It can happen to the best of businesses: you wake up one morning to a scathingly bad review on Yelp or some other review site. Your business is your baby, so it doesn’t matter whether the review is justified or not — your first instinct is to defend the baby.

Resist that temptation.

So what DO you do? I ran across a blog post that sums things up in a way that all of us can remember: Stop. Drop. Roll. This works if you find yourself in flames, and it works if your business gets a flaming review:

• Stop before you hit send. Don’t respond immediately.  Waiting 24 hours can make all the difference.
• Drop the prideful, defensive, and harsh response.  Taking the high road is rarely a bad idea.
• Roll with it.  In the end, you can’t control the opinions of your clients.

Do these things, address any valid issue raised in the review, and keep delivering a quality product or service, and you’ll be spending very little time addressing bad reviews.

---

P.S. If you’re looking for a little help, our strategic marketing consulting is designed to show you the online marketing strategies that help keep the customers you have while generating more and better leads. That process begins with improving search engine ranking, creating winning website content, and putting our full bundle of online marketing strategies to work for your business.