Ask the SEO Wizard
Kind and Patient Wizard of Second Chances,
I bought a store with terrible Google reviews. How do I recover?
— an owner of a franchise store in Hillsboro, adapted from a question on r/smallbusiness
Asked
I just took over a franchise store. It came with bad Google reviews, mostly about how the previous owners treated customers. I'm here to turn it around. What do I do about the old reviews?
The Wizard answers
You can’t delete the old reviews. Real reviews of real experiences stay up, even if the people behind them are gone. But you can bury them, and faster than you’d think.
Reply to the recent bad ones. Short and human: “We’re the new owners as of March. We’re sorry about your experience, and we’d love the chance to show you what’s changed.” No defending the old owners, no blaming them either. People reading reviews look at replies, and a few good ones change how the whole page feels.
You don’t need to reply to every review from five years ago. Focus on the last year or two.
Then ask every happy customer for a review. Every one. At the counter, on the receipt, in a follow-up text. A QR code by the register works. Reviews are sorted by recency and relevance, so twenty fresh ones push the old complaints out of sight.
Invite the old complainers back. If anyone left a bad review recently, a reply inviting them back sometimes turns into an updated review. Not often, but when it works it’s worth a lot.
One franchise thing to check: make sure you, not corporate or the old owner, control the Google Business Profile. If you can’t reply to reviews, that’s the first problem to fix.