Whether you’re a business or an individual, your online reputation is valuable. Reports state that 25% of a company’s market value is directly tied to its reputation.
An impaired reputation can also hurt one as an individual by compromising your career opportunities or personal brand.
Is your online reputation not what you want it to be? Fortunately, there are a number of steps you can take to rectify this.
Continue reading to find out how to conduct internet reputation repair.
Access the Damage
The first thing to do when carrying out internet reputation repair is to assess the damage. There are various ways to go about this.
The simplest is manually googling yourself or your company name and seeing what comes up. By going through the results and assessing how these impact your reputation you can get an idea of what you’re dealing with.
However, this method will only get you superficial results, and won’t show the full extent of any reputation damage.
For instance, doing a google search might uncover some disparaging reviews or blog content. But it won’t always reveal mentions on social media, on podcasts and other audio sources, or in video content.
To truly gauge the state of a company’s or an individual’s online reputation it’s best to use a tool that can track brand mentions and conduct social media monitoring. This can alert you to mentions across a variety of platforms and content types.
The more insight you can get into mentions of your brand or name, the better equipped you’ll be to spot any patterns or themes.
If you do encounter any common threads, such as a problematic area of customer service, or a specific personal action—you’ll be better equipped to mitigate this.
Take Steps to Remove Defamatory Pages or Content
Once you have a good idea of what your online reputation is (and the cause) you can start formulating a strategy to improve it.
One of the first internet reputation repair actions you can carry out is taking steps to remove defamatory pages or content.
There are a couple of ways you can do this. You can try reaching out to the owner of the page or content and request that the defamatory mention is removed.
If the content violates copyright, you can also have it removed by carrying out what is known as a DMCA takedown. To do this you will need to send a legal notice to the applicable service provider (such as the web host).
Take note that there are various legal requirements that need to be met before a service provider will comply.
Take Control Of Your Search Results
Besides attempting to have negative search results taken down, you can also take control of them through SEO. By creating optimized content that follows a well-researched keyword strategy you can effectively drown out compromising search results.
According to statistics, 75% of people never scroll past the first page of online search results.
If you can “push down” compromising results onto the second page, you’ll ensure that fewer people ever see them.
To do this you will need to analyze what keywords to target and create a keyword plan for the content you create. To do this, you will need to have a list of the content you want to push down the search results, as well as a list of name variations and search terms.
Once you have developed a keyword strategy you can move on to creating content.
Create Great Content
The next step in internet reputation repair is creating content. However, not just any content.
Besides being keyword optimized to outrank negative search results, the content you create should also be top quality. Good quality content that is informative and of value is more likely to rank well than poorly crafted content.
Things like keywords stuffing and fluff are likely to get your content demoted in search.
Google evaluates content by its Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) principle.
Content that displays expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness has a much higher chance of ranking on the first page of Google than poor-quality content that lacks substance.
Incidentally, content that follows the E-A-T principle is also more likely to trigger trust in individuals and benefit your reputation.
Manage Reviews
Another key component of internet reputation repair is managing reviews. Online reviews are incredibly important for a business or brand’s reputation.
Stats show that 91% of people read reviews, and 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
If you are a business, it’s essential that you manage and respond to all reviews. Otherwise, consumers will assume that you do not care about your customers.
On the other hand, responding to each and every review shows that you are active online and passionate about customer experience and service.
You should also make every effort possible to respond constructively to negative reviews. Where possible, try to remedy the situation. This will show others that you are committed to helping dissatisfied customers.
If the customer continues to respond negatively or disparaging on the review platform, this might also leave readers with the impression the customer is being difficult. This, in turn, can cast doubt on the legitimacy of their negative review.
Besides this, you can also take steps to have certain reviews removed.
For instance, with Google Reviews if a review is fake, inappropriate, or promotes a competitor you can flag it for review by Google. If it violates Google’s policy, it will then get taken down.
Need to Do Some Internet Reputation Repair? Let Us Help
Has your online reputation has been impaired? Whether you’re an individual or a brand, it’s essential that you rectify it. Otherwise, you will lose out on business, opportunity, and respect.
While you can DIY internet reputation repair, the easiest way to build your brand or personal reputation back up is by using a professional service such as ours.
Not only do we take the leg work out of internet reputation repair, but we can also do a far more thorough job. Through the use of our propriety systems and tools, we formulate a watertight plan for improving your online reputation.
This includes reputation analysis, content removal, SEO research, content creation, and publishing.
Contact us or call 844-461-3632 today for a free analysis.
by Net Reputation