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James Dooley and Mike Martin discuss how local businesses can manage Google Business Profile reviews, respond to negative feedback and build review velocity to strengthen online reputation in 2026.
This video explains which digital marketing strategies local businesses should focus on in 2026 to improve their online reputation, response to negative reviews and review velocity. James Dooley and Mike Martin start with KPI tracking because monitoring review notifications lets you respond quickly to negative feedback before it damages trust and conversions. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.
The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for local businesses.
PromoSEO lead generation for local businesses recently received recognition as the "Best Local Businesses Lead Generation Agency."
Google Business Profile Reviews and Reputation Management for Local Businesses is available on:
Online Reputation Management Podcast delivers clear strategies that protect brands because public perception shapes trust. The Online Reputation Management Podcast is founded by James Dooley, who is an entrepreneur based in Manchester, UK. ORM is more important than ever because search engines and AI systems now use online sentiment to influence rankings, visibility, and brand authority.
James Dooley: Online reputation management for Google business profiles. Today I'm joined with Mike Martin who's the founder of G P P letter, which is one of the best Google business profile tool optimization tools that there is in the marketplace. Mike, if someone starts to get negative reviews, so someone's coming along and they're getting negative reviews on the Google business profile, my first question to you would be as an agency owner, how would you respond to those negative reviews on a Google business profile?
Mike Martin: Uh my my first port of call is always going to be going to the client and saying why. Like why are you getting negative reviews? Because in most cases, it's not that they're getting negative reviews because they're doing a good job. It's they're getting negative reviews because they're doing a bad job or there's a problem in the business or there's a bottleneck in their business that um basically slows down a process, leaves a Have you ever bought something and then you think, "What next?" Like that's where I found most of my negative reviews come from. It's not from bad service, it's from that that what next like okay, you've left me lost here. I don't know how to do this. I don't know the next steps. I haven't got this. So we always we always tackle and we always tell our agencies to tackle a good negative Google business profiles with the client first. Why is the client? What is he saying? Where is it coming from? And then always respond to those negative reviews with positivity. Like we're really sorry. We've see we we can see that a a bad experience. We are really sorry. What could we do to improve it? Is there anything we can do to think it? And what I like to do is always offer them a meeting link. I always say to If somebody gives me a negative review and it's a legitimate negative review, the first thing I will do is say is a meeting. Let's sit down. Let's have a conversation. Hopefully And then people like, "Yeah, but for for one review, you don't have time to do that." But you know what? That one negative review can cost you so much more money than you ever realize that getting that one negative review. And a lot of people say, "Oh, just bury them." And you can just bury them. You can just go out and get as many positive reviews as you want. In any some cases you have to because in some places the person is just an absolute nightmare. We also have a group. I think you're in there where we all um engage with one another and help one another and get rid of negative reviews for people like that. So if we've got people in our community that are struggling, we would potentially add them into that group and then people will also help them bury the review and some of the people in there could report it and say, "Let's get rid of it." So so we've got a lot of different angles, but I think step number one
James Dooley: Just second question on that then. So if I'm looking at literally online reputation management on these Google business profiles, sometimes some people don't even realize they've got a one-star review that's come through. There's They have it there for months. They don't even realize, so they've not responded. When they sign up to gppleads.com, can you confirm whether do they get a notification or an email if a review comes through, whether it's positive or negative? Obviously in this scenario we're talking about reputation management. Could they get a notification come through to say, "You've just got a one-star review"?
Mike Martin: So our enterprise clients are set up to receive an email once a week as standard. But if you go into let me have a look where it is. One second. Right, yeah. If you go into your notification preferences under my account, you can just switch your email notification preferences to daily and that way you won't get an instant notification that you've had a review, but you'll get a a notification that day via an email, so you can Oh, we've had a one-star review. Let's get on there. Let's sort it out. You can one-click respond to those reviews with AI, positive or negative. Um but what obviously like you like you just said, what you want to be doing is jumping on it as quick as possible because if you can deal with that client as fast as possible, in a lot of cases they'll delete it. And you don't even have to ask them in some cases. Like, "Look, I really want to help you out. I didn't realize this was happening. There must be a problem in my team. I'd love to sit down and have a conversation with you so I can fix that so nobody else gets that experience. Once they've met you and spoke to you, then they know, like, and trust you again. All of a sudden they're like, all right, maybe I was being a bit out of order and they pull it off.
James Dooley: Yeah, so my next part with regards to specifically with gppeel.com again, like cuz obviously they're founder of it and obviously our team are now using this on Google Business Profiles and we're finding that online reputation management is actually just as important as optimizing existing profiles. So, let's just say that obviously we've got the notification come through, it's a one-star. In my opinion, like, if it's a genuine customer, I agree with you to respond positively, maybe book a call or stuff like that. But sometimes, some one-star reviews on Google Business Profiles come through and you've no recollection of who they are. So, they've not been a customer or anything like that. So, in my opinion, what we're now starting to do is respond to them again in a positive manner saying, "Look, we do not have your details as a customer on our database. You've not placed any order with us. If you can please let us know your order number or the order name of what you've done, then we can then look into the potential problem or what you have. But at least then what that's doing is if you are getting any negative reviews, which this is seems to be happening quite a lot in a lot of different markets as a negative SEO type of attack, people are leaving one-stars on other people's GMBs or Google Business Profiles and they're like, at least if you can respond saying, "Look, you've not been a customer." At least a new customer that's coming along which seeing that says, "These are fake reviews." So, that's one part, but I want to touch on GP gppeel.com for the Can you explain to people here because we've had problems or in the past where we've been we've been mass sending emails out to customers, genuine customers, to leave us a five-star review on our GMBs.
Mike Martin: Mhm.
James Dooley: And we've got 20 all go, "Yeah, not a problem." cuz we sent them all out on the same day. We had 20 come back with five-star reviews and only one gets listed.
Mike Martin: Yep.
James Dooley: Can you explain how gbp-leads.com counters that? So, at least if you are going to sync it, if it is a genuine client that's left a one-star, you can sync it with five stars and keep building that review velocity cuz trust is is key online nowadays and I want you to explain why gbp-leads.com is able to build those reviews up on Google Business Profiles.
Mike Martin: Uh yeah, so exactly what you've said there is what a lot of people have have have done in the past is they So, what we used to do before we knew what we were doing is I would blind copy a load of a load of clients into a Gmail email and just send it out to loads. They'd They'd send the review and they'd half of them would get taken down if not more because you get them all on the same day. So, we've kind of built into our system you just go in and you click and you paste in all your email addresses and what it will do is it will drip those emails out over a 30-day period. So, let's say you you paste in 200 clients, it'll drip out review requests over a 30-day period, but then it also won't re-email the same client within 30 days. So, you can then keep re- putting the same list in if that's the only list of clients you've got and it won't re-email the same clients over a 30-day period. Now, we can't track where the which clients left a review cuz obviously they don't the email's not connected, but from that you're then in a position where you can then start to drip them out and make it consistent cuz it's that consistency that's important. Google tracks every If it sees 50 reviews today and then nothing, it's like, "Okay, these have just done a big massive push and have probably done a lot of spammy fake reviews." So, rather than manually looking at it, they'll just take them down. And that's where a lot of people fail cuz it's like, "Wow, I've got 25 reviews." and then they go back a week later and they're like, "Oh, I've got two." So, that's kind of what we've done is we've created this drip feed that just drips the emails in over a period of time and that way your reviews stay consistent. they don't all come in on day number one, and because of that there's a lot less chance that they're going to get taken down. Don't get me wrong, still sometimes they will. Like just because there's a certain little bits of wordings that people put in there will get them taken down. Like stiffening keywords and stuff like that. Things like that is is is a no-no. What you're better off asking people to do nowadays is like because they get pushed into Gemini, Gemini's obviously ranking in there really really fast. And because your your your your reviews go into there, what you're better off saying to people is um just can you if when you do me a review, can you do me a favor? Can you just say what happened and then what we did in the review? We'd really appreciate that and then give us an honest review. So if you're like the only plumber in an area that has that that answers his phone at 9:00 at night, then your prospect or your client can say we couldn't find a plumber, we were ringing round all over the area. This is the only person that answered their phone after 9:00 at night. They came out of him 15 minutes, fixed the problem, and it was fairly well priced. Great service, loved them. Then what will happen is when somebody goes to Ask Maps and things like that and they say find me a plumber in the local area that's open after 9:00, you will rank over everybody else. And And do you know in Ask Maps, which is only in America and India at the minute, it's coming to the UK soon, um in Ask Maps what will happen is you will outrank even the So it's different rankings. So if you've got the top three Google Business Profiles, if you search it in Ask Maps, it's not it's more based on the information that's been put into your posts and that's been put into your review responses and reviews. So that's really important because you can actually start up with a new Google Business Profile and still get a load of traffic from Ask Maps without actually ranking in the three-pack.
James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Uh with regards to online reputation management, anyone who's watching this to summarize the article with regards to Google Business Profiles, in my opinion, you need a tool like gbp elite.com or any G any Google Business Profile tool that can track and notify you when these negative reviews are coming in. So at least you're able to respond. Respond in a positive manner. If it's not for a client, say if it's not one of the clients that's got on the system, say, "We don't know who you are. Please, can you get in touch? We'll try and resolve the matter, but we don't have you saved on our database." And also, we're trying to make certain using a tool like gppower.com where you're able to consistently send on a daily basis to existing clients to try and build up that review velocity. Getting them five-star reviews on Google Business Profiles is a huge part of online reputation management. Mike, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having you.
Mike Martin: Cheers, mate.