We know reviews can be the bane of your existence. As a senior living provider, there are many opportunities for families to share fabulous reviews about your communities.
And just as many opportunities for a disgruntled employee to fake a few bad ones.
It’s why so many companies try to make it easy for families to post great reviews. Unfortunately, that might be the reason many of your senior living reviews are vanishing.
Why is Google Deleting Your Senior Living Reviews?
We know the conspiracy theories about missing reviews are abundant, but the likelihood of it being something nefarious is basically zilch.
There are glitches that occur during updates that might cause things to go a little crazy, but it’s not a deliberate ploy to boost the senior living community down the street.
It is more likely to be one of the following issues causing your senior living reviews to go up in smoke:
- Same IP Address: Did too many reviews come from the same IP address, especially your community;s IP address? If your team is helping residents or families complete reviews or giving them a space to write one, Google may question the legitimacy of the reviews.
- Review dump: Were a lot of reviews posted at once? Did your marketing team do an email or text blast to ask families to complete a review that night? Same as above. Google might wonder if they are real.
- Spam: There are a few other possibilities that Google interprets as spam. If the review includes a link or a telephone number, that’s considered spammy because it often is.
- Profanity: Another red flag for Google is profanity. They’ll usually take those down.
More Reasons Why
- Too far away: Another issue might be adult children who live out of town posting reviews. They may have visited a parent, returned home, and wrote a great review. The problem is their IP address is too far away from your local business.
- Google account: Are families creating Google accounts just to give your community a review? A lot of reviews linked to new accounts might seem less than legitimate. You are better off asking a few families a week to create an account and leave you a review.
- Similar language: Do all of your reviews sound alike? Yep, you guessed it. That can seem fake, too. Ask families to be more specific when sharing what they love about your community.
- Third person: Google doesn’t allow for secondhand reviews. That means families need to write their reviews in first person from their personal observations.
- Too many: While it’s not always a good criteria for removing reviews, Google might compare the number of reviews you have with how many are posted for your competitors. If you have a significant amount more, they may question the validity of some.
Mystery solved?
The bottom line is you’re likely the culprit and didn’t even realize it.
Drop us a note if you have any other Google-related concerns and we’ll be happy to help.