Corporate reputation management is crucial because a company’s reputation can significantly impact its success, customer trust, and overall brand value. A good CRM strategy will allow a company to cultivate its public image, address negative issues, and influence public perception to build and maintain a positive reputation.

Understanding Corporate Reputation Management

Corporate reputation consists of 5 key elements. We’ll discuss each individually to help you understand why corporate reputation matters and why managing it is crucial to your company’s overall brand perception.

• Social Responsibility: Every company has an impact on its community, whether that’s environmentally, socially, or both. To keep a positive public perception, your company should be taking steps towards growing its community. These initiatives often involve giving back to the community through volunteering, offering career or mentorship programs, and even getting involved in local events. This is a great way to spread brand awareness while making a positive change.
• Vision & Leadership: The leadership team at your company sets the standard for everyone else. If an employee sees that their boss does not try to spread brand awareness or serves as a poor representation of the company’s values, how can you expect that employee to care? When leadership stays engaged in the company and sets high standards of representation for the company, the rest of your staff will follow. This puts a positive light on your brand and encourages a positive work environment where each team member is equally engaged in the company’s overall goals.
• Products & Services: Regardless of what type of product or service your company offers, it’s crucial that the company, as a whole, stands behind it. Listening goes a long way when something breaks. Don’t think one negative review is nothing to worry about; with the state of online reviewing today, one negative review can snowball into hundreds if you aren’t addressing the core issue. Take time to understand why things went wrong, look internally for the root cause, and take whatever steps possible to confront it. All companies mess up, but your audience will notice if you take accountability and steps toward change, which can help repair their trust in your brand. 
• Workplace Environment: Building a healthy, positive, growth-focused workplace is essential for any company’s reputation with its employees. Employees want to feel seen and heard, not just like another cog in the machine. Conduct anonymous feedback reviews often, take time to speak to your employees face to face, and facilitate growth opportunities and conflict resolution. Keeping the leadership team involved in these things will go a long way in showing your employees that the company cares about its people.
• Online Presence: In today’s digital age, your online reputation is at the top of the pyramid when it comes to influencing your brand’s perception. Keep tabs on your review sites (Glassdoor, Yelp, BBB), and check for consistent complaints or negative comments. If you see the same issues brought up repeatedly, this may be a sign that you’ll need to look internally for a root cause. You’ll also want to keep tabs on social media mentions, whether they are direct comments under your company’s posts or secondary comments where your name is mentioned but the company profile wasn’t tagged. Staying on top of these things will help you determine what your online audience truly thinks of your company and can even help you catch a potential reputation crisis before it grows.  

The How-To’s of Effective Reputation Management

Measuring Corporate Reputation

How do you gauge your company’s current reputation status? As you may have noticed in the section above, many factors contribute to the public perception of your company. 

Let’s start with your online reputation. Look into common review sites like Google, Yelp, and BBB. What are the star ratings there? The number of reviews? Common themes of negative reviews? These should give you an idea of what online audiences think about your company, services, or products. Next, look at employee review sites like Indeed and Glassdoor and ask yourself the same questions. Doing so will help you understand your staff’s perception of specific management practices, team members, and the company as a whole. 

Now, take a look at the search results for your company name. What type of news articles are you seeing, and do they speak positively or negatively about your company? Are these articles about your company, or are they focused on your competitors?

Lastly, take a look at your mentions and comments on social media. Although social media is online, it can help you understand what regular people think of your company. Perhaps they aren’t upset enough to leave a negative review, but many people will turn to social media to vent about a poor experience. 

Looking at all of this together can help you understand whether people see your company in a positive or negative light and also helps identify potential core issues that you and your leadership team should be addressing, both with the public and with your staff.

Improving Corporate Reputation

Now that you have a good understanding of your corporate reputation, what can you do to improve it? 

• Craft Quality Content: If the core issue for your company’s reputation is a lack of positive press and third-party articles, it’s time to start pumping out content. Content could include blog posts on a third-party site (separate from your company blog), asking news outlets to write press releases, building new, relevant profiles such as Crunchbase, or improving existing profiles like LinkedIn. As long as you prioritize quality over quantity, you can create well-optimized content. After sharing this content, you’ll want to track your company’s search results to monitor when and where this content is ranking. Promoting the new positive content can also help suppress any existing negative content.
• Managing Reviews: If negative reviews and star ratings are the main issue, you’ll want to build a team solely focused on review management. With everyone trying to go viral these days, it’s not uncommon for a company to be hit with a review bombing attack at least once. Having a team dedicated to responding to all reviews, facilitating customer service escalations, reporting reviews that violate guidelines, and requesting new reviews will prepare you for a review-based reputation crisis.
• Social Media Monitoring: Even if you think your audience isn’t on social media, it’s still a good idea to monitor various platforms. We’ve seen with many clients that it only takes one viral Tweet, TikTok, or Facebook group to launch a company into a reputation crisis. Monitoring your social media comments and mentions can help you keep tabs on your online reputation, identify common complaints or issues your audience has with your company, and lots of other helpful data. You should have at least one or two team members dedicated to weekly social media check-ins to help keep an eye on things.

At the end of the day, you’ll want to have a corporate reputation strategy and a team ready and capable of implementing that strategy. Don’t wait until your company is actively in a reputation crisis to build out these strategies; at that point, the fight to fix your reputation will be more challenging. If your team needs more support building out and managing strategies, check out our services, and don’t hesitate to reach out!

Addressing and Solving Reputation Issues

Common Reputation Issues

At Go Fish Digital, we’ve seen new clients face the same reputation issues time and time again. Some of the most common issues we come across include:

• Poor Review Site Ratings
• Negative Press 
• Viral Social Posts Gone Wrong 

Our clients are often overwhelmed by the negative sentiment or are confused about why they are receiving such negativity in the first place and aren’t sure about where to start. While each strategy is unique to the client and their reputation issue, here are some of the damage control strategies we typically provide regarding these common issues:

Poor Review Site Ratings

You’ve noticed that several of your business’s online review sites have poor ratings. How do you fix this? To manage online reviews, we recommend verifying their accuracy and appropriateness first and flagging those that violate review guidelines. 

You should also respond to all reviews, especially negative ones, addressing specific concerns to demonstrate attentiveness. Avoid generic responses, ensuring reviewers feel acknowledged. Additionally, consider initiating a review request strategy, adhering to site guidelines, as it can garner positive feedback but also requires proactive handling of any negative comments that may arise.

Negative Press 

A new article came out about your business, great! Except… it turns out to be not so favorable. What do you do now? One effective strategy we recommend is suppressing the negative article. Suppression involves identifying any positive content ranking in the SERPs just below the article and promoting it. 

Another effective strategy is creating new content or profiles on third-party sites to increase the number of positive URLs ranking in your business’s SERPs.

Viral Social Posts Gone Wrong 

A video or social media post is going viral online, and you begin seeing negative comments and reviews pour in for your business. However, you quickly realize the company mentioned in the video is not yours! How do you put out the flames? 

First, put out a public statement on all platforms that states your company is not associated with whatever the viral social post is discussing. Next, set up a team dedicated to monitoring and responding to comments and flagging any reviews left on your review sites that were not intended for your business. 

While each review site has its filters, they unfortunately don’t catch everything, so it’s up to you and your team to flag any reviews that violate the site’s guidelines. These two strategies are not foolproof, but they should help slow down the negativity and remove inaccurate negative reviews over time. 

So, how can your business avoid these common reputation crises? Well, it’s important to build out CRM strategies like the ones above before your business lands in a crisis. We’ve mentioned this multiple times because proactive, social, review, and reputation management strategies are the most effective way to shorten the length of a crisis and potentially prevent it.

Navigating Corporate Reputation Management Jargon

The phrases and acronyms surrounding corporate reputation management can be confusing, so let’s break down the most common terms you’ll find when reading up on CRM:

• CRM – Corporate Reputation Management: the management and monitoring of your business’s overall reputation and perception.
• ORM – Online Reputation Management: the management and monitoring of an individual’s overall online reputation and perception. 
• SERP – Search Engine Results Page
• SEO – Search Engine Optimization: the analysis and optimization of a website or webpage to increase the quality and ranking of that page. 
• CTR – Click Through Rate: the process of increasing the number of organic clicks and engagement on a specific link in the SERP. 
• Page Rank – The number assigned to each URL result’s rank in the SERP, typically in chronological order.
• Sentiment Analysis – The process of assessing each part of your online presence to determine whether it can be marked as positive, neutral, or negative. 
• Sentiment Score – A 100-point algorithm to help you calculate the overall sentiment of the first page of your business’s search results.  
• Social Listening – The process of monitoring and analyzing your business’s social media mentions and comments, to determine if your overall social media footprint is perceived as positive, neutral, or negative. 

Our Services for Corporate Reputation Management

Are you overwhelmed by the thought of taking on all of this work to manage your business’s reputation? Don’t sweat it, Go Fish Digital is here to help! The following services can be customized to each unique reputation situation, ensuring that you and your business are covered on all bases.

• B2B SEO
• Online Reputation Management
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Management
• Digital PR
• …and more! 

Don’t let a lack of knowledge or manpower prevent you from taking control of your corporate reputation. Our team is filled with experts in each of these fields, ready to guide you through each step, take on the heavy lifting, and get your reputation back into the green zone. 

Effective corporate reputation management (CRM) is vital for shaping a positive brand image. Understanding the key elements of CRM, how to measure your reputation, and learning which proactive steps you should be taking are crucial for long-term success. Don’t wait until your business is in an active reputation crisis to seek help. Contact Go Fish Digital today to proactively safeguard and enhance your corporate reputation!

Unlocking the Potential of Corporate Reputation Management is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Good online reputation management for your brand starts with search results and online review sites. The majority of our digital reputation management projects here at Go Fish Digital revolve around suppressing negative search results and review site rating improvement. Optimizing these areas is a good start for taking control of how your brand is perceived.

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• Online Reputation Management
• Online Reviews Management
• Search Suppression Services
• Yelp Review Management

But there are other places where negative sentiment about your brand may be showing up. If online reputation management is going to be a focus for you or your business, it’s important to develop a strategy for these often-overlooked channels. 

1. Autocomplete & Related Search

Before a searcher even gets to your SERPs, they will be greeted by a search engine’s Autocomplete predictions. Rest assured that a negative phrase like “complaints”, “scam” or “lawsuit” appearing here is going to immediately influence the reputation of your brand.

Don’t overlook the “Related Search” section either. Although these predictions appear at the bottom of the SERP on Google and Bing, a curious user will stumble across these terms – which are often different from the Autocomplete phrases. 

The exact algorithm for how these predictions are pulled is difficult to unpack. But we do know that factors like search volume, recency of searches, and location of the searcher are part of the equation. We work with clients on developing a content and optimization plan to increase the frequency of positive phrases we see in Autocomplete, influencing the predictions as much as possible to replace negative keywords.  

2. People Also Ask Boxes

People Also Ask has been a hot topic in the SEO world for the past few years, but it’s often overlooked as a reputation indicator. Just like Autocomplete, the predictions here can help shape public perception. We’ve seen questions related to product recalls, workplace safety, bad press and everything in between pop up. This SERP feature is appearing more and more frequently, yet is often skimmed past when brand managers are monitoring online sentiment.

We’ve found a few useful strategies for converting or suppressing negative People Also Ask questions with schema and third-party content. As part of your ORM dashboard, it pays to keep tabs on what’s appearing in this section of relevant SERPs. 

Have a question about People Also Ask from an SEO or ORM perspective? Feel free to contact our team by following the link at the end of this post. 

3. Video Carousels

While we’re on the topic of SERP features, we need to talk about video carousels. Your brand’s YouTube channel may already be full of product/service overviews, workplace culture highlights, customer testimonials, and other reputation-building content. But not all of these videos are guaranteed to appear in a carousel. We’ve seen businesses with sterling reputations be victimized by an angry YouTuber or past customer who airs their frustrations in a video. With the right title or view count, these videos can leapfrog your owned content and appear on the first page of search results. 

Our strategy here is to promote existing videos or create new ones that can eventually suppress a negative target at least outside the first three videos in a carousel. That takes an attention-grabbing and keyword-optimized title, useful information for the viewer, and distribution that will garner maximum views. 

4. Social & Web Mentions

Ok, so you’ve nailed down your search rankings, autocomplete, review sites, and any other unique SERP features. What about monitoring the chatter of past, present, and future customers online? After all, any dialogue on your social channels is another opportunity for people to weigh in on your brand. Maybe you already have a go-to social media person on the team who can answer any questions on Facebook or Twitter, but what about conversations happening outside of your owned social channels?

It’s important to monitor untagged brand mentions or anything outside the purview of your own pages. Tools like Awario and BuzzSumo are great for picking up mentions of your brand on Facebook groups, subreddits, online message boards and everything in between. For anything else, old standbys like Google Alerts or a page monitoring tool like VisualPing are simple and free ways to catch and address a reputation threat before it gets worse. 

5. Glassdoor/Indeed

Employee review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed seem like obvious places to try and control your company’s reputation. However, we’ve seen plenty of organizations who believe that, unless a searcher is a job-seeker, star ratings and reviews on these sites don’t really matter. The truth is that everything a searcher sees online factors into their perception of the brand, and Glassdoor and Indeed almost always rank high for searches of business names. A company that values its employees is likely to value its customers. 

There are a few different ways to improve star ratings here. Both Glassdoor and Indeed encourage employers to request reviews, and Glassdoor even provides free email templates for obtaining new reviews from different employee groups. We also use our knowledge of these sites’ review guidelines in order to re-verify or remove certain negative reviews. 

With these overlooked areas on your radar, your ORM strategy will be much more comprehensive in the new year. For more tips and tricks, or to learn how Go Fish Digital can help your brand improve its reputation, you can contact us here.

The 5 Best Online Reputation Monitoring Tools is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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What Is Online Reputation Management? 

Online reputation management (ORM) is the process of monitoring the mentions, reviews, and overall sentiment surrounding a specific business or individual. The goal of reputation management is to create a search engine results page (SERP) that features positive owned and 3rd party content, managed review sites, and optimized social media profiles, in order to give potential clients a great first impression. ORM also aims to help clients in addressing and responding to negative feedback, in order to improve business practices and resolve client issues.  

What Are The Benefits Of Online Reputation Management? 

Online reputation management has become just as crucial to businesses and individuals as word of mouth, perhaps even more so. A recent Go Fish Digital data study revealed that dropping from a 4-star to a 3-star review rating can result in a -70% decrease in consumer trust. 

But consumers and clients aren’t just looking at reviews these days. These individuals will look into recent news stories, social media comments, Reddit threads, and even watch non-sponsored video reviews before deciding to purchase a product or service. 

Additionally, if you or your business are hit with a reputation crisis, it’ll be much harder to recover from if you don’t already have your online reputation in good standing. These are just a few reasons why online reputation should be a top priority for you and your business.

How are SEO and Online Reputation Management Related? 

Online reputation management and SEO generally have two different goals. With reputation management, you’ll oftentimes be looking at ways to suppress negative articles in the search results. The goal in these situations is to decrease the visibility of specific content. ORM also looks at improving things such as online reviews or social media mentions, which SEO does not. 

With SEO, you’re generally looking to increase the visibility of owned-content. This is done through a combination of content, link-building and technical initiatives. SEO is a commonly used tactic when implementing an ORM strategy.  

Steps To Improve Your Online Reputation: 

1. Audit Your Digital Reputation

There are a number of sources that factor into your online reputation, including review sites, rich snippets, social media pages, and more. 

In order to narrow down the top priorities, you’ll want to first search your business name in Google and see what type of content appears on the first 1-2 pages. Take note of review sites and their ratings, social media pages, owned and 3rd party content, and any rich snippet features that may appear. 

Ask yourself the following questions: 

• Which review sites have below a 4 star rating? 
• Is there any negative press about my business? 
• What type of questions are being asked in Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) results? 
• Where is Google pulling its PAA answers from? 

Once you have a general idea of the sentiment of your business’ SERPs, you can begin by taking a deeper dive into the most popular reputation sources. These can include the following:

• Review sites: Yelp, Google, Trustpilot, BBB, Glassdoor, Indeed
• Social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram
• 3rd party content: Press releases, news stories, blog posts, opinion pieces, long form reviews

After you’ve reviewed your SERP results, you should have a good understanding of the negative, neutral, and positive content that surrounds your business. Any negative content or low review site ratings should be your first priority in improving your overall online reputation. If you’re still unsure about what your overall sentiment looks like, check out our SERP sentiment score calculation. 

2. Calculate Your Reputation Score

We’ve created a simple calculation to determine your overall SERP sentiment score that can be applied to each page (or every 10 results) of the SERP. 

We’ll start with a 100-point ranking system, where each rank is assigned a numerical value. Next, you’ll determine the sentiment of each URL in each rank, marking them as positive, neutral, or negative. For each neutral URL, you’ll subtract half that rank’s points from the overall score; for each negative, you’ll subtract all of the points from that rank. 

Once you’ve done this for each URL on page 1 of your SERP (or 10 total URLs), you’ll be left with an overall sentiment score. The higher the number is, the more positive your SERPs are. 

Calculating your SERP sentiment score can be a great starting point if you are looking to improve your online reputation but aren’t sure what to tackle first.

3. Define Your Online Reputation Strategy

Now that you’ve identified your overall sentiment score and what negative content you’ll need to target, we can start building out a reputation improvement strategy. Your strategy should be based on what specifically you’ll be targeting. 

For example, if you’ve found that your Yelp, BBB, and Google reviews have low star ratings, you’ll want to build out a strategy focused on gaining new positive reviews, flagging negative ones, and responding to customer complaints. 

If you’ve discovered several negative news articles or blog posts, you’ll need a content strategy focused on creating new, positive content surrounding your business name and related keywords. 

While your online reputation strategy will vary depending on your situation, below you can find some examples: 

1. Suppress negative articles ranking well in the search results
2. Improve Yelp star ratings
3. Remove negative Yelp reviews
4. Clean up social media mentions
5. Improve the rankings of branded pages in the search results
6. Improve your Glassdoor rating

4. Suppress Negative Search Results

You’ve identified the negative URLs ranking on the first 1-2 pages for your business name, but how do you get rid of them? One method is to optimize positive content ranking below the negatives, so that it has a better chance of outranking those negative URLs. Take these search results for “pete davidson” for example:

We can see here that there are multiple articles discussing a controversy between Davidson and PETA. The Rolling Stone result is ranking above the more favorable People result, so how do we get those to switch places? 

The first thing we’d recommend is to go in and make updates to the People article. Perhaps it’s a bit outdated at the moment, or there are new accomplishments in Davidson’s career that can be added. We can also update things such as the photos, meta description, and even title if possible. Changes like these send signals to Google that this page is fresh, relevant, and accurate. 

Next, we’d focus on increasing positive engagement to the People URL. There are several ways to increase engagement, which include sharing to social media, creating backlinks from owned assets, and optimizing the page content for Featured Snippets. All of these methods can help increase visibility and organic click through rate (CTR) to the positive URL. Once Google sees more positive engagement is going towards the People URL vs the Rolling Stone URL, it may determine that users value the People URL more, thus pushing it above Rolling Stone.

Apply this strategy to each positive URL that is ranking just below the negative results, and be sure to track your SERP sentiment score and URL ranks to catch any changes. It will not happen overnight, but eventually you should see things start to move around and the positive URLs rise above the negatives. 

5. Create Positive Content

Content creation is another great strategy for suppressing negative search results. However, you shouldn’t limit your content creation strategy to things such as your primary site’s blog posts or press releases. When working with clients to create new content, we look into any unclaimed social and business profiles as well. 

The first profiles we’ll look at are typical professional ones, which include Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and Inc.com. These sites typically rank very well for a business brand search, and provide positive, owned content regarding the business that’s separate from their primary website. 

If social media plays a significant role in the client’s business space, we’ll look into optimizing those profiles as well, including the bios, captions, and keywords. 

If you do want to create new blog content, try looking into posting that content on a microsite instead of your business’ primary website. This is because typically a business’ website already ranks in the top 10 when searching the business’ name, and any additional content on that site may not be pulled out as a separate result by Google. 

Microsites are typically one-page sites that have positive content that can rank independently in your SERP. You’ll want to make sure that any content posted on these microsites (or any 3rd party site) is unique from your existing content. 

For example, if you took a blog post from your primary site and simply reposted it on your microsite, Google would most likely see this as duplicate content and therefore not rank both. This would defeat the purpose of having a microsite. 

Content creation should be considered a long-term strategy if you’re hoping to keep those negative results suppressed. It will also come in handy if any other negative press comes out about your business, as you’ll already have your SERPs filled with fresh, positive content. For more ways to suppress negative content, check out our blog post on How to Remove & Suppress Negative Search Results. 

6. Find Third Party Contribution Opportunities

Another effective way to create positive content is to find third party sites that are completely independent of your business’ website. These can include sites like IdeaMensch, Medium, your LinkedIn blog, and any other niche blogs that are relevant to your business’ field. 

This new, positive content can be just what you need to suppress negative search results. Take Chris Orsaris’ SERPs for example:

Despite the New York Post article being 10 years old, it still ranks in Orsaris’ top 10 results. However, it appears Orsaris created positive content for IdeaMensch, which shot to the top of his SERP and outranked the negative article. 

As always, you’ll want to make sure that all your content on these various third party sites are independent of each other and of the content you post on your business website. Be creative with this strategy; you can write content about the CEO on IdeaMensch, thought leadership content on Medium, and content featuring tips or recent achievements on LinkedIn. Just be sure to remain consistent with posting amongst these sites, whether it’s once a week or once a month, you’ll want to show Google that these sites are frequently updated with valuable information. 

7. Generate More Positive Reviews

Before going out and requesting new reviews for any review site, you’ll want to be sure to thoroughly read each review site’s guidelines. 

For instance, Yelp has very strict guidelines when it comes to review requests, whereas Google is a bit more lax. 

After understanding the guidelines of the review site you’re targeting, the next step is to decide what review request strategy makes the most sense for your business. Below are a few options that our clients use for review sites other than Yelp:

1. Ask in person or over the phone after a positive interaction – “We’d love to hear feedback about your experience today, please take a moment to leave us a review on [review site]”
2. Create a new email campaign with links to your different review sites, or add links to your existing email campaigns
3. Add a QR code that links to a review site on your print media that can be handed to in-person customers or posted on flyers and other promotional materials
4. Share positive customer feedback on social media channels, with a link for other users to leave a review as well
5. If your site uses a chat functionality, request reviews after positive customer experiences

8. Remove Negative Reviews

Similarly to requesting reviews, each site has its own guidelines when it comes to flagging reviews. 

In order to have the best chance at getting a flagged review removed, you’ll want to only flag reviews that actually violate the site’s guidelines. If a review site’s flagging process has the option to leave additional context or messaging, try to point out the specific guideline that the review is violating. 

Here are some of the most popular review sites’ guidelines:

• Yelp 
• Google
• Trustpilot 
• Indeed 
• Glassdoor

Not all review sites send updates about a flagged review, so you’ll want to create a tracking sheet of all flagged reviews and check back in periodically to see which ones have been removed. Sites like Yelp and Trustpilot may also limit review flagging, if a review was already previously flagged or if you’ve flagged too many reviews at a time. 

Avoid appearing spammy to these review sites by sticking to the guidelines, flagging only a few at a time, and avoid spamming a single review with multiple flag requests. 

9. Respond To Negative Reviews

While it’s not always pleasant to respond to negative critique about you or your business, it’s important to always respond to negative reviews when possible. There are of course exceptions to this rule, as there are some negative reviews that are purely insulting, spammy, or make serious accusations that your business may not want to make a public response to. However, for the standard negative reviews, here are a few tips on responding to them:

1. Thank the reviewer for their feedback. Yes, even negative feedback can still be just as important as positive feedback, as it can give you an idea of possible changes or improvements you can make to your business. 
2. Address their complaints directly (when applicable). There’s nothing more frustrating for reviewers than leaving a genuine complaint on a business only to get a robotic, generic response that doesn’t acknowledge the issues. You should specifically mention their concern if possible and make it clear that your business takes any and all complaints seriously. 
3. Share customer care contact info. This can be email, phone, or a link to a contact form on your website. This allows the reviewer to decide if they’d like to follow up on the issue with your team directly, and provides them an avenue to come to a resolution. 

Below is a great example of a well done response to a negative review of Meow Wolf Denver:

Remember, responding to negative reviews is not just for the individual who left the review, but it also shows other users who may be reading the reviews that your business genuinely cares and considers customer/client feedback. By leaving unique responses that acknowledge the reviewer’s concerns with an offer for further contact to resolve the issues, you’re showing how much integrity and care your business has for its customers. 

10. Monitor Your Brand Mentions

There are several tracking tools you can use when it comes to monitoring mentions. A few of our favorites at GFD include Keyhole or SproutSocial for social media, Google Alerts for SERP mentions, and Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner for keyword tracking. 

However, it’s important to note that while these tools are extremely useful, they may not capture everything. 

This is why you should have a team dedicated to manually monitoring mentions as well. They can do this by searching your business name and relevant keywords on various social media sites, comment sections, Google, relevant blogs or forums, and anywhere else you may have a presence. 

Remember that someone may be talking about your business without using your full name or tagging the business directly.

11. Proactively Manage Your Online Reputation

You don’t need to have an active reputation crisis to manage your online reputation. In fact, you’ll be in a much better position to handle a reputation crisis in the future if you already have your day-to-day reputation under control. This includes consistent monitoring of your online review sites, creating fresh content optimized for your target keywords, and tracking your SERP sentiment scores. 

These tracking and monitoring duties should be assigned to specific team members to check in on at least once a month. The easiest way to keep track of things is to create tracking sheets of data such as your month to month SERP sentiment score, social mentions, new content ideas, and review site ratings. 

If you know you have something big coming up (yearly sales, press releases, C-level staff changes, etc), then your team should keep an extra eye on things during that time. Even when announcing something positive about your business, there is always a chance that the extra visibility may motivate any unhappy parties to share negative sentiment online. 

If you know the current state of your reputation, and are actively monitoring for any new mentions or press, then you should have plenty of time to respond to and handle any new negative sentiment that comes your way.

Online Reputation Management Tools

Google Autocomplete API

When a person enters a query into Google’s search box, Google Autocomplete provides predicted phrases to finish that query. Most searchers can only see 4 out of 10 Google Autocomplete results, which does not provide a full picture of the predictions associated with that query.

The Google Autocomplete API online reputation management tool allows users to see all ten results, making it possible to strategize if any negative phrases come up in the predictions associated with your business, such as “scam” or “complaints.”

Complaint Website Search

Complaint websites are as they sound: websites for people to leave negative feedback about businesses. If left unaddressed, seeing these complaints can lead other consumers to avoid your business. Though you can look through the SERPs manually to find these reviews, there may be complaints on the web that aren’t ranking yet but may in the future.

This complaint search tool searches 40+ complaint websites to see if your site appears so you can tackle negative feedback head-on.

Yelp Improvement Calculator

Yelp is one of the top review sites currently on the web. These ratings can significantly contribute to the well-being of your business. Our Yelp improvement calculator lets you evaluate how your ratings play into the overarching average. Use the tool to determine how many five-star reviews you need to bump up your rating. If your goal is five stars, this calculator makes it easy to see how close you are.

Whether you’d like to be proactive about your online reputation, or you’re currently facing a reputation crisis, our Online Reputation Management team is ready to help. Reach out to get started today!

Related Articles

• How to Remove & Suppress Negative Search Results
• How To Repair Your Online Reputation
• How To Calculate Your Online Reputation Score
• How to Increase Your Yelp Rating Using Yelp’s 7 Content Guidelines
• How to Remove Negative News Articles From Google
• Preventative Online Reputation Management

The Ultimate Guide To Online Reputation Management is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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How many consumers turn to online reviews before making a purchasing decision?

Around 98% of consumers answered that they are likely to utilize online reviews while making a purchasing decision. More than half of respondents specified that they are “extremely likely” to use online reviews.

Takeaway #1: Online reviews have become a large factor in helping consumers decide whether or not they are willing to make a purchasing decision. 

Do online reviews have any affect on consumers’ purchasing decisions?

Just over 99% of consumers answered that online reviews are at least “somewhat important” when making a purchasing decision, while 84% of consumers specified that online reviews are “very” or “extremely” important to their overall decision. 

Takeaway #2: When researching a product or service, consumers value the feedback in online reviews, and take that feedback into serious consideration before making their final decision.  

How comfortable do consumers feel about a product or service based on the star rating?

1025 surveyed said they would trust a 4 star product or service. However only 307 said they would trust one with 3-stars. This results in a -70% decrease in trust when moving from 4 stars to 3 stars. This number drops even further to less than 1% with a 1 to 2-star rating.

Takeaway #3: Dropping just one star from a 4 to a 3 star rating on a product or service can drastically affect a consumer’s comfort level when it comes to making a purchasing decision. consumers value customer feedback and begin to question their decision when seeing that the overall sentiment surrounding a product or service is less than a 4 star rating. 

Can age factor into the likelihood of a consumer researching a product or service before making a purchase?

Based on the data from our survey, age does play a role in the decision to research before making a purchase. Consumers 18-40 years old answered that they would research a product or service at any price point before making a purchasing decision. Conversely, over half of consumers 57+ answered they would not research before making a purchasing decision, regardless of price point.

Takeaway #4: Despite some older consumers not taking time to research a product or service online before making a purchase, it’s clear that the majority of consumers still rely on online reviews to help make a decision. For many consumers who took part in our survey, the price point does not matter as much, as they are interested in reading online reviews regardless of how expensive a product or service is. 

How many negative articles would it take to stop a consumer from making a purchase during their research of a product or service?

55% of consumers answered that it would only take 2-3 negative articles in the search results for them to decide against purchasing a particular product or service, while 2.6% said it would only take 1 negative article to stop them. 

Takeaway #5: Reviews are not just in the form of star ratings or Yelp listings. consumers look at the top ranking articles as well when researching a product or service, and seeing multiple negative articles can bring their research to a halt, ultimately deciding to not follow through with their purchase. 

Methodology

We surveyed 1,070 people to ask their opinions on online reviews and how much they influence their purchasing decisions. We analyzed this data to find key consumer insights based on their survey responses as well as key demographic information.  

As this data confirms, online reviews can heavily influence a consumer’s ultimate decision when considering purchasing a product or service. This means that it’s important now more than ever to keep your online review sites well managed and optimized. This includes responding to reviews of all sentiment, understanding each review site’s guidelines, creating a review request strategy, and more. At Go Fish Digital, our Online Reputation Management team is well-versed in online review management. To learn more about our services, contact us today!

3-Star Reviews Result In A -70% Decrease In Trust [Data Study] is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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Know Your Role & Be Very Careful Requesting for Reviews

On Yelp you can create two different accounts, the most common being a personal Yelp user account, which anyone can create. The other account option is creating a business profile, which is exclusive to business owners. If you happen to be a business owner, it can be beneficial to have both a personal and business account. The reason for this is to simply get engaged and familiarize yourself with the platform. 

For the basic Yelp user account, adding as many details as possible will help you to stand out on the platform – I’ll tell you why that’s a good thing later on. Yelp requires a profile photo when you sign up, as well as your location. They also encourage you to add friends, add “things you love”, and other random facts about yourself. Just like any other social media platform, presenting yourself in a transparent way to others on Yelp will result in more friends and more engagements. 

For the Business Yelp account, the most important details to add to the page initially are location (adding your address), hours of operation  (be sure they are correct and match your other listings for every day of the week), and contact information (the correct phone number and email are super helpful to all customers). Once again, it’s important to present your business in the best light, which means including professional photos, not blurry photos taken by guests. Add as many other details as you can to the page. For example, if your business is a restaurant, be sure to add the menu, and highlight your most “popular” dishes. 

Now that you’ve signed up, start navigating the platform, visit other business pages and other user profiles to see how people leave reviews, and how you can engage with others.

Commonly we will have a client come to us asking to help improve their Yelp score on their business page. We of course assist them in all areas regarding Yelp while making sure they understand that Yelp does not support soliciting reviews, as you can read about here: Don’t Ask for Reviews | Support Center | Yelp. We like to help our clients have open conversations with their customers and vendors regarding Yelp. This in turn gets the client thinking about the platform and how they can use it in their personal lives. Adding these people as friends and liking their reviews is great engagement with the platform, which Yelp encourages! If you’re a business owner, showing clients and vendors that you yourself are a Yelp user, as well as giving them knowledge about the platform will get a conversation started, which is absolutely allowed without being pushy or encouraging them to review your page.

Understand Yelp’s Content Guidelines & Reasons a Review Can Be Flagged for Removal

Leaving and receiving reviews is why you’re a part of the platform. You will want to fully understand Yelp’s content guidelines and the reasons a review could be violating those. 

Yelp’s Content Guidelines

• Relevance: Please make sure your contributions are appropriate to the forum. For example, reviews aren’t the place for rants about political ideologies, a business’s employment practices, extraordinary circumstances, or other matters that don’t address the core of the consumer experience.

• Inappropriate content: Colorful language and imagery are fine, but there’s no place for threats, harassment, lewdness, hate speech, or other displays of bigotry.

• Conflicts of interest: Your contributions to Yelp should be unbiased and objective. For example, you shouldn’t write reviews of your own business or employer, your friends or relatives’ business, your peers or competitors in your industry, or businesses in your networking group. Businesses should never ask customers to write reviews.

• Privacy: Don’t publicize people’s private information. For instance, please don’t post close-up photos or videos of other patrons without their permission, and don’t post other people’s full names unless you’re referring to someone who is commonly referred to by their full name.

• Promotional content: Don’t post promotional material unless it’s in connection with a Yelp advertising product and through a Business Account. Let’s keep the site useful for consumers and not overrun with commercial noise from every user.

• Intellectual property: Don’t swipe content from other sites, users, or businesses. You’re a smart cookie, so write your own copy and share your own photos and videos.

• Personal experience: We want to hear about your first hand experience, not what you heard from your partner or co-worker, or what you saw in the news. Tell your own story without resorting to broad generalizations and conclusory allegations.

• Accuracy: Make sure your review is factually correct. Feel free to air your opinions, but don’t exaggerate or misrepresent your experience. We don’t take sides when it comes to factual disputes, so we expect you to stand behind your review.

• Demanding payment: Writing a review should be informative and meant to help the broader Yelp community. You should not threaten to post or offer to remove a negative review as a way to extract payment from a business.

• Review updates: Review updates should reflect a new experience or interaction with the business. Don’t keep posting about the same old story you’ve already told. If you’d like to add new insight to an old experience, you can edit your review within 30 days of posting it.

Reasons a Review Can be Flagged

• It contains false information

• It was posted by someone affiliated with the business

• It was posted by a competitor or ex-employee

• It contains threats, lewdness, or hate speech

• It doesn’t describe a personal consumer experience

• It violates Yelp’s privacy standards

• It contains promotional material

• It’s for the wrong business

• It represents an extraordinary circumstance (e.g. COVID-19, media-fueled)

The big takeaway from the guidelines above is that your profile is personal to you! There is no such thing as a family Yelp profile, as some people might have on Facebook. Leaving reviews on behalf of someone else can get your review removed from the platform or placed into Yelp’s filter, which I will detail below. Another rule to remember is to keep privacy in mind. For example, if you had a bad experience at a law firm, don’t go onto the platform and start listing off your lawyer’s full name and his office ID. Although you can get away with using a person’s full name within your review if they’re in a public-facing role, it’s important to not publicize people’s private information within a review.

Another way to contribute to the platform is by flagging reviews that violate the content guidelines. If someone starts a review by saying “My wife had an experience here the other day.”, this review should be flagged for removal, as that user is violating the guidelines by describing an experience that’s not personal to them. Other reviews that should be flagged include ones that contain threats, lewdness or hate speech. When you flag another user’s review, they do not get a notification that you did so, or that anyone did for that matter. The only time they would receive a notification is if the review was indeed removed from the platform. You can also report a user’s profile if you see that they’re violating Yelp’s content guidelines multiple times or something else that you believe doesn’t align with the guidelines. You simply click into that review’s profile page and scroll down under their profile picture where it says “Report this profile”. Click on that link and it will bring you to a page that will ask you the following: Please identify what’s inappropriate about this user profile: (e.g. profile photo, headline, spammer, etc.). You can also block a user if they’re making you feel uncomfortable in any way on the platform. Clicking “Block [user]” on their profile page will restrict the user from engaging with you and your reviews in any way.

Here are the simple steps to flagging a review:

1. Be sure the review actually violates one or more of Yelp’s content guidelines
2. Access the flag icon in the bottom right corner below the review, and click on it
3. Once the Pop-Up appears, “Why do you want to report this review?” then select one of the options
4. Next, type out your reasoning under, “Please provide specific details below:” and then click “Report”
5. You will receive an email with a review report ID number for your records
6. Then, over a period of time, which could be 1 day or 3 months down the road, Yelp will send a follow-up email telling you the status of the review and if they’ve decided to remove it or leave it live on the page

Engage with the Platform & Stay out of Yelp’s Filter

Engaging with the platform is very important if you want to see your reviews stay on the page for any business you left a review for. Many users and businesses don’t realize that Yelp has a filter where many reviews go when Yelp deems them as not fit to be on the page, and to contribute to the overall star rating for a business. Yelp has rebranded, and added a section that gives users details about their Automated Recommendation Software – also known as their filter. Every business page has one. On their support page, Yelp answers questions regarding the filter. These filtered reviews are placed at the bottom of the first page of reviews in small font titled “(number) other reviews that are not currently recommended”.  These are two blog posts written back in 2009 and 2010, which is an interesting comparison to the information we have access to now. 

Outdated Information about Yelp’s Filter:

• Why Yelp Has A Review Filter | Yelp – Official Blog
• Yelp’s recommendation software explained | Yelp – Official Blog 

Current Information about Yelp’s Automated Recommendation Software:

• What is Yelp’s recommendation software? | Support Center 
• Automated Recommendation Software | Yelp Trust 
• Yelp Updates Recommendation Software to Better Target and Mitigate Content from Online Review Exchange Groups 

 What we have gathered as reasoning for this is that Yelp prefers to highlight the most credible reviewers and reviews, using many factors included in the links above. They do state “the software also looks for things like unfairly biased reviews — such as reviews people may write about their competitors or businesses they’re affiliated with — which other local search platforms may fail to catch. We work hard to protect the integrity of the content on Yelp so consumers get authentic information and businesses are protected from those that might try to “game the system.” This gives us a little more of an idea about the criteria that go into the decision made.

After gathering the information above, we cannot forget about the many unique cases we have run into while working with our clients. We have seen many cases where Yelp places a review into a filter, despite having all of the details listed below. In other cases, we have seen reviews that have only one or two of the details listed, yet Yelp does not put them in the filter. Yelp seems to be transparent about its automated software, however, seeing examples like these firsthand would lead me to believe that this software still remains a mystery to not only users but also Yelp reps who can’t seem to answer questions about it. Although some of these factors remain a secret we believe that some of them include the following: 

1. Profile pictures on your account
2. More than 10 total reviews
3. Yelp Elite member badge
4. Quality & Quantity of the review content 
5. A high number of friends
6. Engagement with other reviews and profile pages (likes, comments, useful, cool, & funny buttons)
   

Become a Yelp Elite Member & Attend Events

A great way to keep your reviews out of the filter and take advantage of all Yelp has to offer is by becoming a member of Yelp’s Elite squad. This is a private club that not anyone can join, you must qualify! The perks of becoming a member of your community’s squad are that you get to attend Yelp Elite Events with local participating businesses that host them. It’s a way of being able to engage with different businesses in the community, meet new people, and also receive a badge on your profile that shows other members your credibility on the platform. In order to join, you must nominate yourself or be nominated by someone else on the platform. Yelp states the following: “What makes a great Yelp Elite Squad member? Thoughtful reviews, Awesome photos, Sending compliments, Up-voting reviews.” On the elite squad page you will find out who your local community manager is, which is the leader you can email if you have any additional questions regarding your status, and any other questions surrounding elite or community events. 

Attending Yelp events or hosting them as a business can really help your business page’s engagement. It brings awareness to your business from attending members sharing and posting about the event. You may think this would bring new positive reviews to your business listing page but be aware that Yelp frowns upon that, which is why they create a unique business event page for attending guests to leave their reviews on. We have seen businesses in the past work with Yelp to create an amazing event to gather new reviews for their business page, and then have Yelp in turn reach out to those reviewers asking them to delete their review and only add it to the event page. 

From Yelp: 

​​Official Yelp Events have a separate business listing on Yelp where guests can review and post photos of the event. We welcome honest feedback about our events, but it’s never mandatory to write a review of an event. Because Official Yelp Events do not represent a typical consumer experience, if you do choose to post reviews or photos of an Official Yelp Event, be sure to post them on the event’s business listing, and not the business listing of the businesses that hosted or participated in the event. 

It’s a really wonderful opportunity to become an elite member and attend the Yelp elite events that are offered in your community. However, you don’t have to be an elite member to attend events that are offered to the community, attending in general is a great way to show why you should be nominated to become an elite member of the community. You can find which events are happening in your area here: Events

Check-In Everywhere!

Businesses can work with their Yelp representative to host Check-In offers. This will help to generate more reviews that will stay out of the filter because showing Yelp that these patrons actually checked in will give Yelp a signal to leave the review live on the page. Businesses can create and post a Check-In Offer as a way for customers to receive rewards for their loyalty to the business. When customers check-in at a business that is offering these, they will receive an offer on their phone that they can redeem on that visit, or save for another time. For example, this could include a free dessert with any meal if you’re a restaurant owner or a discounted foot massage for a spa owner. 

Using Yelp’s app on your phone users can simply pull up their profile and click “check-in”, if the business is offering anything, it will pop right up on your screen. Even if the business isn’t participating in offers, it’s still a great way to keep track of where you went, and when, and reminds you to leave your corresponding review when you have time later on. It also shows Yelp that you were actually there as “proof” by leaving a little “check-in” note next to your review on that business page. Not to mention, this is another great signal to show Yelp to keep your review out of the filter on that page. 

There are many details that can be leveraged on Yelp that most people don’t realize, which is why it’s important to get familiar with the platform by reading up on every section of the support page. Yelp is always updating its algorithm and platform, so it’s crucial to stay involved whether you’re a business owner or not. If you have additional questions regarding Yelp or are just looking to see how many reviews you might need to improve your Yelp score, feel free to reach out to our reputation management team here at Go Fish, as well as access the GFD Yelp Improvement Calculator.

How To Use Yelp For Your Business is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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In recent years, we’ve seen that review bombing has no limits. From media like Marvel’s Eternals to local restaurants, it seems nothing is safe from review bombing. 

What Is Review Bombing?

A review bomb is an internet phenomenon where a large group of individuals, sometimes referred to as trolls, purposefully leave negative reviews on rating sites with the intent of tanking ratings of businesses, media, or individuals. These negative reviews often contain false information or misinformation, and come from users who have not had a personal experience with the entity they are reviewing.

Does Review Bombing Actually Hurt Businesses?

To some, a few fake or exaggerated negative reviews may not sound like a big deal. However, online reviews can make or break a business, and can be a deciding factor in whether or not a consumer wants to engage with that business. In a standard review bombing, especially when amplified by social media, there can be hundreds if not thousands of negative reviews pouring in at once. This can easily tank a business’s online ratings, even if the reviews are false, and negatively affect its online reputation as a whole.

How Can Social Media Apps Like TikTok Amplify Review Bombing?

It seems that there is a new viral video or post on social media almost every day. Sometimes this virality is due to the creator already having a large following, but other times a video can be so enraging, polarizing, or downright unbelievable that viewers share it like a wildfire. With mass amounts of views comes mass amounts of comments, allowing both information and misinformation to be shared very quickly. It only takes one comment to drop a store location, an employee’s full name, or a phone number to create a snowball effect that can lead to a review bombing. 

One of our ORM clients experienced this firsthand last year. A TikTok creator posted a video of a rogue customer at their place of work, and the video quickly went viral. Within the comments, someone incorrectly stated that the individual worked for our client, hinting that other users should leave our client poor reviews. As is typical across the comment sections of most social media platforms, TikTok isn’t known as an online environment where fact-checking commonly occurs. 

Once other users saw the name of our client, they rushed to Google, Yelp, and other review sites to leave negative ratings. Luckily, our client brought this to our attention before the review bombing got out of hand, and we were able to take action on the spot to put a halt to the attack, as well as publicly correct the misinformation. It also helped that the individual in the video did not in fact work for our client’s company as of present day, so the false reviews were even easier to remove.

Do Review Sites Allow Review Bombing?

Review bombing typically violates most popular review sites’ guidelines, as the reviews are false, hateful, or otherwise ingenuine in nature. Let’s see what policies are in place at the most popular review sites to combat review bombing attacks.

Google

According to Google, review policies were updated to better protect businesses after the company saw an increase in reviews criticizing businesses’ COVID-19 protocols. Google stated that once a new policy is implemented, “it’s turned into training material — both for our operators and machine learning algorithms.” Even with training, the algorithms cannot always flag every single review from a review bomb attack, so it’s important to learn how to manage and report Google reviews as well.

Yelp

Yelp followed in Google’s footsteps by updating their own review policies. Yelp stated that their moderators have a system in place to notify when mass amounts of reviews are hitting a business’s page in a short period of time. “If warranted, our team of moderators will investigate and may temporarily disable the ability to post as we place an alert over the business’s reviews.” Yelp will also make an effort to “clean up” the review page once incoming reviews have returned to their normal rate, aiming to preserve only the accurate and truthful customer experiences on the page. 

Facebook

Facebook does not appear to have a specific policy in place to prevent review bombing, but they do offer the option to disable reviews and recommendations. You can also gather all the reviews from the review bombing attack and report them for violating Facebook’s guidelines. 

Help! My Business Is Getting Review Bombed—What Can I Do?

While it may feel like everything is on fire, it’s important to take a moment to calm down and analyze the situation. First, try to identify the following: 

• Which sites are the negative reviews coming through? 
• Is there a specific location or individual who is being targeted within the reviews? 
• Which employees or managers have the login info for the targeted review sites? 

After gathering this info, follow these five tips to save your online reputation:

1. Prevent new reviews from coming in. Some review sites, like Facebook, have an option to temporarily disable reviews. If you have other social media accounts, you may also want to disable comments and direct messages to prevent those pages from being bombarded as well. In extreme cases, you may find it necessary to temporarily private your social profiles all together. 
2. Verify that the review bomb is actually meant for your business. Like the case with our ORM client, users incorrectly stated that the individual they were targeting worked for our client, and so our client was wrongfully attacked. Misinformation can spread quickly online, so it’s important for you to figure out the reasoning behind the review bomb and if it’s even meant for you or your business. You can usually figure out what the issue is based off of the reviews themselves, as users will often name a specific employee, location, or describe an incident they saw take place in the video or post.
3. Make a public statement addressing the issue (if appropriate). Whether or not to make a public statement should be decided on a case by case basis, as it is not always appropriate or necessary for every review bombing. If you decide it is right for your business to make a public statement, be sure to take the time to create a well-thought out and intentionally worded statement. Be aware that there is always a risk the statement can be used against you. In the case of our ORM client, it made sense to make a public statement saying that the individual in the TikTok does not currently work for the company. Our client also felt it necessary to publicly denounce the behavior of the individual in the video as well.
4. Make note of how reviewers are writing about the individual or incident that took place. TikTok and other social media apps tend to have a younger audience, so it can be easy to identify which reviews were part of the review bombing and which reviews are genuine. Some of the reviews from our client’s review bombing incident even stated that they “came here from the TikTok video.” Statements like this will be very useful when it comes to attempting to remove negatives, so keep an eye out for them.
5. Gather a team to begin identifying and flagging reviews that came from the review bombing. This team can be composed of trusted employees, friends, or family members with an account on the targeted review site. You’ll want to specify the date and time that the review bombing started to help narrow down the list of negatives your team will need to flag. You’ll still need to follow appropriate guidelines when it comes to requesting employees to take on this task (i.e. employees should not feel forced or in fear for their job security if they choose not to participate in flagging). Likewise, don’t offer incentives to friends or family for flagging a review, as this could negatively affect your reputation as well.

Under an active review bomb attack, making the wrong move can reflect poorly on your online reputation, so you’ll want to carefully evaluate each suggestion to decide what will be best for your business as a whole. 

Need Help With Your Online Reputation?

Our online reputation management team can help to optimize your review sites, gather new reviews, and give you the tools to fight future review bomb attacks. To learn more about what online reputation management can do for your business, contact Go Fish Digital to get started today!

Review Bombing: 5 Tips to Save Your Online Reputation is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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1. Identify The Source Of Your Negative Reputation

The first step you should take in repairing your online reputation is to understand the source of what’s driving the negative sentiment. With so many different platforms and websites, you’ll need to narrow in on exactly where negative mentions of your brand or name are living. For instance, you might need to repair your reputation on an online review site or within the search results of a popular platform.

Here are the most popular sources you’ll want to review to understand where the negative sentiment is coming from:

1. Google search results
2. Yelp
3. Twitter
4. Glassdoor
5. Facebook
6. LinkedIn
7. BBB
8. Google reviews

If you’re not sure where to begin, go through each of the above platforms and start to look for information about your brand. Note the types of results you start to see and whether they have positive or negative sentiments. For any platforms where you witness a noticeable negative sentiment about your company, you’ll want to focus on repairing your reputation on that specific channel.

2. Remove Negative Results From Google

By far, the most common place we see that clients need online reputation repair is within the Google search results. This is because Google is the most popular information engine that exists. Google processes more than 8.5 billion searches per day. This means that it’s extremely common for users to perform research around brands they’re looking to use, people they’re considering hiring, what’s going on in the news and much more. Because of these factors, you need to be aware of what your brand’s presence is in the Google search results.

When searching for your brand, you’ll want to gain and understanding of your online reputation score. This is calculated by defining a sentiment for all the results in the first page and subtracting points for any negative articles that are appearing.

If you find that your online reputation score isn’t stellar, you might want to consider trying to remove negative results from Google.

While removing results is pretty difficult, there are steps you can take to achieve this. If you own the negative content, you could remove it from the search engines yourself. If the negative content has been written by journalists or other third parties, you could reach out to them and request that they take it down or use Google’s DMCA form to request removal. For a deeper look at how to do this, you can read our guide on how to remove negative search results.

3. Suppress Negative Search Results

Unfortunately, removing negative search results is exceptionally hard to do. Oftentimes journalists will refuse to remove their articles outright.

It’s equally as tough to get Google to completely remove content by using their DMCA requests. This can often be an extremely frustrating experience as there doesn’t appear to be any recourse to deal with the negative articles and repair your online reputation.

Suppressing the negative searches instead of outright removing them is most often the best approach. Suppressing negative search results occurs when steps are taken to improve the visibility of positive/neutral content ranking below the negative content. Over time, this pushes the negative content down the search results. Eventually the goal is to move the negative results completely off of the first page. While this takes more time and effort, this is often the most realistic solution.

For instance, here’s a screenshot of a client’s first page of Google when they first started working with us. The results are colored by sentiment (green:positive, blue:neutral, red:negative). At the time you can see that there were quite a few negative results.

However, over time we were able to suppress the negative results off of the first page of Google. The result was a much improved online reputation as users could only see positive URLs on the first page of Google.

Suppressing negative search results is completely possible but does require a good amount of effort. Some of the most common strategies that we use to suppress negative articles include:

1. Optimizing existing owned positive/neutral content
2. Creating new social profiles
3. Creating new pages or websites about the target topic
4. Creating backlinks to positive/neutral articles

By utilizing this process, we’ve been able to help many clients significantly reduce or completely eliminate negative content that appears on the first page. For more information, you can read out guide on how we suppress negative search results.

4. Remove Negative Reviews

Oftentimes, you’ll find that the Google search results are not the source of the issues. Instead, what we often see is that online reputation repair needs to be performed on individual review platforms. While this can certainly vary on a case by case basis, common platforms that cause reputation issues are Yelp, Glassdoor, TripAdvisor and Google Business reviews. These negative reviews can lead to poor overall scores on these review platforms.

As well, if users dive deeper, reading the individual reviews that users leave could further damage their online reputation.

These negative reviews can lead to users steering away from using the company and negative imprints of the brand’s reputation. In cases where your brand has accumulated negative reviews on platforms such as Yelp, you should consider steps to improve these in order to repair your online reputation.

If you’re seeing these types of reviews, the first step you can take is to report and flag any negative ones that violate the platform’s guidelines. Most platforms will have a set of guidelines that reviews will need to follow. If the negative review doesn’t follow these guidelines, you can flag it for removal. While these guidelines are unique to the individual platform, some common ways that reviews can go against guidelines include:

1. Swearing
2. Threats
3. Conflicts of interest
4. Reviews not related to the business
5. Mentioning employees by name

For the platform where you’re having reputation issues, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with their review and content guidelines. From there, you can start requesting that any negative reviews be taken down. Over time, this should improve your review score while removing negative content from the platform.

To get a better idea on how this process works, we’ve created a video on how to flag reviews on the Yelp platform.

5. Encourage Positive Reviews

If you’ve identified reviews as the source of your online reputation issues, another step you can take is to proactively improve the number of positive reviews that you have from a given platform. This can help combat negative issues that already exist and cannot be removed by the review platform.

Below are some of the steps you can take to generate positive reviews:

1. Encourage customers to leave positive reviews
2. If the platform is filtering out positive reviews, take steps to remove the filter
3. Request vendors leave positive reviews
4. Utilize your CRM to request positive reviews from customers
5. Identify common themes of negative reviews and address those internally

Before encouraging positive reviews, you’ll definitely want to familiarize yourself with each platform’s guidelines. However, even if the platform discourages the practice of encouraging reviews, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it. Your online reputation and brand sentiment are extremely important factors of your business’s customer experience and you should be taking steps to improve that where you can.

Taking these steps can help your brand turn the reviews of that platform around and improve your online reputation when users come across that page. For additional information, you can read our article on how to improve reviews for a multi-location business.

6. Monitor Your Brand Name

Another great step that you can take to repair your online reputation is being extremely proactive about monitoring mentions of your brand. If you’re a large company, chances are that there are continually new mentions of your brand getting posted online. Depending on the size of your brand, new mentions could be happening daily. Unfortunately, manually keeping tabs on all of the channels where your brand could be mentioned is near impossible.

Fortunately, there are quite a few tools that allow you to automate this process and notify you whenever your brand is mentioned across the Web. For instance, you can use tools like Google Alerts to send you an email any time a new article with your brand’s name is posted:

This can help you proactively monitor what’s being said about your company. This can be extremely powerful as it allows you to be more informed and can help you respond to any negative articles much faster.

Google Alerts will primarily track mentions of your name on other websites, but won’t monitor other platforms such as social media. If you want a better pulse on what’s being said about your company on platforms such as Facebook & Twitter than you can utilize social listening tools such as HootSuite to set up monitors for your brand name.

Overall, monitoring your company’s mentions has many other benefits than just awareness of your online reputation. Paying attention to this can give you better insights into what circles of the Internet your customers are spending time, their feedback on your service and products and potential link opportunities for your site.

Conclusion

While the task of repairing your online reputation can seem extremely daunting at first, hopefully this guide makes the process much more manageable. The primary things to keep in mind are to properly identify the sources of any negative brand sentiment and then take actions by removing or suppressing any negative content. As well, proactively creating new positive content such as new pages for the search engines to index or additional positive reviews can go a long way towards improving your brand’s reputation.

Tools & Companies To Help You Repair Your Online Reputation

If you’re looking to take steps to actively repair your online reputation, these are the tools and services that we recommend checking out.

1. Go Fish Digital: We offer a variety of online reputation repair services including search suppression & review management.
2. Ahrefs: Can monitor keyword rankings of your brand keywords
3. Yelp Improvement Calculator: A tool to show you how many reviews you need to achieve a certain star rating on Yelp
4. Google Alerts: Monitors mentions of your brand name across the Web
5. HootSuite: Monitors mentions of your brand on social media
6. Google DMCA Form: Can be used to request removal of content from Google

How To Repair Your Online Reputation is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

For this reason, over the years we have developed our own internal online reputation score. This has helped both us and client better quantify how their reputation is trending. We now use this online reputation score as part of our internal ORM tracking tool and regular reporting. This metric has proved to be invaluable and we wanted to share our process for how you can calculate your own. 

Related Content:

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Reviews Management
• Search Suppression Services
• Yelp Review Management

1. Start With A 100 Point Scale

To start calculating the score, we look at the first page of the search results as having a 100 point scale. All of the results for a given search are assigned a particular score. When summing the total of all results in the search result, you should end up with a value of 100. Of course, the biggest challenge here is to try to utilize some type of weight to each result. The #2 result should surely carry a higher score than the #8 result.

To solve for this, we weight a search result with 10 pages using this scale:

• Position 1: 35
• Postion 2: 18
• Postion 3: 12
• Position 4: 8
• Position 5: 7
• Position 6: 6
• Position 7: 5
• Position: 8: 4
• Position: 9: 3
• Position: 10: 2

To more easily visualize what this looks like, you can see the position and score in the following search result for “roto rooter plumbing”:

By establishing the 100 point scale, that now allows us to subtract points based on the sentiment of each result.

2. Label The Sentiment Of Each Result

Next, you’ll want to go down the entire first page of the search results and label the sentiment of each result. The sentiment label should fall into one of the following three categories:

1. Positive
2. Neutral
3. Negative

Positive articles should be pretty obvious as to any page that you would want a potential customer to see. Negative articles should be fairly obvious as well. Neutral pages would be any content that doesn’t actively hurt your brand but doesn’t do a lot to help it either. For instance, a 3 star Yelp review would be a good example of a neutral article.

After you’ve labeled each result by sentiment, you’ll then be able to utilize our equation to determine the overall online reputation score for a given search result.

3. Subtract Points For Each Negative Or Neutral Article

So now that we know each positions weighted score and the sentiment of each article in the search results, it’s time to apply some basic math to help determine our online reputation score. To do this, you’ll review each result and perform the following subtractions:

1. Subtract the full score of all negative articles
2. Subtract half of the score of all neutral articles
3. 100 – [Total Subtracted Points] = Online Reputation Score

Example: How To Calculate Online Reputation Score

Let’s go back to our “roto rooter plumbing” query to give you a more concrete example. We start at 100 points for any given search. Looking towards the bottom of the search results, there appears to be some Yelp reviews that do not have positive sentiments. The 2 star review would be labeled as “Negative” and the 3 star review would be labeled as “Neutral”.

Assuming the local results and People Also Ask results are positive, that leaves us with 1 neutral and 1 negative article. The negative article is at position 7 so we would subtract the full value of those points (-5). The neutral article is at position 8 so we would subtract half the point value (-2).

For this given search result, we would give a final online reputation score of 93. While there are a couple of non-ideal articles on this result, they are further down the search results page and are likely doing less damage for Roto Rooter. However, if the negative Yelp review moves up in the rankings, this could lead to a dramatic decline in sentiment score. It could still be in Roto Rooter’s best interest to take actions to suppress the negative search result.

How We Use Online Reputation Scores

The concept of online reputation scores has been so critical for us and our clients, that we have actually built this functionality into our own internal tracking. For a given search, our tool labels the sentiment of each result and then automatically calculates the online reputation score. This allows us to track the online reputation score over time. What we’re hoping to see is that the online reputation score improves as we’re able to reduce the amount of negative content on the first page of Google.

For instance, here’s a benchmark online reputation score at the start of one campaign.

Online Reputation Score: 60

After we were able to suppress negative results, we can see an updated online reputation score:

Online Reputation Score: 100

Of course, even we couldn’t get the score to a perfect 100, this metric still allows us to track improvements over time. If we saw that we were able to improve the online reputation score to 70 after 4 months and then 80 after 6 months, that shows us that the campaign is headed in the right direction.

Conclusion

While “reputation” can be a nebulous term hopefully this calculation gives you a better understanding of how to make the concept measurable for your business. Online reputation scores can help give you a better idea of your benchmarks for online reputation. As well, you can measure the score over time to see if it’s improving. This can help you get a much stronger gauge on any online reputation management initiatives you might be performing.

How To Calculate Your Online Reputation Score is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Related Content:

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Reviews Management
• Search Suppression Services
• Yelp Review Management

Maybe you’re looking for a new doctor or specialist, or maybe you already have a doctor you like. Regardless, the healthcare industry affects everyone in their life at some point. This is exactly why doing your own research and sharing your experience for others to see can be extremely helpful and informative. It’s also super important for businesses and medical professionals to stay on top of their online reputation by monitoring reviews.

Doing all this research can sound like a daunting task at first, but we’ve included some information on the top healthcare review sites below to make it easier. These answers are to help potential or past patients navigate review sites. Additionally, if you’re a medical professional, this may just give you some extra information to assist you while navigating these sites. Online reviews matter, as they help businesses provide better experiences for customers while gaining an edge on the competition. Here are the answers to some of the common questions regarding HealthGrades, RateMDs, and Vitals.

HealthGrades

Who can leave a review here? 

This review site is for customers to leave reviews for doctors and dentists. 

What is useful to me on this page? 

HealthGrades has many useful tools, including a location-based search bar, so that you can simply add the location you’re searching and it will show you professionals in only that area. You can also search for doctors, conditions, or procedures. They additionally offer appointment guides based on condition. 

Some other details this platform highlights are professional certifications, degrees and licenses, hospital relationships, how many other offices they have, insurance providers they work with, personal details, and their schedule. Of course, the main benefit of using HealthGrades is reading up on the reviews of a potential doctor, if you’re considering surgery, for example. Knowing what past customers have experienced with these professionals should hold great weight when determining who will fit your needs best.

How does the rating system work? 

HealthGrades offers a one-to-five rating system. After you’ve created your personal profile, you are able to leave a review. After you submit a review, you will then receive an automated email or text message from the platform. You then must follow the instructions within the email or text to confirm your review before it will be processed. After confirming your submission, the average star rating you left for the professional is immediately posted to their profile. Note that if you left comments within your review, it may take a little longer to show up on the profile page. 

Once your review is posted, you are not able to go back in and edit it. You may only delete it and then start the process over once again. It is also very easy to flag any review for removal for any reason. The site’s flagging options include “Inappropriate content,” “Privacy concerns,” and “Other,” which leaves it open for all reviewers to give their reasoning on why a review should be taken down. All other content guidelines and details are written on this page.

Should I manage my profile if I’m a doctor or dentist? 

Yes! You can claim your free profile by visiting this page. Not only is this profile great for expanding your personal reputation online, but you will also be able to engage with past customers and gain helpful feedback to improve your practices. The profile also allows you to add a headshot, awards, and certifications, as well as even create other profiles for colleagues in your practice.

RateMDs

Who can leave a review here? 

This reviews site is for customers to rate doctors.

What is useful to me on this page? 

This page offers many useful details about doctors, including location-based search, the gender of which you prefer, doctors that are accepting new patients, as well as other educational details. You can also access the hospital affiliations. Reading other patient reviews can help to make future decisions when choosing a professional to help you. This platform additionally offers the option to leave reviews for a doctor’s office staff and wait time. The detailed FAQ page can answer other questions you may have.

How does the rating system work?

The scoring system is from one to five stars. The Overall Quality rating is the average of the category ratings. To rate a doctor or a facility, you can search by name, city, or country with the “Find a Doctor” or “Find a Facility” search feature. If your doctor is not listed, you can add a doctor and rate them. If your doctor is already listed, just click their name to see their ratings and rate them (look for the “Rate This Doctor” button).

There are no real content guidelines on this platform. They state to only rate doctors for whom you have first-hand knowledge, and you can only review your doctor once. Rating them more than once may result in all your ratings being removed. All reviews are posted immediately; however, sometimes the web pages are cached for a couple of minutes, so you may need to wait a minute or two to see your rating show up. Also, the site’s automated spam filters will sometimes hide your comments until a human reviewer checks them, but the numerical ratings are still displayed immediately. 

You can also flag reviews by clicking the “Flag” icon next to any review. The reasons you can flag a review include but are not limited to, profanity, private information, spam, wrong provider, and other. You can also add any additional information, which gives you space to explain why you want a review removed. The flagged reviews are reviewed by staff at the platform.

Should I manage my profile if I’m a doctor? 

Yes, managing your profile is important. By claiming your profile here, you open the opportunity to improve your online presence, as well as gain valuable feedback from past patients. RateMD also takes paid advertisements from doctors, which can gain you more exposure.

Vitals

Who can leave a review here? 

This reviews site is for customers to leave reviews for doctors and dentists. 

What is useful to me on this page?

Finding a doctor or dentist by specialty, name, or condition is how you can search on this platform. This site also places a highlight on a doctor who consistently gets higher rankings with a badging system, which includes people’s choice and top 10 doctors. 

How does the rating system work?

The rating system here is a one-to-four star rating system. The reviewers here can include details like bedside manner, accurate diagnosis, and wait time. Some of these details differ from the other two platforms. The platform doesn’t edit any of the comments or rating selections of doctors or practices, but they do reserve the right to remove public postings and any comments which may be deemed offensive, malicious, inappropriate, sexually explicit in nature, or not made in good faith. In order to improve the patient experience, the platform now only displays moderated patient reviews that are submitted.

Should I manage my profile if I’m a doctor or dentist? 

Yes, you can claim your free profile through the steps on this page. There is a detail on this profile that will show whether or not a doctor is active, meaning the professional is actively licensed or not. Sometimes this can mean that the professional just simply isn’t verified with the practice they operate. This is just another reason that doctors should stay on top of their listings online, to be sure that all information is accurate and properly represented.

Final Thoughts

Doing the proper research for whatever your healthcare circumstance may be will be much easier knowing where to go and how to start your research first. Comparing the information you find from review site to review site should also give you more confidence about a professional and help you to make the best decision when it comes to your health.

For medical professionals looking to improve their online presence, check out our Online Reputation Management services at Go Fish Digital and explore our blog for more resources, such as When to Respond to Online Reviews (And How).

How to Navigate Healthcare Review Sites is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Related Content:

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Reviews Management
• Search Suppression Services
• Yelp Review Management

This means that even one negative news article can be damaging to both your reputation and your business. To make matters worse, the negative coverage can stick around on the first page of Google for a while, even long after the event has passed.

However, there are steps you can take to remove the article or reduce the damage it does to your reputation. This guide illustrates how we help our clients remove negative news articles from search engines.

Why Do News Articles Rank So Well?

So when looking at search results tied to your online reputation, why do news articles tend to rank so well? News articles can rank very easily after their date of publication and stick around in the top results for longer periods of time.

The main reason news articles rank well is because of the websites these articles are on. One of the most prominent Google ranking factors is the amount of links that a particular website has. Simply put, the more links a website has, the better the pages on that site will rank in the search engines.

News sites are some of the most powerful sites on the web due to the amount of links they attract. Since news stories are highly shareable content by their nature, they tend to generate a lot of coverage (and thus links) from other places on the web. When a news story goes live, that story can be shared in many places, such as personal blogs, other news sites, syndicated articles, and many other places.

We can use a site’s “Domain Authority” as an estimate of how powerful a particular site is on the web. While not officially used by Google, this can provide a rough estimate of how strong a site is based on its total number of links. Domain Authority is assessed in a score from 0 to 100. Sites above an 80+ Domain Authority are generally considered to be among the most powerful sites on the web.

When looking at national publications, we can see that almost all of the top sites have 90+ Domain Authority scores:

• USA Today: 94 DA
• The Wall Street Journal: 94 DA
• The New York Times: 95 DA
• The New York Post: 93 DA
• Los Angeles Times: 93 DA

Even when drilling down to local media outlets, we can still see very strong Domain Authority scores. Since we’re located in Raleigh, NC, we pulled some examples of the Domain Authorities from larger local outlets:

• The News & Observer: 81 DA
• WRAL: 82 DA
• CBS 17: 77 DA
• ABC 11: 81 DA

With this data, it’s easy to see why news articles rank so well. In general, publisher sites have some of the strongest sites in the entire web. This means that articles posted on these sites can easily rank for less competitive keywords with little effort. While this is great for these sites, it can be less than ideal when a negative piece of coverage is written that ranks for keywords pertaining to your online reputation.

How Do You Remove Negative News Articles From Google Search?

You can try to remove negative news articles from Google search by requesting the journalist take down the article. Other methods of removing negative articles include using Google’s DMCA form, giving the article time to fall off of the first page or suppressing the article. Below you can find more information on each of these methods and how you can use them to improve your online reputation.

1. Request the Journalist Remove the Article

The first step to take is to try to reach out to the journalist that wrote the article and request removal. This is the ideal action, since deletion of the article will result in the removal of the page from the search engines, as they should encounter 404 pages over time. As well, removing the article on the publication’s site will ensure that users aren’t able to find it there either.

To start this step, you’ll want to first find the journalist’s contact information. While this can be difficult to do, there are some ways to accomplish this:

1. Review their journalist author page to see if they list an email address.
2. Find their Twitter profile and run it through AllMyTweets to see if they list it there.
3. Look for a “Contact” page on the publication’s website.
4. Use a large media database. We’re big fans of Cision.
5. Use tools such as Hunter.io to use the journalist’s name and website.
6. Extrapolate based on other publicly available emails. For instance, if you see that the people on the website have an email format using firstname.lastname@domain.com, try using that same pattern.

If you get in contact with a journalist, always be respectful with your request. Upsetting them will likely just exacerbate the situation and make it even less likely they’ll remove the article.

If you’re not able to find contact information for the exact journalist, try reaching out to their managing editor instead. They may be more likely to respond to inquiries about previously published articles.

2. Request an Update to the Article

Unfortunately, most times we’ve found that journalists and publications are unwilling to outright remove articles from their websites. However, with clients in the past, we’ve had some success getting journalists to provide updates to articles.

For example, here you can see how The Huffington Post provided an update at the top of this negative news story.

While this doesn’t completely remove the article from the publication or search engines, it can help mitigate the reputational damage that’s done. These updates can help inform users of the recent events of a negative news article, and they then know that the claims and allegations have been ruled as false.

Generally, to get journalists to update articles, you’ll need to provide some type of proof. For our clients, we’ve been able to get journalists to publish these updates after providing court documentation and stories on other news outlets that show that particular lawsuits were dropped or proven to be without merit.

3. Fill Out Google’s DMCA Form

When looking for options to remove negative news articles from Google, you can also try completing Google’s DMCA Form. This is a form that Google offers where you can request that content be removed from the search engine for a variety of reasons.

Using this form, you can cite one of the reasons you think the negative news article violates and request that Google remove the content. If successful, this would prevent the negative article from appearing from Google’s search results. However, the article would remain present on the source publication.

For the EU, another interesting aspect of Google’s legal documentation around this topic is the “Right to Be Forgotten” which states:

“The “right to be forgotten” is a common name for a right that was first established in May 2014 in the European Union as the result of a ruling by the European Court of Justice. The Court found that European data protection law gives individuals the right to ask search engines like Google to delist certain results for queries related to a person’s name. In deciding what to delist, search engines must consider if the information in question is “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive,” and whether there is a public interest in the information remaining available in search results.”

If you feel that the result is “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive” you can fill out this form to request that Google removes the content. Google will then evaluate your request based on a number of factors such as your notoriety to the public, how old the content is, how truthful the content is, among other factors.

4. Give the Article Time to Fall off of the First Page

Depending on how recent the negative news article is, simply waiting for the content to fall off the first page of Google could be an acceptable solution. When determining it’s rankings Google uses freshness as one of its ranking signals. This means that news articles that have been more recently published will oftentimes temporarily rank on the first page due to their recency. It’s almost as if Google is a newspaper that shows the most popular headlines around a topic for a short period of time.

For example, after a recent playoff loss, Dak Prescott made some comments in his post game press conference that ended up getting a negative news article written. Immediately following the game, the page was ranking in the first page of Google.

However, weeks after the loss we can see that the article has fallen off the first page of the Google search results.

Since the article became outdated and no longer as relevant to searchers over time, we can see that Google has completely removed it. In a sense, the article has “expired” off of the first page.

In general, the more public notoriety your name or company has, the more likely it is that negative news articles will expire off the first page in time. However, this might not work for less notable figures where a negative news article is one of the few articles online about them.

5. Create Positive News Stories

Another great strategy to help suppress negative news articles is to quickly get back in the news cycle, except in a positive way. This can help push any negative news articles off  of the first page of Google and associate searches for a name or company with more positive content.

As we just discussed, Google takes “freshness” into consideration with the content that it ranks. Articles published more recently are going to be more likely to rank well. This is an attempt from Google to better capture trends for users and give people a more social media-like experience.

If you have a negative news article ranking well, you can use Google’s freshness algorithm to your advantage. By getting yourself back in the news cycle, new content will be created that’s capable of ranking in the search engines. Since this content will be newer than the negative coverage, this can help push out the negative articles. As a result, users should see the new positive coverage when searching for your core keywords.

For example, here’s what Google is showing when a user searches for “tesla” in early February 2022. We can see that most of the coverage contains negative articles about an accident that vehicle in autopilot had with a police car.

However, later in February 2022, we can see that searches for the term “tesla” return much more positive articles. The company was able to quickly hit the news cycle again in a more positive way. Now all of Google’s Top Stories are showing articles about Elon Musk’s recent donation of $5.7 billion in Tesla stocks.

With this new coverage, Tesla has completely removed all of the negative information off the first page of Google. These new articles contain a much more positive brand sentiment than the ones that were previously ranking.

While it’s extremely likely that you won’t be able to control the news cycle as much as a company like Tesla, we’ve seen this strategy for higher influence companies and people. We’ve seen many examples where a large company or celebrity receives negative press but then quickly inserts themselves back into the new cycle in a positive way. This results in more positive articles being written about them and helps significantly mitigate the reputational damage done by negative news articles.

6. Suppress the Negative News Article

Unfortunately, what we’ve found in our experience is that journalists and Google are often unwilling to remove negative news articles from their respective platforms. As well, sometimes articles will naturally move off the first page, but many people and brands aren’t able to move the news cycle enough to make the negative coverage go away.

In these events, your best option is to suppress the negative news article. Search suppression is when you take actions to improve the rankings of other results, pushing the negative article off the first page of Google. While the article won’t be removed from the search engines, you’ll significantly decrease the number of people who see the result. This is because very few people actually click to the second page of the results.

In another article, we have written out our process on how we suppress negative content from the search results. While we won’t completely reiterate the process, the basic steps include:

• Tracking the keywords associated with negative content
• Identifying positive, neutral, and negative articles in the search results
• Optimizing existing articles for your target keywords
• Creating new content optimized for your target keywords (social profiles, third party contributions, personal sites)
• Linking to any positive and neutral articles from owned content

Following this process, we’ve been able to help clients suppress negative news articles in the search results. In the below screenshot, you can see one of our client’s baseline search results by sentiment. Positive articles are green, neutral articles are blue, and negative articles are red:

By implementing the search suppression methods, we were able to push down all of the negative articles off the first page of Google.

As a result, this was a large step towards repairing this client’s online reputation and improving the user sentiment in the search results.

Conclusion

Negative news results can definitely have an adverse impact on both your reputation and your business. Fortunately, there are steps that you can take to mitigate the damage that this type of coverage has on your online reputation. By following the steps above, you might be able to get the news article suppressed from the first page of Google or even outright removed.

If you see negative results that you’re looking to bury, check out our search suppression services at Go Fish Digital.

How to Remove Negative News Articles From Google is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.