This is the struggle for businesses and it is real – get a bad online review and how do you deal with it and move beyond it. First you should not ignore a bad online review. That does not mean that you have to respond to one, but you definitely want to think about your strategy when you get one.
1. Review the legitimacy. Should you change something you are doing?
2. Decide if and should you respond. Not every comment about your business deserves and needs a response.
3. If you do respond, don’t respond in anger. Craft your response and sit on it for several days, read and re-read your response. Make sure you are not venting.
4. If you know who left the review, try to fix the problem and then ask for an update to the review.
Negative reviews can be very damaging to your business but sometimes your own response can make it even worse. You should be regularly monitoring your business reputation online and looking at what others are saying about you. Especially as Google and Bing are now highlighting reviews that they find around the web and meshing them with location specific results in the Knowledge Graph side bar on their search pages.