Reviews Response & Acquisition | Local SEO & Search Marketing

What It Is

Review HELPER helps you counter and neutralize negative reviews and commentary on crowdsourced online media and any other public forum. We'll manage your entire program on an ongoing basis—monitoring and responding as appropriate. Or we'll respond on a one-off basis.

Counter negative attacks.
Turn them into
marketing opportunities!

Attacks can appear as reviews on sites such as Google+, Yelp, TripAdvisor and Facebook. On employment sites such as Glassdoor and Indeed Or trade media sites. Or blogs. Or the Better Business Bureau. Or product reviews on retail sites such as Amazon and Walmart. They criticize and perhaps defame your products, your services—even what it's like to work at your company.

We'll help you acquire positive reviews, using smart surveys to identify those who love you and those who don't—asking those who do for reviews, and making sure you contact customers with bad experiences to pre-empt negative reviews.

We can also help with content creation, making you highly visible on search engines for your keywords (SEO & SEM), or minimizing the visibility of negative web pages in search engine results (reputation mangement).

What It Does

Review HELPER makes it easy and affordable for you to confidently counter business-killing negative online reviews and other web attacks and turn them into marketing opportunities. Key benefits:

You'll get this important need handled with confidence and ease, because now you've got world-class professionals you can trust—experienced communications experts who've worked for international companies on issues management and crisis communications programs.

We address your entire situation. We'll monitor the sites that matter. We'll make removal requests and responses everywhere that's needed, regardless of when reviews and posts were made.

Our process minimizes your time as much as possible, while ensuring you have full control and approval over all communications.

Our service is highly flexible. Hire us only for what you need, when you need it. There are no monthly minimums or retainers, unless such an arrangement meets your needs.

We offer all the other brand reputation management and marketing services you might need, including customer surveys/audits, review acquisition, content creation/ marketing, search engine optimization and advertising, website best-practices audit, website development, and PR/ crisis communications.

How It Works

We have many services to help clients meet brand reputation and marketing goals.

For review response, we can manage all of your reviews on an ongoing basis, working as independently as you like—typically, though not necessarily, on a monthly retainer basis. Or we can respond to individual reviews, even just one review, using time-fee billing.

If we manage all reviews on an ongoing basis, we set up a review management system with a dashboard that lets us see and manage everything. We can monitor for new reviews, and link directly into review sites, making it easy to respond. The first step, however, is getting the background information on your services or products, and developing response tools such as fact sheets and message documents.

World-class expertise.
Flexible and affordable.

For responding to one or multiple individual reviews, our Response EXPRESS service makes it easy for you to take action now. You fill out our formmail, and based on your responses, we'll email back a quote. Some factors that effect cost, other than number of reviews, is the complexity of the situation and if you can communicate with us via email or if we need to hold phone calls.

Testimonials

Most of our reviews are great, but every now and then we'll get a bad one. Sometimes they're fair, an honest complaint. Other times they're full of lies and distortions. Responding to either kind intimidates me. So I never responded, and let them hurt me. Since discovering Review HELPER, I no longer feel anxious about bad reviews. I was taken aback the first time I saw a response they wrote. It was completely alien to what I'd have written, even how I think. Now I get it. I don't want negative reviews, but now I know there's no reason to be intimidated.
....Marc D., Owner of a Car Rental Business

Review HELPER gets it done. Period. And the quality is great, which matters to us. Before them, we never did anything about bad reviews, which are nearly always spiteful. Now we respond, and our responses rock! They've also done a fantastic job for us with SEO. I couldn't be happier.
....Andy R., Owner of a Home Contracting Business

Sue the Bastards?

If you use the Court of Law to deal with negative reviews, you could lose big in the Court of Public Opinion:

You May Not Even Win a Clear-Cut Defamation—Contractor Christopher Dietz sued Jane Perez because her reviews said he stole her jewelry and trespassed. After numerous court decisions, a jury called it a draw and awarded no damages.

Forget Non-disparagement Clauses—Not only can these kill your business in the court of public opinion; reviewers counter-sue and win big (see KlearGear and dentist Stacy Makhnevich). Some states (e.g., California) have banned them, and a federal law to ban them is imminent.

Anonomous Reviewers Are Protected—It's not easy getting a defamer's identity (see Hadeed Carpet Cleaning vs. Yelp). In Oregon, it's impossible, because a judge declared that sites like TripAdvisor are protected under Oregon's media shield law.

Anti-SLAPP Legislation—28 states already have it. A federal bill has now been introduced in Congress.

Why Bad Reviews Are More Powerful

Negativity Bias/Effect

Numerous studies show that people are more impacted by, and better remember, negative information, emotions, interactions, events, etc., than positive or neutral. The most famous published study is Bad Is Stronger Than Good, by Roy F. Baumeister and colleagues, in the Review of General Psychology in 2001. Read more...
The Sleeper Effect

This phenomena of psychology has to do with source credibility. It says that as time passes, e.g., a few weeks, people remember the message but forget the source, even if it's some idiot ranting on Yelp. Combine this with the greater memorability of negative information, and you see why negative reviews must be countered and neutralized at the source. Read more...