Customers search Google, review websites, and social channels before buying. Potential employers are turning to Google and social media, too. If they find negative comments, press, or bad reviews, you’ve given them every reason to choose someone else.
If your current online reputation is less than ideal, this guide will teach you how to repair it.
Five Steps to Repair Your Online Reputation
Eliminating everything negative about you or your business may not be possible, but it’s always a good idea to do as much as you can. The last thing you should do is ignore it–that can cost you more than you think.
Even if you can’t remove it all, there are reputation repair strategies you can use to position yourself in a positive light.
Not only does this improve your image overall and minimize the impact of the bad, but it also makes it easier to protect your reputation if something else comes up later.
The ultimate goal is generating positive content that pushes negative sentiment off of page one. Here’s what we recommend:
- Claim All Your Online Profiles
- Monitor What Is Being Said About You
- Request Deletion of Negative Information
- Harness The Power Of SEO
- Engage, Engage, Engage
A lot of this is pretty straightforward. However, it can be an incredibly frustrating and time-consuming process. You can’t repair your reputation overnight, unfortunately.
If it’s going too slow or you run out of patience, you can hire a reputation management company to handle it all for you. They’ll go to bat for you every day until the situation is resolved, no matter how long it takes. All while you focus on other things. Many of them are capable of things you won’t be able to manage on your own.
BetterReputation and Reputation Defense Network are two of our favorites. BetterReputation is transparent, affordable, and fast with a small business vibe you won’t get from their larger competitors. RDN offers a wider range of services, including content removal and putting together legal cases, but it comes with a higher price tag.
The Easy Parts of Online Reputation Repair
While there’s no quick fix to repair your reputation, many aspects are pretty straightforward.
One of the easiest things to do is claim all social media profiles and online accounts, such as Google Business, Yelp, and TripAdvisor if you’re a business. People look for these things when researching you or your company–even if you don’t use them very much, they’re a strong trust signal that you are who you say you are.
Over time, these pages will begin to rank higher in search results.
Setting up Google Alerts is also very easy. You can set up weekly, daily, real-time notifications–whatever you prefer. Armed with early notice, you can quickly deal with any potentially damaging information.
Just make sure you go into it with a reputation management strategy. It can be simple, but you should have a plan in place.
The Difficult Parts of Online Reputation Repair
Claiming all your online profiles is simple. Managing all of those profiles day in and day out? It can get intense pretty quick.
There’s a reason social media manager is a full-time role. Plus, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Oftentimes, social media profiles aren’t enough to fix page one for your name or business. Full-fledged content campaigns aren’t uncommon.
Are you ready to publish fresh, new content on a regular basis? Are you prepared to learn everything you need to know about SEO?
Doing any of this well enough requires knowledge, experience, and a lot of time.
Not only that, but it can also get grindy. Quick. Aside from the actual work you have to do over months at a time, there’s a lot of waiting too. It gets frustrating, annoying, and sometimes a little depressing regularly looking at everything negative.
If all of this work sounds daunting, that’s because it can be.
Many businesses, especially those without the skills or resources in-house to tackle these tasks, turn to professional reputation managers for assistance (BetterReputation and Reputation Defense Network are our top picks).
Step 1: Claim All Your Online Profiles
The first thing to do to start your reputation cleanup process is to inventory your existing online profiles and identify any you haven’t yet claimed. This ensures that new leads, employers, business partners, etc. are able to verify that you’re legit.
Social Media
Choose the social media channels most important to you or your business–then, make sure you have complete profiles on each. Whether this is a Facebook Business page, Twitter account, LinkedIn company page, Instagram account, Pinterest profile, TikTok, YouTube, or all of the above, be sure your information is complete on each platform.
There are two reasons to do this. First, these accounts often show up near the top of online search results. If you don’t have any profiles, you lose this easy opportunity to control page one.
Second, customers often turn to social media to see what people are like everyday and talk about their experiences—good or bad. On some platforms, including Facebook, they can even leave reviews. Staying active on social media is one way to keep your finger on the pulse of what others say about you, engage with the community in a positive way, and respond to any negative comments before they snowball.
Business and Review Sites
If you’re a business, don’t forget about sites like Google Business and Yelp. Both will show up high in search results, which is usually a good thing. Having a profile on each also gives customers an easy way to leave positive reviews about your business while showing that you’re real.
It’s also important to know that, at least in the case of Yelp, people can leave reviews whether you have an official business profile or not.
You can’t respond to any reviews until you set up your business profile there. Engaging with customer reviews is important, so you’ll want to be able to do so on every platform.
Depending on your industry or business type, you may have to claim some niche-specific profiles. For example, restaurants, hotels, and hospitality businesses would need to claim listings on TripAdvisor. Whereas a B2B software company would need to prioritize sites like G2.
Step 2: Monitor What Is Being Said About You
Another easy step you should take right away is to keep an eye on your mentions online. This is the fastest way to know when something negative about you turns up on the web.
The faster you find out what’s being said about you online, the faster you can put out fires before they spread.
Identify Past Mentions
This is as simple as running an online search for your name, business name, products, or services. You’ll find any past mentions and can quickly assess how much negative information is out there right now.
Running a search is also a good way to see how you stack up in search results overall. This gives you a benchmark for measuring improvement.
If you’re coming across lots of negative press, blog posts, images, or any other content that paints you in a bad light, we recommend starting a list that includes all of these URLs. This is especially useful if you’re trying to remove negative news articles from the web.
Then you can use this to keep track of who you’ve reached out to to request removals, which we’ll cover in greater detail shortly. You’ll eventually use this to keep detailed notes in the column next to each URL on the list.
Set Up Google Alerts for Future Mentions
Knowing what’s already been said is only part of the equation. You also need to be aware when new information is published. While you could just keep running searches periodically, there is a more efficient way.
You can automate the process by setting up a Google Alert for your name.
You have a number of settings to set up, including how often to be alerted. We recommend you select as-it-happens, so you can deal with any negative information as fast as possible.
Once you create your alert, you’ll receive an email at the interval you chose. The email will identify all mentions of your name with a link to the source.
Pinpoint the Source of the Problem
For some of you, the reason for your bad online reputation might be obvious. It could be tied to a specific event, arrest, bad publicity, news article, or something along those lines.
But others may not understand exactly why they’re getting bad reviews or why their perception is need of repair.
The easiest way to do this is by looking through the mentions that you’ve identified. See if there are common problems or complaints throughout them.
For example, is the problem tied to a particular product or service? Or is it related to a specific employee or location?
While you’ll ultimately be taking steps to remove negative information that’s on the web, you won’t be able to prevent negative remarks from being published in the future if you can’t contain the root cause. It makes sense to do this now while you’re already here.
Step 3: Request Deletion of Negative Information
Negative information about you and your business can come in all different shapes and sizes. But to simplify things, we can break them down into three categories—URLs, reviews, and videos.
Any news story or blog post would fall into the negative URL category. This is essentially everything that’s not a third-party review website, and the process to request deletion for each of these varies slightly.
Negative URL Deletion Requests
If you find untrue or defamatory information about your business in a Google search result, you can ask Google to delete it. They have processes in place to evaluate and respond to these requests.
But keep in mind that even if Google removes your information from its search results, the content will still reside online at its source. It just won’t appear in any Google searches. You will have to approach the site directly if you want the information permanently deleted from the web.
That’s where the list you created back in the second step comes in handy. To stay organized, you need to keep track of every site you’ve reached out to, when you reached out to them, and the status of the URL.
Depending on how many URLs you’re dealing with, this can be a long and somewhat grueling process. Even after you’ve identified a negative URL, you still need to do some digging on who to contact. In most cases, a general “Contact Us” form won’t get the job done.
You’re much better off contacting the editor or webmaster directly.
Review Deletion Requests
If the negative information is on a public review site like Yelp, you can ask the site to remove the false review. The site will investigate and if they find the information is untrue, they will take the information down.
However, if the negative review stems from a legitimate transaction, then you’ll have to approach the review differently. We’ll cover how to handle that scenario later on.
Videos
This won’t apply to everyone, and it can sometimes be a bit more challenging to identify. But there might be videos online that bash you, your brand, or your products.
Start with what’s being indexed on Google. You can click the Videos filter of any search term to see the top video results.
Unlike a blog post or a review, this step may require you to actually watch the videos to see what’s being said about you. If there’s no transcript, you can’t just quickly search for your name and jump to it on the page.
You can also go straight to different video hosting platforms like YouTube or Vimeo and search for your name and related keywords there.
Another tricky part about this step is picking your battles. For example, say your business sells backpacks online. Someone creates a YouTube video of the “Five Worst Hiking Backpacks” and puts one of your products on a “do not buy” list.
If the video only has a few hundred views, move on. But even if it has 100,000 views, the reviewer may not be so willing to delete the video.
So in terms of video, make sure you only put effort into getting content removed that’s really damaging to you or your brand. Be highly selective here, since it could be an uphill battle.
Step 4: Harness the Power of SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps the content you publish rank higher in online search results. This is a very effective way to push any negative information about your company off page one and into internet oblivion.
Why does this matter? Three-quarters of people who search online don’t look beyond the first page of results. So the more positive content you can get to land high in rankings, the faster the bad stuff will be relegated to the place few people look.
Develop a Solid SEO Strategy
Creating a comprehensive SEO reputation management strategy involves researching to determine high-ranking keywords and phrases applicable to you or your business, building a solid website structure, and getting backlinks to your content from other reputable websites.
Effectively doing this requires having someone on your team that is very knowledgeable about the ins and outs of SEO. This person creates the strategy and then manages the execution.
It is a big job, so don’t worry if you aren’t—or don’t want to be—an SEO expert.
Create Great Content
The SEO research will tell you what users are searching for, but it’s up to you to create killer content that is informative and helpful for those users. Your content must also incorporate the keywords and phrases you identified during your SEO research, so that it has a chance to catch Google’s attention.
The more of this great content you publish, the happier Google will be since it loves fresh, quality content. Pleasing Google gives you the best shot to see your content rank high in search results.
Having a blog on your website is a great place to start. You can use it to share news and information, answer frequently asked questions, offer tips, and provide other information relevant to who you are or what you do.
Another important factor is adding content to your website. You can publish your blog on your website, but you also can create content that describes your business and your services that ranks well on Google.
Additionally, you need to have a well-organized website. If visitors click through to your website, but quickly become frustrated with finding the information they want, they will jump to the next site in the Google search results. A well-organized website generates “sticky” visitors, meaning they spend a lot of time on your site, which Google views positively inside its ranking system.
Knowing exactly how to create sticky content on a website that keeps visitors engaged can be challenging for many people.
If you are running your own business already, you may not have much time available to create your content. An online reputation management company can help you design your website, organizing it successfully and helping you create content that ranks well.
You can also employ other strategies like sending out press releases and sharing your content across your social media channels.
The more positive information you send out into the world about your business, the more chances you have to bury any negative information.
Build Authority
In addition to creating content on your own website, you can use other websites and online platforms to help establish yourself as an authoritative source within your niche or industry.
So when someone searches for your name, they’ll see a variety of results showing you as a leader or innovator in a particular space.
- Look for guest posting opportunities
- Be a podcast guest
- Create video content
- Speak at an event
From an SEO perspective, these types of initiatives can ultimately kill two birds with one stone.
First, your name or your brand’s name will have a more positive spin in the search results—even if the URLs aren’t directly sending people to your own site.
But for most of these, you’ll also get backlinks to help boost your website’s domain authority. This is a huge win for your SEO efforts.
Step 5: Engage, Engage, Engage
Once you’ve got your basic online reputation repair strategies in place, it’s time to start a dialogue with your current and future customers. Regular engagement is one of the most effective ways to build goodwill with your target audience.
Ask For Reviews
While customers who have a bad experience don’t hesitate to leave negative reviews, the same isn’t always true for satisfied customers. It’s important to encourage your happy customers to share their positive experiences with the world through online reviews.
There are many ways to do this. You can create social media posts asking them to share their honest opinions about their experience with you. You can include small reminders in the packages you send with customer orders. You can send follow-up emails to your customers, too.
The point is to remind customers that reviews are a valuable part of their transaction with your company.
For more information, we have a dedicated guide on how to ask for reviews that you can use as a resource.
Respond To All Reviews
Asking for reviews is only half of the equation. You also need to respond in a timely manner to all the reviews you get—whether they’re good or not so great. Responding to the positive reviews is easy—a simple “thanks for your feedback” is fine, though you can certainly say more to show your gratitude if you want!
Responding to negative reviews is a little trickier. If the contents of the review are true and the issue they’re complaining about actually happened, be open and honest in your response. Acknowledge the mistake, fix it if you can, and apologize. Then explain the steps you’ve taken to avoid a repeat of the mistake down the road.
They’ll get reviews for your business, keep your online profiles up-to-date, provide strategic responses to all reviews, and help highlight the most positive ones.
Own Your Mistakes
Turning something negative into a positive is one of the best ways to respond to bad publicity.
So while you’re engaging with your audience and putting out new content, don’t be afraid to reference mistakes from your past and identify how you’ve improved moving forward.
For example, let’s say you’re running a restaurant, and the majority of your bad reviews were tied to slow service. You can recognize that your service in the past wasn’t up to standards and highlight what you’ve done to get better—like hiring more kitchen staff or reducing the number of items on the menu.
You could potentially take this a step further and offer a discount if food isn’t on the table within 20 minutes of ordering.
Customers love it when you’re honest. The same people who previously wrote bad reviews about you will be more inclined to write positive ones if you’ve addressed their complaints.
Other Ways To Engage
Social media is a great way to engage with your followers. Start with a thoughtful post, ask readers to respond in comments, then respond quickly to any comments you get.
While this sort of engagement isn’t going to directly impact any negative online information, it does keep your company front of mind for your followers. Then when you do ask for reviews on your social channels, there’s a higher likelihood your followers will see the request and respond with the positive reviews you want.
Final Thoughts About Repairing Your Online Reputation
Repairing a damaged reputation requires time, patience, and ongoing attention. If you don’t have the resources to manage this on your own, it’s worth investing in an online reputation management service to handle the heavy lifting on your behalf.
Read our full reviews of our top online reputation management companies to learn more about these services. Alternatively, we recommend BetterReputation and Reputation Defense Network if you prefer to leave it to the pros.