How many people are seeing that 1* review?

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that negative Google reviews of your business are either 'not seen' or 'have no impact' (if you want reviews, but don't want them to show up in search there are always the review sites: Yelp, Trustpilot, Feefo and so on). For reasons better known to Google, it stopped showing the number of views a review received, like this...

...a while back. There's no point in us even trying to guess Google's rationale, but it definitely enabled those who persist in thinking that the odd negative review 'doesn't matter' or 'won't get seen by many people' (those 'people' being potential customers) to relax in the comfort of their own self-delusion.

There are two lessons we can all learn from this simple screenshot:

1. That hundreds, even thousands, of people will see any negative reviews of your business
2. That if a negative review is 'liked' - the only statistic that Google still shows (the thumbs up at bottom left)...

...you can be absolutely sure that it has been viewed, and read, by a whole lot more - not necessarily in the ratio of 1:1300 indicated by the first review, but the multiple will be considerable.

So: take negative reviews very seriously indeed - do everything in your power to avoid receiving them in the first place (HelpHound's moderated review management?) and then deal with them professionally when they do arise.