When potential customers search for your brand, are they greeted with a barrage of harmful content that undermines your credibility?
Many businesses need help to regain control of their online reputation once they lose it. They end up feeling helpless as the unpleasant content continues to dominate the search results, drowning out all their positive assets.
If you’re experiencing this, here’s how to turn things around. Stay with me.
In this comprehensive guide, you’ll discover a step-by-step search engine optimization (SEO) reputation repair playbook to help you take back control of your online presence.
You’ll learn proven strategies to suppress negative content, improve your positive assets, and fuel your ascension back to the top spots on Google.
Assess the damage
The first step in your SEO reputation repair journey is to thoroughly assess the current state of your online presence. This involves conducting a comprehensive audit to identify all the negative content that’s impacting your brand.
Begin by searching for your business and your products, services, and key personnel across major search engines. Don’t forget to check review sites, social media platforms, and other online channels.
Next, make a list of any negative reviews, articles, blog posts, social media comments, or other harmful information you find.
Analyze the severity and reach of each piece of negative content.
Consider factors like:
- The domain authority and traffic of the website hosting the negative information.
- The number of backlinks pointing to the negative content.
- The engagement and sharing of negative content on social media.
- The position and visibility of the negative content in search results.
This can help you prioritize which issues to tackle based on their potential impact.
Tools like Ahrefs work well for this, as do other SEO tools that offer these specific features.
Determine the root causes
What are the contributing factors behind the negative content?
Was it a product failure, a customer service mishap, a disgruntled employee, or something else?
Understanding the origins of the problem can help guide your reputation repair strategy.
Once you have a clear picture of the damage to your online reputation, you can move on to the next steps of the SEO playbook.
Optimize your positive assets
Now that you’ve identified the negative content impacting your brand, it’s time to shift your focus toward amplifying your positive online presence.
This step in the SEO reputation repair process can help you counteract the harmful information with authoritative, optimized assets.
Start by confirming your owned media channels—including your website, social media profiles, and any other branded platforms—are fully optimized for search.
Strategic optimization is important because if searchers can find your content, how do you expect it to outshine an onslaught of negative search results?
Positive asset improvement includes:
- Improving on-page SEO elements like title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and image alt text.
- Creating a cohesive brand identity and messaging across all your online properties.
- Regularly publishing high-quality, SEO-optimized content that showcases your expertise, products, and services.
Leverage the power of content marketing
Content marketing is one of the most important parts of this process.
To proactively build your authority online, you need to develop a strategic content plan that addresses your target audience’s pain points and questions.
This could include blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, and other engaging formats.
Couple these content creation options with a well-planned SEO strategy, and you have the recipe for making better online reputations more common.
Pair your content creation efforts with a robust link-building strategy
Link building is a high-value skill. And to get the best results, you might need to hire some professional help. However, you can still do it on your own if you have the right plan.
Reach out to influential industry publications, relevant bloggers, and authoritative websites to earn valuable backlinks pointing to your positive assets. This can help boost your owned media channels’ domain authority and visibility in search results.
Backlink strategies can be its own post.
There are hundreds of articles about it online. If you’re doing this on your own, you can help ensure you’re not wasting your time by learning more this workflow on great resources like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Backlinko, and Reddit.
Optimizing your positive online presence can help you be well on your way to pushing down the negative content and reclaiming the top spots in Google with the help of social proof.
Now that you understand the whys and a touch of the how, we can dive deeper and look at a content strategy you can use.
6-step SEO reputation repair content strategy
One of the most powerful tools in your SEO reputation repair arsenal is content marketing (which I touched on earlier).
The consistent creation of valuable content can actively push down negative mentions and reinforce your brand’s authority.
Here’s a simple content marketing strategy you can implement:
1. Identify key topics and questions
Start by researching the common questions, pain points, and concerns of your target audience.
What information are they actively seeking related to your industry, products, or services? These will be the foundation for your content creation.
2. Develop a content calendar
Map out an editorial calendar that covers a mix of content formats, including blog posts, videos, podcasts, and social media updates. Aim to publish new content on a consistent basis, whether that’s weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
3. Optimize content for SEO
Ensure all your content is thoroughly optimized for search. This includes conducting keyword research, incorporating relevant terms into your titles, headers, and body copy, as well as adding alt text, meta descriptions, and other on-page SEO elements.
4. Promote content aggressively
Don’t just hit “publish” and hope for the best. Actively promote your content through email outreach, social media sharing, influencer collaborations, and other channels. The more visibility and engagement your content receives, the more it will help boost your online authority.
5. Build authoritative backlinks
Supplement your content creation efforts with a strategic link-building campaign. Reach out to industry publications, relevant blogs, and other high-authority websites to earn valuable backlinks pointing to your content. This can help further enhance your search rankings.
6. Monitor and maintain your reputation
Your work doesn’t end once you’ve successfully pushed down the negative content and boosted your positive online presence. Ongoing monitoring and maintenance are crucial to protecting your hard-earned reputation in the long run.
Start by setting up comprehensive reputation monitoring systems.
This should include:
- Google Alerts for your brand name, key personnel, products, and industry keywords.
- Social media monitoring tools to track mentions, comments, and sentiment across platforms.
- Reputation management software that provides a holistic view of your online presence.
For example, with TotalRadius by Reputation Defender, you have a powerful tool at your fingertips that can help you manage your reputation, your way.
The most important thing though, no matter what software you use, is the ability to regularly review the results from these monitoring tools and be prepared to take swift action on any new negative mentions or emerging issues.
When you respond, do so professionally and constructively, by addressing customer concerns, correcting misinformation, and reinforcing your brand’s commitment to quality and integrity.
Beyond monitoring
In addition to monitoring, you’ll need to maintain a consistent content creation and promotion strategy. Continue publishing new blog posts, videos, and other assets that showcase your expertise and positive brand attributes.
You’ll also need to regularly update and refresh your existing content to keep it current and relevant.
Establish relationships with industry influencers, journalists, and other thought leaders who can help amplify your positive messaging and credibility.
Leverage these partnerships to earn additional high-quality backlinks and media coverage that can further bolster your online authority.
Finally, don’t neglect the importance of internal reputation management.
Ensure your employees are aligned with your brand’s values and equipped to handle customer interactions professionally. Empower them (within legal guidelines) to be active brand ambassadors who can help protect and enhance your online reputation.
Implementing these ongoing monitoring and maintenance tactics can put you in a position that safeguards your hard-won reputation—which can help you stay ahead of any future reputation challenges.
Final thoughts
SEO is more than just ranking on Google; SEO can be used for growing a business, spreading malice about a business, and building credibility to repair a business’s reputation.
In this case, you’ve just learned how to start improving as well as maintaining your online reputation through SEO reputation repair.
If this seems like tons of work and you want help, you can start by grabbing your reputation report card. It’s a great way to audit your online reputation for free. Once you know what you’re dealing with, you should speak with a search engine results specialist about suppressing negative results online.
This post was contributed by Rockey Simmons, founder of SaaS Marketing Growth.