Repair & Enhance Your Online Reputation

Online Reputation Management

What Is Online Reputation Management?

Every piece of information that’s out on the internet contributes to your online reputation — the good and the bad. When the bad information rises to the surface, whether that’s in search results, online reviews, or social mentions, it’s important that you tackle the problem head-on before your reputation takes a hit.

Online reputation management (ORM) is the practice of making all of the positive information about you or your brand highly-visible and easy for your audience to find.

The team at Go Fish Digital specializes in both repairing digital reputations and proactively building and maintaining reputations for all types of brands, from personal to Fortune 500.

We know that brand identity and perception is everything, so we’ve developed a comprehensive approach to online reputation management services that makes our clients stand out (in a good way!).

person pointing at tablet with google page

Our Online Reputation Management Process

With online reputation management services, there is no “one size fits all” strategy. Our goal is to improve your search results and reviews to craft your online reputation into something that truly reflects your brand and all the hard work you’ve done to build it.

We offer a number of reputation management services that cover the key areas where your online reputation starts to be defined in a searcher’s mind. These areas include:

Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Search
Online Reviews (Yelp, Google, BBB, and others)
Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Autocomplete

As we progress through the project, we use a variety of strategies and tactics to diminish the visibility of negative content or even remove it altogether. The end result is a positive online reputation supported by high-ranking and highly-visible favorable content.

Search Suppression Services For Reputation Management

Damaging press, review sites, or complaint sites can have a devastating effect on a business’s digital reputation when they appear on the first page of the search engine’s results for brand-related queries. When a client has a problem like this, we attack it from many different angles using a variety of tactics we’ve built out over the years – from attempting removal to suppression by pushing the negative article down in the search results.

Content Promotion

After creating positive content for your brand, we use our experience with search engine optimization to promote this content onto the first page of Google. This content will subsequently push down any negative content onto the 2nd or 3rd page of Google where fewer users will notice or click. Our years of experience help us determine what existing and new content will rank the fastest and stay on top for long-term protection and positive branding. We use the latest strategies of digital marketing, search engine optimization, and semantic search to strengthen your credibility with Google.

Monitoring

We developed a proprietary tracking tool to monitor a calculated “Sentiment Score” of your brand’s digital reputation and track its changes over time. We create clear key performance indicators before any new campaign and build custom reports based on our clients’ needs.

lawyers in suits working together in office

Online Review Improvement

Through our years of online reputation management experience we have developed a toolkit of services that can help turn a sparse or floundering Yelp profile into a positive page that enhances a brand’s online presence.

Review Removal

Negative reviews can damage your online reputation. We examine the possibility of flagging 1-star and 2-star reviews for violation of Yelp’s guidelines. When a review may be in violation of the Yelp guidelines, we craft a strong case for its removal and submit it to the Yelp team for review. You only get one chance to make your argument, and using our knowledge of the Yelp review processes gives the strongest chance of improve your online reputation.

Review Defiltration

Many times positive reviews are filtered and do not appear on your Yelp business profile. We review strategies to signal to Yelp that those reviews are genuine and should be displayed. Through our efforts, we can often pull some 5-star reviews out of the filter so that they display on the main page and factor into the overall star rating.

We have developed strategies and approaches that businesses can implement to encourage satisfied customers to leave genuine reviews highlighting the benefits of your services. Often times customers only go online to leave negative reviews, so building a strategy to obtain positive reviews can turn a negative profile into a positive brand asset.

Our Yelp and online review improvement services do not include fake reviews.

Social Media Monitoring

We have helped a number of organizations share their important messages to communities online that would have otherwise not found the information. This type of work spans across many of our online reputation management services: we’ve pushed content that needed to be more visible higher in the search results, adjusted copy on public forums to reflect specific messaging, and promoted important information and statistics in large and active communities on Reddit.

If you are looking to spread a message to a specific online audience or demographic, our services can help you reach them.

Improve Your Reputation In Autocomplete

The values that Google Autocomplete (formerly known as Google Suggest) displays are the first impression of your brand within Google. Our online reputation management services help businesses, organizations, and individuals overcome negative autocomplete values when terms such as ‘lawsuit’, ‘complaints’, ‘scam’ or a competitor’s name appear after your brand name in Google.

Autocomplete Strategy

In our experience and through testing, we have discovered three primary factors that drive Google Autocomplete:

Search Volume and Searcher Location
The number of searches performed for a name/keyword along with the location of the searchers.

Keyword and Phrase Appearance
The total number of mentions of the words on third-party websites, blogs, and forums.

Social Media Mentions
The amount and consistency of mentions on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The algorithm also contains a time tracking component that factors in the freshness of queries and content. This ensures that new, trending searches are included as well. We use all of our research and experience to build an online reputation campaign to influence Google Autocomplete for our clients.

You can take a look at the autocomplete values for your brand or any other search term with our custom Google Autocomplete tool.

Online Reputation Monitoring

Closely monitoring your online reputation and reporting on its progress is an important part of an ORM campaign.

Reputation Monitoring
We have custom-built a number of tools to help us with very specific monitoring activities. We can track the smallest of changes in search results, and monitor online reviews in real-time. These capabilities allow us to quickly assess changes in your online reputation and adjust strategy as needed to triage any immediate problems.

Reputation Reporting
A good report has all of the information you need, and nothing extraneous. We custom build your report based on the metrics that are most important for you. These reports consist of data around your online reputation and an explanation of any significant changes that have occurred over the reporting time period. In many cases, we also develop a custom metric that factors in every aspect of your online reputation, meaning we can plot your reputation for the month on a scale from 1 to 100. This single number is incredibly useful for seeing the direction that the organization’s online reputation is heading and has proven very effective in improving executive awareness and obtaining program buy-in.

The Four Elements Of Online Reputation Management

Monitoring: This element focuses on actively monitoring your online presence and what others are saying about you or your brand. It includes tracking mentions on social media, search engines, review websites, forums, and any other platforms where your reputation may be discussed.
Analysis: Once you have gathered data through monitoring, the next step is to analyze the information. This involves assessing the sentiment of comments or reviews, identifying trends, understanding the impact on your reputation, and evaluating the overall perception of your brand.
Engagement: Engagement refers to actively interacting and engaging with your audience, customers, or stakeholders online. This includes responding to comments, reviews, inquiries, and feedback in a timely and appropriate manner. Engaging in a positive and constructive manner helps build relationships, address concerns, and demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction.
Strategy and Action: This element involves developing a comprehensive strategy and taking proactive actions to manage and enhance your online reputation. It includes setting goals, defining key messages, implementing best practices, and establishing guidelines for addressing different types of situations.

Your Guide To Online Reputation Management

Read By Chapter:

Chapter 1

Remove & Suppress Negative Search Results

A guide to suppressing negative search results from Google

Chapter 2

How To Repair Your Online Reputation

Steps you can take to repair your online reputation

Chapter 3

How To Calculate Your Online Reputation Score

By following these steps, you can easily calculate your reputation score.

Chapter 4

How to Increase Your Yelp Rating

You can increase your Yelp ratings by using their content guidelines.

Chapter 5

Remove Negative News Articles From Google

If you’re seeing negative news articles rankings, these steps can help suppress them.

Chapter 6

Preventative Online Reputation Management

Once you’ve repaired you’re digital reputation, these steps can help prevent negative content from returning.

Online Reputation Management FAQs

Many clients come to us asking this question and unfortunately, the answer is, it usually depends. Repairing brands or an individuals’ reputation online can take anywhere from 3 months to a year, depending on what the goals and challenges are. We look at many of Google’s ranking factors and other variables when assessing this, and we can help give you a sense of what the timeline might look like when we review your project.

Online reputation management is critically important in the digital age for both individuals and businesses. It is a powerful determinant of trust and credibility, which directly influences decision-making processes of potential clients, employers, business partners, and even the general public. The ubiquity of the internet allows information to be disseminated widely and quickly, and negative content or reviews can significantly harm one’s reputation.

Online reputation management enables proactive monitoring and controlling of what is being said or shared online, enabling swift response to negative remarks and enhancement of positive sentiments.

Our process is always changing to align with the most recent algorithm updates, and there are lots of factors that contribute to it! As a team, we research and stay up to date on the most important ranking factors in Google and work with those factors to promote positive content and channels. Increasing clicks, improving SEO on all owned web and social properties, and creating new content are just some of the tactics we use on when improving the search results.

Yes, our process does work! We have many case studies with different success timelines. However, it is important to understand that we are working alongside (and sometimes against!) an algorithm that is constantly changing, and some things are outside of our control. Success, and how long it takes to get there, depends on each client and their particular issue.

If we’re talking about reviews, then we have developed a tried-and-true process of helping our clients identify, flag, and get the removal of a review that violated that platform’s content guidelines. We have also run into cases where we can assist clients in the removal of a negative website result.

If something cannot be removed, then we work with our clients to draft messages and responses to best help the situation at hand. Sometimes we assist and guide our clients in the correct direction in taking legal action.

Online reputation management and SEO set out to achieve two separate goals. With SEO, the goal is to improve the visibility of a particular page. Conversely, with online reputation management, you’re looking to suppress the visibility of a negative article. SEO can be a large component of an online reputation management strategy.

In order to repair your online reputation, you first need to know the source that’s creating negative brand sentiment. Oftentimes, this is negative content appearing in the Google search results.

Some of the best ways to improve your online reputation are to create new positive articles optimized for your core terms, contribute to third party websites, ensure social media profiles are created and optimized, and externally linking to positive coverage. A comprehensive approach is generally best when looking to repair your online reputation.

Some of the most commonly used tools for online reputation management include Google Alerts, HootSuite, Moz Pro, and our Yelp Calculator. At Go Fish Digital, we have proprietary technology that tracks your digital visibility by sentiment. This allows you to see improvements in your online reputation over time.