What Are The Best Online Reputation Management Tools? 

The best online reputation management tools are:

• Detailed SEO
• YCS
• Filmot
• ChatGPT
• Yelp Improvement Calculator
• Google’s Spam Report
• Google Alerts

What is Online Reputation Management?

Online reputation management (ORM) is the process of monitoring and improving a business or individual’s online presence. The goal of reputation management is to fill the search engine results page (SERP) with positive content to give potential clients a great first impression. Reputation management also aims to help clients address and respond to negative feedback to improve business practices and resolve client issues. 

Check out our Ultimate Guide to Online Reputation Management to learn more.

Top 7 Tools For Online Reputation Management

Whether you’re an individual or part of a large corporation, managing your online reputation is no small feat. Luckily, there are some great tools online that can help you monitor and optimize your online presence more effectively. We’ve compiled a list of our top 7 online reputation management tools below. Oh—and they’re all free!

1. Detailed SEO

Detailed SEO is an reputation management extension that allows you to get a quick overview of several SEO elements on a page, including… 

When working on a business’ online reputation, it’s important to have all existing owned content optimized. This not only helps that content rank higher for your target keywords, but it also ensures that the user experience, content, and branding of the site are high-quality.

Using the Detailed SEO tool, you can look into ways to improve your website, such as updating the metadata, checking that all images have alt text, ensuring that the site is indexed, checking for broken links, and so much more. It will also help identify any bugs as well as areas for optimization, such as including your target keywords in the meta description.

2. YCS

Youtube Comment Search provides you with a quick way to search through hundreds of YouTube video comments. 

Social media management can be tedious, and while there are analytics already integrated into each social platform, they don’t help when it comes to non-tagged mentions. This becomes even harder when a video increases in popularity, leading to hundreds or even thousands of comments to sift through.

With this helpful YouTube plugin, you can easily search for mentions of your brand in the video’s comments and transcript. Not only will this aid in finding any negative mentions of your brand that need to be addressed, but it can also help you identify whether a vaguely titled video actually mentions your brand at all. 

3. Filmot

The Filmot tool allows you to search through both auto-generated and manual transcripts across hundreds of YouTube videos.

How do you find actual videos about your brand if it’s not directly mentioned in the title? YouTube search features are pretty good, but you can’t guarantee that every single mention of your brand will come up from an organic search.

This is why the Filmot startup was created. With this tool, you can search both YouTube titles and YouTube transcripts to find those sneaky mentions that you may have never seen otherwise. The tool searches through multiple languages and offers numerous filtering abilities to get as detailed as you’d like in your search. 

4. ChatGPT

OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool has many uses, from content creation to debugging complex lines of code. 

We have only scratched the surface of AI chatbots’ potential, but there are already plenty of great uses specific to ORM and SEO. The free version of ChatGPT can play a major role in streamlining business strategies, especially for small businesses or even one-man startups.

Use this tool to bounce business ideas off of or ask for advice on how to properly and professionally respond to negative customer feedback. Need alt text for a large number of photos? Ask ChatGPT to write it for you; it can analyze images. 

The tool is also helpful for coming up with engaging social media captions or ideas for social media posts in general. There are endless possibilities, so our biggest tip is to just play around, try asking the same question in different ways, and see where a tool like ChatGPT can take you! 

5. Yelp Improvement Calculator 

Go Fish Digital’s Yelp Improvement Calculator is a tool for identifying the number of new positive reviews needed to improve one’s overall star rating on Yelp. 

Yelp is arguably one of the trickiest review platforms to manage. From the ominous review filter to the no-soliciting rule, many businesses feel lost when they see low ratings for their Yelp page. Something we are often asked is, “How many positive reviews is it going to take to get an x star rating?” 

While it can be difficult to give a precise estimate, this tool can get you pretty close! Simply input the current number of reviews of each star rating,  your desired overall rating, and hit “Calculate.” 

Once you have a general idea of how many new 5-star reviews you’ll need, you can plan a more detailed marketing strategy and set milestones toward your review goal. The Yelp Calculator can also help you better understand how much weight each star rating holds in regard to the overall star rating. 

6. Google’s Spam Report 

Google’s Spam Report allows you to submit 1 or more URLs to report any spammy content you may come across.

When conducting an audit of your online reputation, it’s important to look at negative content ranking within the first three pages. Occasionally, spammy content such as random one-page sites, link farming sites, or low-quality news sites can rank for your target keywords, harming your overall reputation.

Using Google’s spam report tool, you can collect these URLs and report them as spam. After entering the URL and reasoning for reporting, you may get an additional set of questions (as pictured above) to help Google understand what exactly is spammy about the page. You can also put optional notes before submitting the form to include any other relevant information, such as the keyword that this page is ranking for. In combination with Google’s March 2024 algorithm update, you should be seeing less and less spammy content over time. 

7. Google’s Alerts

Google’s Alerts allows you to put in any keyword or keyphrase you’d like to track, then sends you periodic updates on any recent news, articles, or other activity related to that keyword in the SERPs.

Not everyone has the time to Google themselves or their business on a daily basis, especially if you own multiple businesses or have a wide range of target keywords you want to keep track of. Even if you do manually search, you may still miss an alert or get to it late.

That’s where Google’s Alerts come in. Using quotations, you can set up alerts for any and all keywords relevant to your business. This can include your business’s name, CEO, a specific product name, or really anything at all. Once set, Google will send you periodic alerts every time that keyword is mentioned in a new piece of content. This is especially helpful for any businesses that get mentioned in a lot of third-party news or blog content. You can also customize the alerts to get them the moment something is posted or have them aggregated into a once-a-week list of all mentions. You can even use it to keep track of your competitors as well!

Other Helpful Reputation Management Tools

Although these reputation management tools are not free, they can be very helpful for automated research, data analysis, and management.

• Keyhole – Monitor online mentions and chatter about your brand. Keyhole allows tracking for numerous social media sites, blogs, and more. Keyhole also applies an auto-generated sentiment to each mention, so you don’t have to manually review everything.
• Ahrefs – Conduct SEO research for keywords, link building, site audits, and more. Ahrefs also offers educational resources for those wanting to dive into the world of SEO. This tool is also helpful for looking at the backlinks that currently exist for your owned content to ensure that they are quality and not lost. 
• ReviewPush – ReviewPush is a cloud-based tool that helps businesses monitor and manage their online reviews across various platforms. It provides features for review collection, analysis, management, and promotion, aiming to optimize customer feedback and enhance online reputation.

Effectively managing your online reputation takes a lot of time and effort, but in today’s digital age, it’s a crucial and worthwhile investment. Using these online reputation management tools can give you a closer look at your overall reputation and help you be prepared if your business receives any negative press. 

At Go Fish Digital, we’ve developed custom tools to help automate SERP results tracking, reviews management, and more. We’ve also got a team of experts who know how to handle everything from proactive ORM to crisis management. If you’re interested in getting to know more about our online reputation management services, contact us today! 

The Best 7 Online Reputation Management Tools for 2024 is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Resolving online reputation management issues can be both confusing and difficult if it is your first time doing it.  Because of that, I thought it would be helpful to share what some of the most common questions we receive are and how I answer them.

Related Content:

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

1. How do I respond to a negative review?

Depending on the context of the review, many business owners can cause more harm by responding to a negative review than not, namely because there are so many possible traps to fall in to when responding to an upset customer.  So, rather than immediately answering, take a step back and make sure you have a strategy for responding.

Step one is assessing the review. It is very important to assess the review carefully and cautiously.  Some reviewers are looking for a response right away because they legitimately need an answer to a concern which they express within their review. These reviews should be responded to right away with an answer that addresses the issue directly with a solution, if there is one.

Some reviewers are downright angry and are not looking for a resolution, but rather looking to tell other users about their horrible experience because they feel dissatisfied or personally offended by the business. Responding to these reviews in a very understanding manner is key.  It is important to not fire back with a defensive response simply because you disagree with the reviewer. The review response will live forever, and will be viewed by a lot of people (not just the reviewer), so it needs to reflect positively on the business.

We recommend the following framework:

1. Thank them by name for taking the time to leave feedback
2. Acknowledge the specific situation (you don’t want it to seem like a generic response)
3. Apologize for their negative experience
4. State that what they experienced is not how the business operates
5. Explain any steps you will take to ensure that nobody has that experience again
6. Invite them to contact you directly as you’d like an opportunity to make it right
7. Give your name and a direct phone number and/or email

Try to use your natural voice and be genuine and honest.  Official-sounding PR statements just don’t work in review responses; coming off as a real human does.

2. How long will it take to fix the reputation problem?

The answer no one wants to hear: it depends.

It truly does depend on where the problem area is, how big of an issue it is, and what the objective is.

Completely changing the Google search results does take time because there are many details that go into changing what Google sees as the ‘perfect assortment’ in the results. Google doesn’t change the search results very quickly anymore; we used to be able to completely shake up the search results in 3 months, then we had to change that to 6 months, and now it takes around 9 months to make a significant impact on Google search results.  We see many incremental changes along the way, but Google is hesitant to shift away from the status quo.

For improving Yelp or Google review scores, we’ve improved scores by 2-points in a month, and we’ve also had projects extend over a year when they are particularly tricky.  Our ORM agency knows that every project is unique, so unfortunately there is no easy answer to this question.

3. Why does Google show this negative article in the search results?

It is important to understand that Google’s algorithm tries to put together a diverse collection of search results based on the specific search query entered in the search box. If something bad is there, they aren’t singling you out and it has nothing to do with your brand personally; specific sites will show up on page one of the search results based on the information

Google gathers from the website it chooses to show, including how authoritative and credible a site is among many other indications like social shares, backlinks etc. Google is trying to satisfy every user’s search intent, which is why you will see a number of unique results appear for a search query.

For example, if someone were to type “Go Fish Digital” into the search box, they would find an array of results, some of which might include GFD’s social profiles for users who are trying to stay in touch with the brand, as well as the company website for potential clients who are looking to do business with us. You also might find a glassdoor profile, for users who are looking for a career.

Basically, Google doesn’t know the specific needs of each user, so they put together the best assortment of results to satisfy as many users as possible…. which may unfortunately include those negative articles or those negative reviews you don’t want them to see.

4. Can I remove a negative review?

Few things can bother a business owner or marketing director more than a negative review.  They are just. so. frustrating.  And so a common questions we get is, “Can a negative review be removed?”.

The answer is… sometimes.

Each review site has its own rules for reviews.  With Yelp, the rules are very well defined over their many years of collecting online reviews.  If a reviewer breaks a rule, their review can be removed.  This video from my colleague Daniel Russell goes in-depth on how we go about flagging and removing reviews.

Whereas Yelp’s content guidelines are more thorough, Google Reviews are a little more wild west.  Unless a review shares highly personal information (SSN, for example), the likelihood of it being taken down from your flagging is very low.  Angie’s List, Glassdoor, Houzz, BBB, and others all have their own rules, so if you are worried about reviews on those platforms, it is important to understand what can and can’t be said in a review.

5. Why does it matter what people think?

It matters. If you genuinely know that your company is great, then that should be represented across your online presence.  You know how they say that you only get once change to make a first impression?  Well often times, your first impression will be what shows up in the search results when someone Google’s your name.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes… if you’re choosing between many companies to work with, you do all sorts of research to find the very best organization. Although you may have a great thing going, many customers could be blinded by any negative articles or reviews you have and turn to another company, which is why it matters what people are saying about your brand online.

6. What can I do to improve the reputation management process?

Many clients ask us what they can be doing to help with the process, and we absolutely love this enthusiasm and interest in helping resolve the problem. There are many things that can be done, but the most helpful action is to be continually proactive with building up your brand.

Look for opportunities constantly, whether it is doing interviews, podcasts, meetups, seminars, or events. Take the time to look for interesting events where you will have a good opportunity to represent your brand. The more you’re in the public eye, the greater chance you have to engage with new consumers (which will help improve your reputation), get recognized by publishers (which could create new content), and to get your brand involved in the conversation (which shows you care).

7. How do I change the conversation around my online reputation?

Many companies believe that changing the conversation about their brand is the way to go, because at the end of the day, we want to start something new, positive, and fresh for people to talk about. But have you ever thought what’s wrong with the current conversation? Instead of changing it, why not get involved with the current conversation that influencers are already having and maybe work on changing the way you involve your brand in that conversation.

Far too often, companies want to show off all of their assets, brag about what they can do, and show that they’ve improved upon something that was different before, instead of listening to what their customer really needs and wants. Asking questions and being a legitimate resource for customers is a far less pushy way to connect and engage.

Every customer is not created equal. Becoming involved with the talk around your brand will not only help the customer to express their needs but can change their perspective on your brand overall. Who wants to lead the conversation when there’s no one listening? Getting engaged in the current conversation and listening to others will set a foundation for loyal, happy customers and establish your brand’s identity on the web and in reality.

7 Common Online Reputation Management Questions: Answered 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

Key Takeaways:

1. Online reputation management is a critical consideration for individuals and businesses, as negative search results can have significant consequences on personal and professional success.
2. There are two primary ways to address negative search results: removal and suppression, and the approach you take will depend on the specifics of your situation.
3. Strategies to address negative search results may include creating new content to push negative results down in search rankings, optimizing existing content to improve search visibility, and leveraging strategies to request the removal of certain content.

To pull back the curtain, we’ve decided to write an article that details our search suppression process.

Table Of Contents

• How To Remove Negative Search Results
  • Contact the Platform About a Guideline Violation
  • Request the Content Be Removed From Google
  • Contact the Author
• How to Suppress Negative Content
  • What Is Negative Content Suppression?
  • Research Keywords Where Negative Content Is Appearing
  • Identify Sentiment for High-Ranking Content
  • Regularly Track Keywords
  • Optimize Owned Positive and Neutral Articles
  • Create Social Profiles
  • Create New Websites
  • Contribute to Third Party Websites
  • Create Backlinks From Owned Assets
  • Optimize for Featured Snippets
  • Review Other Keyword Variations
• Case Study
• Conclusion

How To Remove Negative Search Results:

You can remove negative search results by following these steps:

1. Request the article be removed for violating content guidelines
2. Use the DMCA form to request the negative results do not appear in Google
3. Contact the author and ask them to remove the article
4. Suppress the negative result by improving rankings of other articles

The first step that you’ll want to take is to try to remove the negative content from the search results altogether. If the unflattering content is completely taken down, Google will stop showing the article in the search results. In theory, this method is preferred since it is the fastest way to ensure your search results contain positive information.

However, the unfortunate reality is that this is often much easier said than done. In most cases, we find that outright removal of the content is rare. Authors generally don’t take articles down and it can be tough to appeal directly to the publications or platforms for content removal. Keep in mind that these entities are monetized by the number of clicks and the engagement that their content gets. This means that they generally won’t remove content unless they absolutely have to.

Of course, it is definitely still possible to remove negative content altogether. Below are some of the methods that we find to be most effective:

Contact the Platform About a Guideline Violation

Most platforms have guidelines that the content on their site needs to abide by. For instance, this generally involves language saying the content shouldn’t be hateful, inappropriate, use private information, and so on. Of course, this varies by platform. If you familiarize yourself with these guidelines you can assess if there are grounds for content removal.

For instance, if a Yelp review appearing in Google mentions an employee’s full name, you can flag to the support team and request they remove the content as it goes against Yelp’s guidelines. If a negative YouTube video uses copyrighted content, you could also request that the video be removed as this violates YouTube’s guidelines. You could possibly even get entire Yelp pages removed if they do not meet Yelp’s eligibility requirements. This can be a very effective way of getting negative content directly removed.

Request the Content Be Removed From Google

If the platform won’t take the content down, you could make a request directly to Google to have the page removed. While this won’t stop the content from appearing on the platform’s website, it should remove the article from showing up in the Google results.

On Google’s website, there is a form you can fill out to request content be removed. You can cite different reasons such as violations of copyright and trademark infringement.

While this is definitely a step worth taking, in our experience we find it pretty rare that Google actually removes the content from its search engine.

Contact the Author

If the content is a negative article, you might consider reaching out directly to the author to see if they’ll remove it. Of course, having them directly remove the article should result in the content losing its rankings over time as Google will no longer be able to see the article.

This works especially well when you have strong evidence that the facts contained in the article are incorrect. In the past, we’ve been able to get content removed this way by providing evidence such as links to new stories about overturned court cases that dispute facts contained in the original article. This can result in the author taking the content down, adding a noindex tag to it, or at least providing updates to the story to represent the most accurate information.

How to Suppress Negative Search Results:

You can suppress negative search results by following these steps:

1. Optimize Owned Articles
2. Create Social Profiles
3. Publish New Websites
4. Contribute to Third Party Websites
5. Add Backlinks From Owned Assets
6. Optimize for Featured Snippets
7. Review Other Keyword Variations

What you’ll often find is that getting negative content outright removed is extremely difficult. Even if it’s possible, the time it takes to get the content removed can already do substantial damage to your reputation. If the above steps don’t work, we recommend taking a proactive approach and trying to bump down the article instead of removing it.

What Is Negative Content Suppression?

Negative content suppression is the process of trying to get positive content to outrank the negative articles in the search results. The goal of this is to get the negative content to rank on page two of the search results where users are much less likely to find it.

As an example, let’s use the current Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott. He recently made some controversial statements that seemed to condone fans treating refs poorly and Sports Illustrated wrote an article about it. Now when searching his name, we can see that the negative article (red) appears on the first page of Google. This article ranks above some other positive or neutral coverage (green) such as his bio pages on the Cowboys’ website and CBS Sports.

Negative search results suppression would be actions taken to get some of the positive coverage from CBS Sports and DallasCowboys.com to outrank his negative article, eventually pushing it to page two. This would help him better manage his online reputation by bumping the negative search results down.

Page two is ideal because user clicks significantly drop off after page one. According to the most recent data from Advanced Web Ranking, the CTR of the 11th result is around 1.05%.

This means that if 100 users search for your name, only 1.5 users would end up clicking on your article if it ranked in position 11. This makes page two the gold standard for any content suppression campaign.

So now that we know what the goal of the campaign is, let’s talk about some different strategies that you can use to push down or remove negative results from the first page of Google.

Research Keywords Where Negative Content Is Appearing

The first step that you’ll want to take is to identify the keywords where your negative content is appearing. For example, if it’s your personal brand you’re worried about, the negative results might be showing when someone simply searches your name (like the Dak Prescott example above). If you represent a corporation, the keyword might be your company name. The keywords might even be more specific than these such as a product name or detail about a negative event (“[company] data breach”). If you’ve had negative reviews around your company’s jobs your keyword could be “is [company] a good place to work for?”

Whatever the case might be, you’ll want to be sure you’re identifying and keeping a list of the most popular phrases people could be searching for where the negative result is appearing. This will help you better understand the search landscape and what content you need to try to move up in the rankings.

Identify Sentiment for High-Ranking Content

Once you’ve established your core keyword that you’ll be optimizing, you then should inventory the sentiment of every page ranking for that keyword. In our process, we generally assign one of the three sentiments to each search result:

• Positive
• Neutral
• Negative

Positive and negative results should be pretty self explanatory. A neutral result might be a page that does not provide either positive or negative sentiment for your brand. For example, a page about a different person with your same name might be considered neutral. While you might not want to prioritize helping neutral results rank higher first, these results are certainly preferred to the negative result and can still be used to suppress it if needed.

Once you’ve labeled all high ranking results (within the Top 20), you’ll have a much better understanding of your current landscape. You should be easily able to see how many negative articles there are and which positive/neutral articles you want to help promote.

Regularly Track Keywords

Once you’ve identified your target keywords and the sentiment for each article, you’ll want to track the rankings of these terms every week. This will allow you to see your progress over time and if the negative content is moving further down the Google results.

At Go Fish Digital, we use our own internal rank tracking tool that shows the rankings of each URL in the search results. This tool also overlays the sentiment of each result: green for positive, blue for neutral, and red for negative

We can see here in the example above that there are 2 positive, 2 neutral, and 6 negative articles in the top 10 results for “dak prescott playoffs”. Tracking this over time will allow us to see how we’re doing in terms of suppressing the negative articles.

Tools such as Ahrefs and Moz Pro will allow you to track keyword rankings over time (without the sentiment overlay). If you don’t have the budget to pay for a service, you could also create a spreadsheet and manually track your rankings. Using Chrome extensions like LinkClump, you can easily copy all of the SERPs and paste them into a spreadsheet. Of course this can get complicated when tracking multiple keywords. This will help you better define your strategy moving forward and allow you to track progress.

Now that we have a better understanding of where we stand and have proper tracking in place, let’s talk about what steps you can take to bump down negative articles.

1. Optimize Owned Positive and Neutral Articles

To start, your highest priority should be to optimize any owned positive or negative articles that rank below your negative article. It’s important that you choose content that ranks below the negative article since ranking improvements will help move the negative content down the search results. As well, it’s important to start with the content that you can control directly. Pages on company websites, personal blogs, or any other content that you can directly edit should be prioritized first.

Going back to our Dak Prescott example, it might make sense to start with the article on dallascowboys.com since it ranks directly below the negative content and he likely could control the content on that domain.

On page optimization is the process of ensuring that a page targets the core keyword it’s trying to rank for. This involves steps such as:

1. Using the keyword in the title tag of the page
2. Ensuring the keyword is integrated into page headings
3. Incorporating the target keyword more times within the content
4. Internally linking to the page using the target keyword
5. Improving the content on the page so it contains more relevant information to the primary topic
6. Ensuring the page has relevant images with optimized file name and alt text

At Go Fish Digital, we provide our clients with a document that provides optimizations opportunities for positive and neutral articles.

On page optimizations can be implemented quickly and are one of the most powerful things you can do to improve the rankings of pages. Optimizing owned content that ranks below negative articles will put you in a much better position to suppress the negative article. While there’s a lot of information about on-page optimization, I recommend starting with this guide from Moz if you’re new to the subject.

2. Create Social Profiles

After you’ve optimized owned articles, the next step that we like to take is to create social profiles, especially if you’re trying to rank for keywords that exactly match your name (“chris long”) or company name (“go fish digital”). Creating social profiles can be a great strategy because:

1. They are fairly quick to create
2. They exist on authoritative websites that are capable of ranking well
3. They create new pages that Google can rank in the search engines

As an example, if you represent an organization and are trying to push down a negative article that ranks for your company name, you might want to consider creating social profiles. If you don’t have them already, you could consider creating pages on TechCrunch, YouTube, Linkedin, and other relevant social sites.

My colleague Brian Patterson previously performed a study where he found the most frequently appearing social sites for brand names. He found that the most common sites were:

1. LinkedIn
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. YouTube
5. Instagram

To show the power of social profiles, you can look at the search results for “mark cuban.” While Mark Cuban obviously gets a ton of press coverage when searching for his name, you can see that both his Instagram and his LinkedIn are on the first page of Google.

This illustrates the power of social profiles. These properties end up ranking very well for an extremely public figure who’s constantly quoted on websites such as CNBC, Entrepreneur, Inc., and more.

3. Create New Websites

Another great step to take if you’re trying to bury a negative search result is to create new websites. These websites should contain domain names that include the keyword you’re trying to rank for. Websites with keywords in the domain name (oftentimes called Exact Match Domains) still tend to perform very well in the Google search results.

Notice how for the term “jk rowling” her personal website of jkrowling.com ranks in the #1 position:

Let’s say you’re an author and you would like to suppress some negative search results showing up on the first page. You could create a domain that directly uses your name in the URL:

• www.authorname.com

This domain would stand a good chance of ranking well for your name over time as it contains the keyword you’re trying to optimize for.

However, creating other domains could be beneficial as well. Even if they don’t contain the exact keywords you’re trying to rank for, if Google deems them topically relevant, they could still rank well for your keywords.

Back to our author example, if you wanted to get more aggressive with suppressing a negative article, you could create even more domains. You could purchase domains associated with your books as well. If you have written two books, you could have the following domains ranking:

• www.authorname.com
• www.bookone.com
• www.booktwo.com

Creating these multiple domains would give you even more opportunities to push the negative search result down the first page as these would all be websites capable of ranking for your name.

4. Contribute to Third Party Websites

Contributing to third party sites is another great way to add more relevant content to Google that’s capable of ranking for your core keywords. The benefit of third party sites is that like social platforms, these sites have built up a lot of authority over time. This authority makes it easier for them to rank well in the search engines.

For example, the author Malcom Gladwell contributes to both The New Yorker and runs a blog on Typepad. As a result, both of these pages appear on the first page of the search results for his name:

IdeaMensch is a website that interviews CEOs, entrepreneurs, and other business personalities. These interviews are posted in an article format on their website. As a result, these articles are capable of ranking for keywords around the name of the interviewee.

We also often see success when recommending that clients start blogging on Medium. Medium is a website that contains a lot of authority which makes it a great asset to rank well in the search engines. Continually blogging on this platform can result in author pages ranking well for target keywords.

Finding opportunities to contribute to these third party sites can be a great way of establishing new content that can rank above negative search results in Google. Content such as interviews, guest blogs, author pages, and more can be fantastic digital assets towards ranking for your primary keywords.

5. Create Backlinks From Owned Assets

Not only should you be focusing on creating new content that can rank for your primary keywords, you’ll also want to try to find opportunities to link to that content using your owned digital assets. In Google’s algorithm, links to other pages act as “vote.” In general, the more “votes” that a particular page (or website) has, the better chances it stands of ranking well. You can read this guide from Moz to learn more about how links help websites rank.

Image from SEObility.net

What this means is that you’ll want to identify opportunities to internally link to high-ranking pages that are ranking below the articles you want to bury in the search results. This will help give these pages more “authority” and a better chance of ranking above the negative coverage.

Back to our Dak Prescott example, we can see that his CBS Sports page might be a good page to link to since it ranks just below the negative article.

As a result, Dak Prescott might consider linking to this page from his Instagram, DallasCowboys.com page, personal sites, and any other pages where he controls the content.

While you’re optimizing existing assets and creating new content, you should always be thinking about ways that you can internally link to your positive or neutral articles that are performing well. In the anchor text, you should attempt to use your primary keywords.

There are a lot of opportunities to link to existing digital assets from your owned properties. While it’s impossible to make a list of all of the ways you could add internal links, here are some common ways we help clients add these links:

• Linking to social profiles in website footers
• Finding link opportunities on relevant blog posts
• Ensure social profiles are linking to other social profiles
• Using personal and corporate sites to link to high-ranking content
• Linking to relevant content within author biographies

6. Optimize for Featured Snippets

If the search results for your primary keyword are showing a featured snippet, it could be a great opportunity to bump down negative search results. Featured snippets are search features where Google answers a query directly in the search results. This is generally by using two to three sentences of text or a bulleted list.

Featured snippets can be very powerful from a reputation management standpoint:

1. They rank in the #1 position: Claiming the featured snippet can help get a positive result in the very first position for your primary keyword.
2. Google can scrape any result from the first page: This means you can optimize a page ranking in position #8 for the featured snippet, potentially propelling to the #1 spot.
3. They tell the story directly in the search results: Featured snippets can be one of the first impressions users have of a particular story.

For example, here’s a positive featured snippet for Facebook (now Meta). When I Google “facebook data breach”, I can see that a featured snippet is appearing. Notice how this starts to tell the story of what happened during Facebook’s data breach without users even having to click on a single result.

By just looking at the featured snippet, you can see that users get the following information:

1. Facebook claimed the data was old
2. Facebook denied wrongdoing
3. Facebook said the information was publicly available

While a data breach is certainly a very concerning thing for a data company, this featured snippet might soften a user’s perspective about how serious the breach was. As a result, this featured snippet shows Facebook is a more positive light given the seriousness of this query.

The great thing about featured snippets is that you can use them to your advantage if one is appearing for your primary keyword. By optimizing any owned assets, this can help get content you want to appear in the first result and help you control the narrative.

Let’s use Cash App as an example. We can see that when we search for “is cash app safe”, we’re seeing a few articles that could be considered negative appearing:

These articles could certainly be damaging to Cash App’s reputation as they might make users question how safe Cash App actually is. However, Cash App has done a great job of optimizing their own site for a featured snippet that’s appearing. As a result, they rank in the #1 position, above all of the negative articles:

This is the result that users will most likely read and interact with. By ensuring that they have a page created and optimized for this term, this helps them give users a positive brand association directly in the search results.

If you’re seeing a featured snippet appearing for your primary keyword, you’ll definitely want to optimize for it with any owned assets. This will involve rewriting and restructuring pages in a way that gives the answer directly on the page in a concise manner. For more information, we have written a detailed guide on how to optimize for the featured snippet.

7. Review Other Keyword Variations

Once you’re starting to be satisfied with the results you’re seeing on the first page and you’ve successfully suppressed all negative content for your primary keyword, it’s time to move on to other keywords.

Going back to our Dak Prescott example one last time, we started by reviewing the search results for his name (“dak prescott”). However, once those results look good, you can start reviewing other search results. Search terms such as “dak prescott fans” or “dak prescott comments” still might be showing negative results.

If these searches could still be detrimental to your reputation, you might want to work on suppressing or removing any negative content you see here. You’ll want to start applying the steps above for any other search results for these keyword variations. This will help ensure that your reputation is improved across all of the likely keyword variations that users might be searching for.

Case Study

At Go Fish Digital, we’re able to apply this methodology to help our clients. While we can’t reveal some of the names and URLs, we are able to demonstrate how this process was able to successfully bury negative search results and improve the client’s online reputation score.

The below screenshot shows you the top ten ranking results when a client with some negative press approached us. You can see how the four of the top 10 results were articles the client deemed to be negative. As well, the number one ranking article was a “neutral” result.

Online Reputation Score: 60

However, after applying many of the strategies above, we were able to move all four negative articles and the neutral article off the first page entirely.

Online Reputation Score: 100

Today, the first negative result doesn’t even appear until a user reaches the third page of the search results. The client’s SERP sentiment score has improved by +40 points from 60 to 100.

Conclusion

If you’re seeing less than desired results for keywords related to your name or your business, it’s definitely worthwhile to look into how to improve your sentiment score in the search results. While removing negative results from Google is the quickest way to do this, it is often extremely difficult. Instead, you may need to pivot to suppressing the negative results by improving the rankings of other positive or neutral content. By following the process above, you’ll significantly improve your chances of hiding negative results and better controlling your brand narrative.

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

Contact Us for Search Suppression Services

Request a Proposal

How to Remove & Suppress Negative Search Results is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Let’s dive in!

Do Online Reviews Really Matter?

Online reviews have become an increasingly popular resource for people researching a business or service. In fact, a study we conducted in 2023 found that dropping from a 4 to 3-star review rating led to a 70% decrease in consumer trust in a business. With this in mind, businesses are putting more effort toward building their online reputation, including managing their online review platforms. 

On the flipside, consumers are also using reviews more frequently to provide feedback to businesses they’ve interacted with. This feedback can be highly valuable to businesses, as they can use it to see where they’re doing well and what they need to improve on. Review platforms can also provide a direct line of communication from consumer to customer support, aiding in complaint resolution.

Why Do Consumers Leave Online Reviews?

As a business owner, you may wonder, “Why did my customer leave a negative review instead of contacting my business directly?” While there are many reasons why a customer might leave a positive or negative review, the main one is likely the convenience and accessibility of review sites. If a business does not make their customer service contact easy to find online, or require a deluge of menu options to reach a team member, a consumer may find it much easier to just leave a review. 

There is also an idea for many consumers that by leaving a public review of their complaints, they are more likely to get a response and/or resolution to their issue. Consumers know that businesses do not want negative reviews harming their reputation, so they assume that by leaving one, the business will work above and beyond to make things right. We see this idea amplified by things like review bombing, where hundreds or thousands of users leave negative reviews in an effort to tank a business’ ratings because they feel a business did something wrong. 

Can Businesses Delete Negative Online Reviews?

There is a common misconception that businesses have much more control over their online reviews than they actually do. For instance, you may have seen people online complain that a business has been “deleting negative reviews” on Yelp, Google, or some other review platform. But is this actually true? Can businesses really just delete all their negative reviews? 

To cut to the chase, no, there is no option for businesses to outright delete negative reviews across the most popular review platforms. But let’s take a look at what some of these platforms have to say about negative review removal: 

Yelp

Negative reviews on Yelp can be deleted only by the customer who posted them. Yelp’s moderators may also filter out or remove them due to a guideline violation. 

Yelp strongly encourages businesses to provide the customer with a solution-focused, thoughtful response. If a business believes a review should be removed rather than responded to, Yelp recommends that the business report the review to moderators. It’s important to note that anyone can report a review to Yelp, not just the business itself.

Reporting a review is not guaranteed to remove it, however, and attempting to abuse Yelp’s reporting options with mass reporting of all negative reviews can still get businesses in trouble. This is why Yelp has a few precautions in place, such as removing the ability for multiple users to report a single review. If a review has already been reported before, but Yelp moderators decided at that time to keep the review up, it cannot be reported again. When reporting again, Yelp will respond with a message stating that it has already been brought to their attention and they will not be re-evaluating the decision. 

Yelp has also stated that it “stands firmly against businesses pressuring customers or paying them to change or remove reviews.” While a business could technically attempt to do this to change a negative review into a positive one, it’s well known that this is in poor taste, and could lead to some serious repercussions for the business. Businesses could even risk getting into trouble with the FTC over an undisclosed incentivized review. Because of these risks, it’s highly uncommon for a business to take such drastic measures just to have a single negative review updated to a positive one. 

Google

If a business wants Google to remove a negative review, their only option is to report it. Google asks that businesses only report the reviews that “violate Google policies” and that you shouldn’t “report a review just because you disagree with it or don’t like it.”

While Google is not as detailed as Yelp on review removal, it’s clear that they want to remain an unbiased third party by stating that they don’t “get involved when businesses and customers disagree about facts.” 

As with Yelp, anyone can report a review on Google, not just the business itself. Within a Google Business Profile, businesses can open the Reviews Management Tool to check the status of a reported review. If Google finds that there were no policy violations, businesses are allowed a one-time appeal of the decision. After that, a review is unlikely to be re-evaluated for removal.

Aside from reporting, the only other option for a review to be removed is if the customer decides to delete it themselves, or if Google’s automated moderation tools find a guideline violation on their own. 

Trustpilot

Although Trustpilot offers both a free and a paid version of their platform to businesses, they make it clear that there are no differences in terms of TrustScore or flagging ability between the two versions. Trustpilot states that “all businesses—free and paid—are allowed to flag reviews they believe breach our guidelines.” They also clarify that “simply not liking a review is not a legitimate reason” to flag it. 

Trustpilot does not offer businesses the option to pay for negative review removal either, and like the other review platforms, Trustpilot aims to remain an unbiased third party in the situation. When a business flags a negative review, Trustpilot will typically reach out to the reviewer to ask for some form of proof that they had a legitimate interaction with the business’ product or service. This could be an order number, a receipt, or some other documentation. If the reviewer fails to provide adequate documentation, Trustpilot will remove the review. 

Trustpilot also states that “flagging a large number of reviews or re-flagging reviews without good reason can be considered misuse of the flagging tool.” If a business is caught repeatedly abusing the flagging tool, Trustpilot will send them a warning to stop. If misuse continues, a Consumer Warning flag will appear on the business’ page, which could lead to the complete termination of any contract the business has with Trustpilot.  

BBB

Unique from other review sites, BBB (Better Business Bureau) offers both reviews and complaints on their platform. BBB explains that “a consumer files a complaint when the consumer wants BBB’s help to resolve a dispute with a company, usually (but not always) involving a monetary claim, and wants to share the outcome with the public.” In contrast, “customer reviews allow consumers to share with BBB and the public their opinion – good or bad – about companies with which they had a marketplace interaction.”

BBB does not offer the ability to flag or report complaints, unlike other review platforms. BBB states that complaints “cannot be changed, edited, or deleted once it has been submitted.” This means even the reviewer is unable to delete their own review. 

As for reviews, businesses can respond to BBB with an explanation of their side if they disagree with the customer’s statements. The only way a review can be removed is if the review contains sensitive information, such as phone numbers or addresses, or uses hate speech or abusive language. However, the decision to remove a review for these reasons is up to BBB, and businesses cannot flag or report it themselves. 

Can Businesses Buy Positive Reviews?

Along the same vein, many believe that businesses can buy or otherwise incentivize positive reviews. You may have seen ads posted for businesses like “Leave us a Google review for 15% off your next purchase!” or “Rate us on Facebook for a free basket of fries!” Is this actually allowed? Is it poor practice? While review solicitation policies can differ amongst popular review sites, they tend to follow similar guidelines when it comes to incentivized reviews. 

Yelp

Review soliciting of any kind is strictly prohibited on Yelp. If a business is caught soliciting reviews, Yelp will enact a set of penalties based on the severity of the business’ activity. Paying for or incentivizing reviews in any way is also strictly prohibited, according to Yelp’s guidelines. 

Google

While review solicitation is allowed on Google, the platform states that “business owners shouldn’t offer incentives to customers to leave reviews.” If Google gets a slew of positive reviews for a business, and Google has reason to believe that they were incentivized, the reviews will be removed for violating guidelines. 

Trustpilot

Businesses are allowed to invite customers to leave feedback on Trustpilot, however, the platform warns users that “receiving an incentive to write, change or delete a review is a big no-no.” Trustpilot encourages users who receive an incentive to report it on their platform. 

BBB

Simply put, “BBB’s Customer Review Acceptance Policy goes beyond FTC’s legal requirements and prohibits customer reviews that are incentivized even if a disclosure is made.” Incentivizing reviews violates BBB’s Standards for Trust, and “BBB may include a notice on the Business Profile to inform consumers about the practice” if this activity is discovered. 

Does BBB Actually Force Businesses to Resolve Complaints?

While discussing the authenticity of review sites, we find it important to clear up some misinformation regarding the BBB. There seems to be an overarching idea that the BBB has direct power or control over businesses, and can actually take steps to force businesses to resolve complaints. In order to explain the validity of this idea, let’s first build an understanding of the Better Business Bureau.

What is the Better Business Bureau?

The Better Business Bureau, commonly known as the BBB, is self-described as a platform that “sets standards for ethical business behavior and monitors compliance.” This description, combined with the “bureau” in the name, has led many to believe that the BBB has government connections. 

Is the BBB Affiliated with Government Organizations?

The truth is that the BBB is yet another privately owned organization like Yelp, Trustpilot, and other review platforms. As explained on Wikipedia, the “Better Business Bureau is not affiliated with any governmental agency,” and although their “policy is to refrain from recommending or endorsing any specific business … they still advocate for business interests.”

To be clear, we do not believe that the BBB is engaging in any deceptive activities to mislead consumers into believing they have more power over businesses than they actually do. However, between the name, description, and consumer perception, the BBB has built their reputation as a leading platform for consumer-business resolution. 

Why do Businesses Care About BBB Ratings?

Businesses tend to take BBB more seriously than other platforms because they know consumers hold BBB ratings to a higher standard and that a negative letter or star rating on the platform can really tank consumers’ trust in a business. BBB also tends to rank highly in businesses’ search results, especially for a query like “[business name] reviews.” 

This, in turn, encourages businesses to resolve complaints and come to a resolution with all customers on the BBB platform. Additionally, businesses cannot maintain a good letter rating on BBB if they are not actively responding to and working toward complaint resolutions. Luckily for businesses, the BBB is happy to aid them in improving their reputation on the platform by providing an accreditation program. In order to be accredited, a business must meet the BBB’s accreditation standards, as well as pay a yearly membership fee to the platform. 

How to Spot a Fake Review

Now that we’ve discussed the popular review platforms’ guidelines on review deletion and incentivization, let’s take a look at reasons why a fake or biased review may still end up on a review site. 

Despite their policies and moderation tools, no review platform can catch 100% of false or biased reviews. These platforms can’t know for sure if a review was incentivized, whether the reviewer has a conflict of interest with the business, or if the review content is genuine. They also can’t know if a business is verbally requesting or incentivizing reviews against guidelines unless reported. 

This is why most popular review platforms offer some form of review reporting or flagging to both the business and outside parties. These tools help keep ratings honest and aid platforms in catching fake reviews that their automated filters may have missed. It’s important to note that although anyone can technically flag any review for any reason, the decision to remove is ultimately up to the review platform’s moderators. There is no magic number of review flags that automatically equate to a review being removed. 

So, how do you spot a fake, biased, or incentivized review when researching a company? Here are a few things to look out for:

• The review is overly positive or lacks detail: While you can’t assume that every positive review was incentivized, it’s always a good idea to take overly positive reviews with a grain of salt. Some review sites, like Yelp and Trustpilot, value the description of a genuine consumer experience in their reviews. If you see a review on these platforms that is unusually short and generic, it may not be authentic. Keep in mind that reviewers who had a negative experience are more likely to provide detail than those who had a positive one, so this should not be your only reason for believing a review is fake. 
• The review has nothing to do with the entity being reviewed: A big red flag when reading through reviews is if the content of the review has nothing to do with the entity being reviewed. For instance, sometimes the content of the review is just the reviewer’s name, all emojis, or some other form of gibberish unrelated to the entity. 
• The review listing features mass amounts of reviews within a short time period: If your local small-owned donut shop suddenly has 200 overly positive or overly negative reviews, you may have cause for suspicion. Mass amounts of overly positive reviews within a short period of time could suggest that a business put some sort of incentivization in place to encourage customers to leave positive reviews. Conversely, mass amounts of negative reviews could be a review bombing attack on a business. 
• Multiple reviews use the same content: If you see multiple reviews using the exact same sentence(s), it’s likely that they are bots copying and pasting the text into multiple review submissions. 
• The reviewer explains a bias within their review: This will be one of the more obvious tells, but there are some reviewers that actually write within the review content that a business incentivized them to leave a positive review. We can also see this with negative reviews in reviewing bombing attacks, where the reviewer will state that they saw something negative about the business online, which prompted them to leave a bad review. This makes it clear that the reviewer likely did not have a personal experience with the business. 

If you suspect a review is fake, biased, incentivized, or violating a review platform’s guidelines in any way, you are welcome to report that review to the platform. This helps keep review listings authentic, accurate, and free of misleading reviews. 

Research Reviews with Confidence

With the developments of AI and the increasing spread of misinformation online, it’s important for consumers to be educated and up to date on the inner workings of popular review platforms. With the right tools and knowledge, consumers can feel confident researching a business’ review listings. It’s clear that online review platforms have put many safety precautions in place to keep their review content authentic, however, it’s still important for consumers to take what they read with a grain of salt. 

Businesses should also remain up to date on each review platform’s guidelines and policies for review solicitation, incentivization, and flagging. A consumer warning posted on a business’ review listing can be detrimental to consumer trust. Complaint resolution and customer satisfaction should be the number one priority for all businesses and are ultimately what will build trust for other potential customers reading through the reviews. 

If you need assistance managing your business’ review platforms, Go Fish Digital can help. Our Online Reputation Management team is experienced in managing the most popular review platforms and can help you build a customized review management strategy that gets your business’ reputation on track. Contact us today to learn more! 

The Truth Behind Online Reviews: Can They Be Trusted? 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
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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.

Related Content:

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

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.