, but because that specifically is what Google rewards. Second, if they have photos, ask them to attach one. Even a phone photo of a finished work makes that review more useful to the next customer. Do this consistently and within a few months, the top reviews on your profile will be recent, detailed and positive. Build one star, it's dropped further and further down. Move four. Control what shows on your own website.

5:53 Move 4 Control Reviews on Your Website
Google controls what people see on your Google Business Profile, but you control what people see on your website. Use that. Pull your best real reviews word by word and feature them on your homepage, your services pages, and your contact page. If a customer reads a glowing review before they even hit your Google profile, they're coming in with a different frame of mind. You can also embed your overall star rating and review count through the tools that pull from Google directly, so the number is always current without you updating anything manually. And your website is the one place that nobody can post and wants our review, so make your website work for you.

6:32 What Not to Do Buying and Gating Reviews
What not to do? Now, here's a few things that will make things worse, not better. Do not buy reviews. Do not offer a discount, a gift card, cash, or anything else in exchange for review. Google prohibits both of those and can suspend your entire profile. The FTC also bans fake or incentivize reviews. If your profile gets suspended, you lose the calls coming in from it immediately, and that's never worth it. Do not review gate. Review gating means that you only send the review request to customers you think are happy and you're screening out the ones that might leave a bad review. Google explicitly prohibits this. You have to ask everyone for a Google review every time. If someone is unhappy, you want to know before they write a review anyway. Do not ask friends, family, or employees to leave reviews. Google's rules count that as a conflict of interest, and those reviews can get removed.

7:31 Job-Close Text Template That Gets Reviews
A worked example, what to send at the job close. So here's how the math works for a shop closing 10 jobs a month. If you send this message to every one of them and three of them leave a review, that's three new reviews every month. In a year, that's 36 fresh, detailed reviews, sacking up on your Google business profile. And here's the message you should use. Picture this going out as a text because text usually get better response for Google reviews, and you want to send this out the same day as the job close. Hey, it's your name from your company. Thanks for letting us take care of this for you. If you have two minutes, a Google review would mean a lot to us. When you write it, mentioning the type of work we did in the city helps others in city find us. Here's the direct link with your review link. Thanks again. That's it. No pressure, no script about how much it means, short and direct with a link in the message they don't have to hunt. If you have a job management tool, this goes out automatically. If you don't, your tech or team member needs to send this at the close of a job, a work example,

8:42 One-Star Reply Template Word for Word
how to reply to a one star. Here's our response looks for a one star that says something like they showed up late. They did the job too fast and left a mess behind. Your reply could be something like this. Thank you for taking the time to leave this. What you've described is not the experience that we aim to deliver. And I'm sorry, it fell short. I like to look into this personally. Please reach out to me at my name or phone number and email so we can make this right. That's it. You're not saying it happened exactly as described. You're not posting photos on the job site. You're not explaining your insurance process. You're telling the next person reading that review that this owner reads these cares and responds like a professional. That's the whole goal.

9:27 Action Steps to Take This Week
What to do this week? Here's what I would do if I were in that disaster restoration owners shoes right now. This week go through every one sub review flag the ones that generally violate Google's policy. Write a calm professional reply to every one star review that doesn't get flagged. Get your direct review link from your Google Business Profile and build that job close text into your process starting today. If you want any help with the reply drafting or setting up the automatic requests, that's something that we do for contractors. We set up the automatic review request so it fires after every completed job and we draft the one star replies for you and you can get a free visibility teardown at SEO .PushLeads .com backslash audit or call us at 828 -348 -7686. The one star is going to be there. You can either let them sit at the top unanswered or you can respond like a professional and bury them with volume. That's the whole game. I'm Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads and I help small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. Talk soon.