How To Ask For a Review

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Online reviews can make or break a business. But most people won’t go out of their way to leave a review—you need to ask them. 

Learning the right way to ask customers for reviews will help drown out negative reviews, improve your reputation, and generate more revenue for your business.

Before you know it, you’ll have hundreds, if not thousands, of online reviews for your business across multiple review websites and platforms. 

The Top Online Reputation Management Companies to Help You Get More Reviews

Asking for reviews and getting more reviews is easier with some help. These reputation management specialists can streamline this process and help you get reviews quicker:

• WebiMax — Best overall
• NetReputation – Best for ultra-responsive customer support
• InternetReputation.com – Best for personal reputation management
• Reputation Defense Network — Best for permanently removing false content
• Podium — Best for getting reviews automatically
• SEO Image — Best for legal and medical practices
• Gadook — Best for rebranding after reputation attacks
• BirdEye — Best for getting Google and Facebook reviews
• Reputation.com — Best for knowing your competition’s reputation
• Go Fish Digital — Best for improving Yelp reviews
• Netmark.com — Best for hands-off, fast responses to reputation hits

You can read the full reviews of each online reputation management company here.

5 Steps to Ask For a Review

Asking for customers to leave you a review is much easier if you have a playbook to follow. The entire process can be summarized in just five simple steps:

1. Establish Your Presence on Review Sites
2. Set Up Automated Review Requests
3. Give Your Customers a Reason to Leave a Review
4. Monitor and Respond to Customer Reviews
5. Showcase and Promote Your Best Reviews

The Easy Parts of Asking For a Review

Lots of business owners don’t know when to ask for a review. They think the opportunities are scarce. But this is a common misconception. 

There are actually tons of opportunities to ask customers for reviews on a daily basis. The easiest time to ask is immediately following the sale. 

Following a purchase, you can set up automated prompts for reviews through emails, text messages, thank you pages, and other landing pages. This is when it’s helpful to partner with an online reputation management company, as they’ll have the technology you need to automate this process.

WebiMax is an excellent option. In addition to automating online review prompts, WebiMax can also help you ask for customer reviews in person.

They’ll generate a QR code that you can put on print media or point-of-sale stations to make it easy on your customers when you’re asking them for a review. 

As a full-service reputation management company, WebiMax can also help suppress negative reviews, remove negative reviews, promote positive reviews, and get more reviews than your competition. 

The Difficult Parts of Asking for a Review

The hardest part about asking for reviews is that you can’t control what people say. 

Some customers will have a bad experience with your business. If you’re asking those people to leave a review, don’t be surprised if they share candid feedback. 

Many business owners struggle with negative reviews because they take things personally. The sooner you start looking at negative reviews as a chance to get better and improve your business, the easier it will be moving forward.

There will always be a handful of customers that can’t be pleased, no matter how hard you try. But those scenarios are generally anomalies and shouldn’t be something for you to worry about.

Having patience is another challenge for some business owners, especially if you currently have low star ratings and lots of negative reviews across multiple platforms. You can’t jump from a 3-star rating to a 5-star rating overnight. It’s going to take some time for you to see an improvement. 

But once you start asking for reviews and the volume of online reviews increases, you should start to see the positive reviews outweigh the negative ones. 

Knowing When to Stop Asking for a Review

The other difficult part of asking customers for a review is knowing how frequently to ask and when to stop asking. If the customer does not respond to your request for a review the first time, you may want to generate a few automated emails or text messages to ask again. This sometimes will work, as some customers simply may be too busy or may forget to leave a review immediately after the purchase. They may respond positively to the reminder.

However, if you generate too many reminders, the customer may feel frustrated with the pressure to leave a review. This could lead to a negative review, simply out of spite. 

When you hire an online reputation management company to represent you, this company can help you find the sweet spot in the number of times to request reviews from a customer who is procrastinating.

Step 1 – Establish Your Presence on Review Sites

Before you can ask customers to leave you a review, you need to guide them in the right direction. “Can you please leave us a review?” without any link or direction isn’t going to get the job done.

For digital requests, you’ll want a direct link to one or more specific review sites. Even if you’re asking in person, you should direct the customer to a specific site.

Claim Any Unclaimed Profiles

Make sure you set up a business profile on all of the most popular review sites related to your brand and industry. Prioritize the ones that already have existing reviews. 

Here are some examples of sites where customers leave reviews online:

• Yelp
• Google
• Facebook
• Yellowpages
• Trustpilot
• Foursquare
• ConsumerReports

Depending on your business, there might be some other platforms to consider. For example, Amazon sellers would obviously want to direct customers to leave a review on Amazon. B2B software companies would want to establish a presence on sites like G2.

If you’re unsure which profiles need to be claimed, WebiMax can help you out. This is part of their free reputation analysis service.

If you’re on the fence about working with a reputation management company or handling this on your own, it can’t hurt to start with the free analysis. Then you can make a decision from there.

Make Sure All Your Information is Accurate

Once you’ve claimed your business profiles, you need to go through and verify all of your information. The format of everything will obviously vary from platform to platform, but here’s a quick checklist of the information you should have on every profile:

• Business name
• Physical address
• Mailing address
• Phone number
• Email address
• Website
• Links to social media platforms
• Hours of operation
• Menu (if applicable)
• Services (if applicable)

You should also use this opportunity to add professional photos to your profile. This is your chance to show off your products, food, customers, employees,  services, and anything else that you’d like to highlight when potential customers land on this site to check you out.

Step 2 – Set Up Automated Review Requests

Now that you have all of your profiles claimed, you can send customers to these sites with an automated review request. Depending on how you’re interacting with customers, you’ll have different options to consider.

Requests via Email

Any post-purchase email, including confirmation numbers, receipts, and shipping updates can contain a section that asks for a review. Alternatively, you can set up automated campaigns specifically designed around reviews, where the request is the entire purpose of the message.

Experiment with both of these options. But timing is really important to consider here. 

For example, if you’re running an ecommerce website, asking customers to review your product in an order confirmation email may not be so effective—they haven’t received the product yet. You’d be better off waiting until the product has been delivered for at least a week.

But a restaurant would have better luck asking for a review immediately following the meal. If you wait a week in this scenario, the customer might not even remember what they ordered. 

Mobile Requests

You can also set up automated review requests via text message. This would obviously require the customer’s permission, but it works well in scenarios where you’re communicating with them over the phone.

For example, when you’re offering phone support to a customer, you can end the conversation by asking if you can send them a review request via SMS messaging directly to their phone.

If you have a mobile app, you can prompt customers to leave you reviews with push notifications or in-app messages. 

Requests in Person

Technically, asking someone for a review in person isn’t automated. But you can look at it as just another step in the checkout flow, just like telling the customer the total amount due or asking them to swipe a card.

The cool part about using WebiMax to help you with request automation is that they can also generate QR codes for you. 

This is perfect for in-person requests, where the customer can pull up a review site in seconds from a QR code, as opposed to having to find it on their own. 

Having a company like WebiMax automate your review request process with the right technology will drastically increase the chances of your customers completing your request. 

Step 3 – Give Your Customers a Reason to Leave a Review

Why should your customers leave you a review? This is not a hypothetical question.

Giving some type of reason or incentive can go a long way. So make sure to include your reasoning in the request, whether that’s in person or digitally. 

Make it clear you’re not just soliciting positive reviews—you want honest feedback. Explain the benefits of getting reviews for your business. Be honest and explain you’re trying to reach new customers. Let them know you value their opinion. Share that you always want the customer to have a positive experience and that you’re trying to get better. 

Stick with one or two reasons, and move on. You can experiment with different reasons to see if some propositions work better than others. 

Just always make sure you’re asking nicely, and make it as easy as possible on whoever you’re asking. Saying please, thanking them in advance, and providing them a direct link to the review site will definitely increase your chances of success. You can also offer a small incentive, like a discount on a future purchase. 

Step 4 – Monitor and Respond to Customer Reviews

Your job isn’t over once the request has been made. Now you need to see if customers are actually leaving reviews. 

Then you can see what kind of feedback you’re getting and respond appropriately. 

Set Up Alerts

Time is of the essence when you’re monitoring reviews. 

Replying a week later isn’t as effective as responding immediately. This not only shows your customers that you care about their feedback, but it also gives you a chance to get ahead of potentially negative reviews. 

Many review sites give users the option to filter reviews by date. So the most recent ones will appear first. 

In the event that someone has a bad experience, a prompt reply from the business owner can make prospects feel better about the situation. Apologizing, owning your mistake, and offering a resolution can save your relationship with a disgruntled customer and show new customers how seriously you take feedback.

That’s why it’s so important to set up alerts so you can promptly respond. 

WebiMax makes this process really easy, as you can have alerts go to a single person or to your entire team. 

For larger organizations with multiple locations and different managers, having an alert system that goes to the right people will make everyone’s job much easier. 

This also ensures that the customer is contacted by the appropriate person during the reply. A reply from a restaurant manager is more impactful than a reply from the corporate office of a franchise.

Use a Review Dashboard

Google, Yelp, and all major review sites let you set up alerts through the individual platform. But getting bombarded with emails is tough to manage at scale, and there’s a good chance some reviews will slip through the cracks.

WebiMax has a review collection dashboard that lets you see all of your reviews from every site within a single source of truth. 

This might not be important if you’re only getting one or two reviews each week on a single site. But once you start getting dozens of daily reviews across multiple review sites, you’re definitely going to want everything in a consolidated dashboard. 

Step 5 – Showcase and Promote Your Best Reviews

Now it’s time to pick out your best reviews and show them to the world. Here’s why this is important.

Some customers are loyal to specific review sites. So if a customer only checks Yelp, then they’ll never see your best reviews on Google. 

Here, the idea is to showcase the best reviews on your website and social channels to broaden the reach and expose them to the widest possible audience. 

WebiMax has simple widgets that even non-technical owners can use to share reviews on social media and their websites. 

You can even use schema markup generated by WebiMax for SEO purposes, so your reviews have a chance of appearing within the search results. 

Customer Testimonials and Case Studies

Some businesses can take reviews a step further by showcasing customer testimonials and reviews on their website. This works really well for service-based businesses and B2B organizations.

Maybe you run a personal training business. While a customer review is great, a testimonial that includes before and after photos will really prove what you can accomplish. 

B2Bs might put together case studies about how much money they helped a business save, how their efforts generated a positive ROI, or how they were able to improve internal efficiencies. 

These types of initiatives will take a lot more work than asking for a review. But sourcing your existing reviews for potential candidates is a simple first step. Then you can contact those people privately and see if they’re interested in a testimonial or case study. 

If you find some customers who have interest in helping you with a customer testimonial, you may want to hire a professional writer, photographer, or video company to package the testimonial. You certainly don’t want the testimonial to seem forced or fake, but you do want it to appear professional and believable, and hiring pros may help you accomplish this.

To entice customers to agree to provide a testimonial, you may want to promise to add a link to the customer’s website as part of the testimonial. If the testimonial looks great on your site, the customer may even want to include a copy of the testimonial on its site. 

You do not want to offer a customer free products or a discounted bill in exchange for a positive customer testimonial, however. Someone may choose to reveal this information on the internet in a way to sabotage your company, making it appear as though you are bribing customers to leave positive reviews and customer testimonials.

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How to Repair Your Online Reputation

Want to get going right away? Click here to sign up for WebiMax and start improving your online reputation today. 

A bad online business reputation isn’t just embarrassing, it costs your company money every day. 

Customers search Google, check review sites, and browse social channels before they ever reach out for a quote or a demo. If they find bad reviews or negative comments about your business, they’ll move on to the next option.

Ensuring savvy consumers find positive information about your business is not just a nicety—it’s a necessity. Here’s how to make that happen.

The Top Online Reputation Management Companies to Repair Your Reputation

Fixing a damaged business reputation requires patience, a lot of legwork on your part, and ongoing attention. If you don’t have the time or resources to manage the repair yourself, you can turn to an online reputation management service to do the heavy lifting on your behalf.

Here are the ones we determined are the best of the best.

• WebiMax — Best overall
• NetReputation – Best for ultra-responsive customer support
• InternetReputation.com – Best for personal reputation management
• Reputation Defense Network — Best for permanently removing false content from the web
• Podium — Best for getting reviews automatically
• SEO Image — Best for legal and medical practices
• Gadook — Best for rebranding after reputation attacks
• BirdEye — Best for getting Google and Facebook reviews
• Reputation.com — Best for knowing your competition’s reputation
• Go Fish Digital — Best for improving Yelp reviews
• Netmark.com — Best for hands-off, fast responses to reputation hits

For more info on these companies, read our full reviews of each online reputation management company.

Five Steps to Repair Your Online Reputation

Totally eliminating bad press about your business may not be 100% possible. However, there are steps you can take to position yourself in a positive light and minimize the impact of the bad information out there.

The overall goal of any reputation repair strategy is to generate positive content about your business and have that content rank high in search engine results. This positive content then pushes the negative content off page one of search results and onto later pages where almost nobody bothers to look.

Here are the steps to take to do that:

1. Claim All Your Online Business Profiles
2. Monitor What Is Being Said About Your Business Online
3. Request The Removal Of Negative Information
4. Harness The Power Of SEO
5. Engage, Engage, Engage

We’ll walk you through each of these steps later in this article. 

The Easy Parts of Online Reputation Repair

Unfortunately, there’s no easy or quick fix to improve your online reputation. It’s an ongoing process that takes time and effort. That being said, there are a few things you can do right away to build a foundation for turning your online reputation around. 

One of the easiest things to do is claim all social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) and online accounts (Google Business, Yelp, etc.) on behalf of your business. This gives you an online presence everywhere, allows those pages to show up high in search results, and offers customers a place to leave positive reviews—more on that last one later. 

The other thing you can do is to set up Google Alerts for your business name. This provides nearly immediate notice when your business is mentioned on the web. You can set your alert to deliver notifications weekly, daily, or as they happen. Armed with early notice, you can deal with any potentially negative information fast.

Of course, for anyone who wants to leave reputation repair to the professionals, there are many capable services available to assist. One of my favorites is WebiMax. They’ve been helping businesses fix online reputation issues for years with proven results.

WebiMax specializes in helping businesses with reputation management and other digital marketing services. They offer a customized solution for every single client. No cookie-cutter or one-size-fits all approaches here. 

WebiMax also ensures total confidentiality with a non-disclosure agreement. Nobody ever knows you’re even using a third party for reputation management.

Every new client also benefits from a free comprehensive reputation analysis to understand where and how your brand needs help. This analysis includes a realistic timeline for goal achievement, reports on both negative and positive online content, a list of unclaimed online profiles, and a custom price quote.

The Difficult Parts of Online Reputation Repair

While claiming all your online profiles is relatively easy, it is much harder to effectively manage all of them day in and day out. This is a full-time role in many companies. 

When you are spending significant time on trying to repair your online reputation, you may experience frustration with how slowly the process is going. Understand that achieving results through this process is going to take a while, but it will be worth it in the long run. Think of it as making an investment in your future, even if you are not receiving immediate benefits.

Likewise, understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and effectively incorporating it into your content is another big hurdle for many businesses. Again, this is a specialized area that requires knowledge and experience to do well. 

Yet SEO is a crucial part of successfully turning your negative online reputation around, since pushing negative information further down in search results is a big way to improve your online presence. Good SEO helps your positive content rank high which leaves no room on the first page of search results for negative information.

Of course, in order to succeed in burying negative information about your business, it’s not enough just to have a solid SEO strategy. You must also publish fresh, new content on a regular basis, content that is both helpful to readers and aligned with the SEO strategy you just came up with. Whether this content looks like a weekly blog post, regular press releases, or some other form of communication, many companies don’t have the bandwidth or in-house expertise to do this well.

If all of this work sounds daunting, that’s because it can be. Many companies, especially those without the skills or resources in-house to tackle these tasks, turn to online reputation management companies for assistance.

A full-service company, like WebiMax, can manage all facets of online reputation repair, including the tough tasks like SEO, online engagement management, and content creation.

WebiMax is a complete digital marketing agency, experienced in handling all aspects of building and maintaining a positive online presence for your business. They do the hard work and let you focus on doing what you do best–running your company.

Step 1: Claim All Your Online Business Profiles

The first thing to do to start your reputation cleanup process is to inventory your existing online business profiles and identify any you haven’t yet claimed. This ensures that customers and potential customers can find information about you easily, while also offering them an easy place to leave reviews.

Social Media

Choose the social media channels most important to your business, and make sure you have complete profiles on each. Whether this is a Facebook Business page, Twitter account, LinkedIn company page, Instagram account, Pinterest profile, or all of the above, be sure your company information is complete on each platform. If your company uses video at all, add YouTube and TikTok to that list. 

There are two reasons to do this. First, these accounts often show up near the top of online search results. If your business doesn’t have any profiles, you lose this easy opportunity to appear high up on page one of the search results.

Second, customers often turn to social media to talk about their experiences—good or bad. On some platforms they can even leave reviews. Staying active on social media is one way to keep your finger on the pulse of what customers are saying about your business, engage with them in a positive way, and respond to any negative comments quickly. 

Business and Review Sites

Don’t forget about sites like Google Business and Yelp. Both will show up high in search results, which is usually a good thing. Having a profile on each also gives customers an easy way to leave positive reviews about your business.

It’s also important to know that, at least in the case of Yelp, people can leave reviews whether you have an official business profile or not. However, you can’t respond to any reviews until you set up your business profile there. Engaging with customer reviews is important, so you’ll want to be able to do so on every platform.

If all this seems overwhelming, WebiMax will take care of it for you.

They’ll set up and monitor your social media and online business listings, confirm the information is always accurate, and manage engagement, too.

Step 2: Monitor What Is Being Said About Your Business Online

Another easy step you should take right away is to keep an eye on your business mentions online. This is the fastest way to know when something negative about you turns up on the web. 

Identify Past Mentions

This is as simple as running an online search for your business name, products, and services. You’ll find any past mentions and can quickly assess how much negative information is out there right now.

Running a search is also a good way to see how your business stacks up in search results overall. This gives you a benchmark for measuring search result improvements in the future. 

Set Up Google Alerts for Future Mentions

Knowing what’s already been said is only part of the equation. You also need to be aware when new information is published. While you could just keep running searches periodically, there is a more efficient way.

You can automate the process by setting up a Google Alert for your business name.

You have a number of settings to set up, including how often to be alerted. I recommend you select as-it-happens, so you can deal with any negative information as fast as possible.

Once you create your alert, you’ll receive an email at the interval you chose. The email will identify all mentions of your business name with a link to the source.

Step 3: Request Negative Information Be Deleted

If you find untrue or defamatory information about your business in a Google search result, you can ask Google to delete it. They have processes in place to evaluate and respond to these requests.

But keep in mind that even if Google does remove the information from its search results, the content will still reside online at its source. It just won’t appear in any Google searches. You will have to approach the site directly if you want the information permanently deleted from the web.

If the negative information is on a public review site like Yelp, you can ask the site to remove the false review. The site will investigate and if they find the information is untrue, they will take the information down.

However, if the negative review stems from a legitimate transaction, then you’ll have to approach the review differently. I’ll cover how to handle that scenario in Step 5, below.

The reassuring news is that an online reputation management service like WebiMax can manage both these tasks for you. This frees you up from spending valuable time communicating back and forth with search engines or online review sites.

Step 4: Harness the Power of SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps the content you publish about your business rank higher in online search results. This is a very effective way to push any negative information about your company off page one and into internet oblivion.

Why does this matter? Three-quarters of people who search online don’t look beyond the first page of results. So the more positive content you can get to land high in rankings, the faster the bad stuff will be relegated to the place few people look.

Develop a Solid SEO Strategy

Creating a comprehensive SEO strategy involves researching to determine high-ranking keywords and phrases applicable to your business, building a solid website structure, and getting backlinks to your content from other reputable websites.

Effectively doing this requires having someone on your team that is very knowledgeable about the ins and outs of SEO. This person creates the strategy and then manages the execution. It is a big job, so don’t worry if you aren’t—or don’t want to be—an SEO expert. WebiMax offers award-winning SEO services that will help elevate your company to a top spot in Google’s search results.

They’ll help you with all the things you need to ensure your business is leveraging every SEO strategy possible to boost your position in search engine rankings. And their efforts are all totally customized for your business.

Create Great Content

The SEO research will tell you what users are searching for, but it’s up to you to create killer content that is informative and helpful for those users. Your content must also incorporate the keywords and phrases you identified during your SEO research, so that it has a chance to catch Google’s attention. 

The more of this great content you publish, the happier Google will be since it loves fresh, quality content. Pleasing Google gives you the best shot to see your content rank high in search results. 

Having a blog on your website is a great place to start. You can use it to share news and information about your business, answer frequently asked questions, offer tips, and provide other information relevant to your company.

Another important factor is adding content to your website. You can publish your blog on your website, but you also can create content that describes your business and your services that ranks well on Google. 

Additionally, you need to have a well-organized website. If visitors click through to your website, but quickly become frustrated with finding the information they want, they will jump to the next site in the Google search results. A well-organized website generates “sticky” visitors, meaning they spend a lot of time on your site, which Google views positively inside its ranking system.

Knowing exactly how to create sticky content on a website that keeps visitors engaged can be challenging for many people. If you are running your own business already, you may not have much time available to create your content. An online reputation management company like WebiMax can help you design your website, organizing it successfully and helping you create content that ranks well.

You can also employ other strategies like sending out press releases and sharing your content across your social media channels. The more positive information you send out into the world about your business, the more chances you have to bury any negative information.

Step 5: Engage, Engage, Engage

Once you’ve got your basic online reputation repair strategies in place, it’s time to start a dialogue with your current and future customers. Regular engagement is one of the most effective ways to build goodwill with your target audience. 

Ask For Reviews

While customers who have a bad experience don’t hesitate to leave negative reviews, the same isn’t always true for satisfied customers. It’s important to encourage your happy customers to share their positive experiences with the world through online reviews.

There are many ways to do this. You can create social media posts asking them to share their honest opinions about their experience with you. You can include small reminders in the packages you send with customer orders. You can send follow-up emails to your customers, too.

The point is to remind customers that reviews are a valuable part of their transaction with your company. 

Respond To All Reviews

Asking for reviews is only half of the equation. You also need to respond in a timely manner to all the reviews you get—whether they’re good or not so great. Responding to the positive reviews is easy—a simple “thanks for your feedback” is fine, though you can certainly say more to show your gratitude if you want! 

Responding to negative reviews is a little trickier. If the contents of the review are true and the issue they’re complaining about actually happened, be open and honest in your response. Acknowledge the mistake, fix it if you can, and apologize. Then explain the steps you’ve taken to avoid a repeat of the mistake down the road.

If asking for and responding to customer reviews feels like something your business doesn’t have time to do, WebiMax can help you with this, too.

They’ll get reviews for your business, keep your online profiles up-to-date, provide strategic responses to all reviews, and help highlight the most positive ones.

Other Ways To Engage

Social media is a great way to engage with your followers. Start with a thoughtful post, ask readers to respond in comments, then respond quickly to any comments you get. 

While this sort of engagement isn’t going to directly impact any negative online information, it does keep your company front of mind for your followers. Then when you do ask for reviews on your social channels, there’s a higher likelihood your followers will see the request and respond with the positive reviews you want.

You can also turn on comments on your blog posts and engage with readers there. These comments are visible to anyone reading your content. This is a great way to showcase your attentive customer service and focus on engagement.

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How to Remove Unwanted Search Results from Google

Want to just get started? Click here to sign up for WebiMax and start removing unwanted search results from Google today.

You want people to find out about your brand–but what if Google search results are outdated, wrong, or contain personal information?

It’s not always possible to remove unwanted content from search results, but you should get rid of anything you can. You may also be able to make the unwanted content less visible in search results, if you cannot remove it.

The Top Online Reputation Management Companies for Removing Unwanted Results from Google

Removing undesirable Google search results is a key part of protecting your brand’s reputation. Instead of handling this issue in-house, many businesses enlist professional services to help them maintain a positive online image. These are the top options:

• WebiMax – Best overall
• NetReputation – Best for ultra-responsive customer support
• InternetReputation.com – Best for personal reputation management
• Reputation Defense Network – Best for permanently removing false content
• Podium – Best for getting reviews automatically
• SEO Image – Best for legal and medical practices
• Gadook – Best for rebranding after reputation attacks
• BirdEye – Best for getting Google and Facebook reviews
• Reputation.com – Best for knowing your competition’s reputation
• Go Fish Digital – Best for improving Yelp reviews
• Netmark.com – Best for hands-off, fast responses to reputation hits

You can read our full reviews for each of these companies here.

5 Steps to Remove Unwanted Google Search Results

Here’s what you can do to remove unwanted search results from Google:

• Step 1 – Start with the Content You Control
• Step 2 – Use an Online Reputation Management Company (WebiMax)
• Step 3 – Contact the Webmaster to Remove the Content
• Step 4 – Ask Google to Remove the Search Result
• Step 5 – Check If the Removal Was Successful

The Easy Parts of Removing Unwanted Google Search Results

The good news is that some type of content is easy to remove from Google search results. Some examples include personally identifiable information, defamatory content, and even background reports and arrest records.

The steps for removing these types of content are also fairly straightforward. You may even be able to do it yourself with basic computer and internet knowledge. This is especially true if it’s your own content, such as an outdated web page or blog post. 

It’s even easier when you use a reputation management service like WebiMax.

The Difficult Parts of Removing Unwanted Google Search Results

Some type of content is difficult or impossible to remove from Google search results. For example, content types like Sex Offender Registry Listings, government or law enforcement public records, and telephone numbers may be impossible to remove.

Equally, some types of content that can be removed may require extra steps. For example, you may need a takedown notice, legal request, or court order to remove Google results in some cases. You may also need to prove that the unwanted content infringes upon Google Policies, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or other such policies.

Things can also get complicated when attempting to remove other people’s content, even if it is about your brand. At the very least, you’ll need to contact the site owner or webmaster with a request to remove the content. This process may require a lot of patience and back-and-forth with the site owner before you are successful.

You may need help from a legal expert or a professional reputation management company in some of these cases. Regardless, removing unwanted search results takes time and effort. It may even take a few days or weeks before the result disappears from the search results after completing all the necessary steps.

Step 1 – Start with the Content You Control

By far, the easiest type of content to remove from search results is the one that you own and control. This content includes your social media accounts, website, blogs, YouTube channel, and other online assets.

Delete the Unwanted Web Page

Start by deleting the unwanted web page. The process may look slightly different depending on your content management system (CMS). WordPress is a popular option, so we’ll use it for this example.

• Log into your WordPress dashboard.
• Hover on the web page or blog you’d like to delete.
• Select Trash.

The deleted web page will be stored in the Trash folder and can be recovered. You can also delete the page permanently from the trash if you wish.

Block the URL from Google Search Results

Deleting the unwanted web page is only the first step. The web page was already indexed by Google and probably linked to other pages on your site or externally. This fact can come back to bite you.

Crawl bots, including Google, will tag the page as missing once you delete it. This will harm your SEO efforts and overall rankings for the remaining content. A quick way to get around this issue is to use the Google Remove URLs Tool.

This tool will help you remove the web page from Google search results.

To do this:

• Go to your Google Search Console.
• Click the Temporary Removals tab.
• Select New Request.
• Select Temporarily remove URL.
• Click Next to complete the process.

This method permanently removes the URL from Google search results since you have already deleted the web page. You can also skip deleting the web page if you only want to remove it from search results temporarily.

This option removes your pages from Google search results for six months. That’s enough time to decide if you want to remove the search result permanently.

Stop Google from Indexing Your Content

There is also a way to stop Google from indexing your content in the first place, meaning your content can remain live without showing up in the search results. This is a good option if the content is still helpful, but you don’t want it showing up on the search engine.

You’ll need to use the noindex meta tag. To do this:

Go to the <head> section of the unwanted page’s HTML markup

Insert the metatag: <meta name=”robots” content=noindex”>  

Please note that some CMS like WordPress doesn’t give you access to the source code. In this case, you can use a third-party plugin like Yoast SEO to instruct web crawlers not to index your content.

It’s also worth noting that this method is not foolproof. It is better to delete and block the content if you don’t want it to appear on search results.

Don’t Forget to Remove Related Social Media Posts

If you are someone who promotes the content you generate on your personal or professional social media accounts, you’re not alone. This is one of the best ways to alert people who are interested in you and your business about new content when you post it.

However, if you later delete the blog post or webpage because you no longer want to make this content available, you will want to delete any related social media posts as well. Google will return results for YouTube when someone performs a search, for example. Simply deleting your original webpage, but leaving the related YouTube post active, may allow people to still find the content you now want to remove.

You also may want to delete any related posts on Facebook or Twitter, as Google sometimes archives those posts and makes them available in its search results.

Step 2 – Use an Online Reputation Management Company 

Removing your content from Google search results is the easy part. However, things aren’t as straightforward when the unwanted content belongs to someone else. Your best bet is to use an online reputation management service like WebiMax.

WebiMax mainly uses content deletion and promotion. The company can help you delete unwanted content for search results, as long as there is proof of misinformation.

WebiMax will also create new positive content to suppress the harmful content where deletion isn’t possible. The negative content is pushed past the first page, where people are unlikely to find it.

Get a Free Audit and Proposal from WebiMax

Ask WebiMax for a free audit of your internet reputation. Don’t be surprised if WebiMax discovers unfavorable content that you didn’t know about.

Next, a representative will create a custom proposal and quote. You can opt-out of any services you don’t want. Either way, the rep will let you know what the company can do to get rid of any unwanted Google search results. They’ll also give you a time frame for the removal.

The great thing about WebiMax is that it doesn’t matter if the content can be removed or not. The company will devise and implement a strategy to push content that cannot be removed down to lower search result pages. Since most people never make it past the first page of Google’s search results, this often equates to removing the content. 

Explore WebiMax Services

You might prefer that unwanted or harmful results don’t show up on Google in the first place—or that future negative results that may show up get handled immediately. To assist with this, WebiMax offers reputation management. The company will monitor your digital presence and take appropriate action if negative information pops up.

Other WebiMax services include:

• SEO
• Reviews
• Web design
• Social media marketing
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing
• Online PR
• Digital marketing
• Lead generation
• Local marketing

Go to the WebiMax website to see how they can help you maintain your online reputation now.

Step 3 – Contact the Webmaster to Remove the Content

Using a reputation management company is the fastest and easiest way to get rid of unwanted Google search results. However, this option isn’t open to everyone. If that’s the case for you, you may try to contact the webmaster to take down the unwanted content instead.

Request for Content Removal

This option is hit-or-miss, but it is worth exploring. Sometimes webmasters might be willing to remove harmful content if you ask them. You can find their contact information on the website’s Contact page.

Alternatively, you can use tools like DomainTools or Whois.net to find the webmaster’s contact information.

Avoid threats and confrontations which could only make things worse. For example, a threatening email or legal demand letter may be added to the unwanted content. Google will recognize it as fresh content and elevate it in the search results.

Instead, be friendly and professional. When possible, speak to the webmaster on the phone. Again, emails or texts may be added to the unwanted content. If the webmaster is willing to cooperate with your request, the content will disappear from search results a few days or weeks after they delete it. 

It is worth noting that many website owners choose to take advantage of privacy settings through the WHOIS database. The website owner will hide contact information, leaving you unable to find this information easily. When you hire a reputation management company to represent you, the company may be able to track down the site owner more easily than you can.

Ask The Web Admin to Add a No-Index Tag

Asking the site owner to remove the unwanted content might be a tall order. There’s likely a good reason why they created the content in the first place. You can compromise and ask for a no-index tag to keep it from being indexed by Google.

Here, the webmaster will add the <meta name=”robots” content= “noindex”> to the header of the HTML page. This metatag instructs crawl bots not to index the content so it won’t appear on Google search results. Before the content disappears from Google search results, it might take a few weeks.

You can also ask the webmaster to remove identifying search phrases from the page. For example, your brand name may appear in the page description or title of the HTML page. However, simply removing the brand name from the page means people won’t find it in the search results when they Google your brand.

Step 4 – Ask Google to Remove the Search Result

There are limited instances where it is possible to remove content directly from Google. You can ask Google to de-index the unwanted content. This effectively removes the content from Google’s search engine. If this step is successful, Google doesn’t need to contact the site owner or publisher to de-index the content.

Find Out If You Qualify for De-Indexing

De-Indexing isn’t a silver bullet. But it can be a great option if you qualify. Some of the types of content that can Google is quick to de-index include:

• Sexually explicit information
• Identity theft or financial harm
• Legal issues
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations
• Right to be forgotten

It’s worth talking to an attorney or reputation management company about your options. For instance, an attorney may be able to spot copyright violations or other legal grounds to substantiate your removal request.

Submit a Removal Request to Google

Google offers a few removal scenarios on its support page. Simply scroll through the options and click the relevant link to your application. You’ll be redirected to a new page with the application steps and more details about submitting your request.

Step 5 – Check If the Removal Was Successful

Any one of the steps outlined here should work in most cases. Also, consider using multiple removal methods until you find one that works. Finally, check if the unwanted result has been removed successfully.

Enter the URL into the Search Bar

Type in or copy/paste the exact URL you attempted to remove in the search bar. Next, check if the unwanted content still appears on the search engine results.

Remember that it can take up to two weeks for the content to disappear from the search results. After that, you’ll have to wait for Google to re-crawl the pages before the result disappears.

Lastly, the URL is case-sensitive. So Google identifies different cases as different pages. Therefore, you may need to repeat the removal process for all the URL versions you’re attempting to remove. Be sure to check in every few days to see if the removal was successful.

Wait it out

It’s not always possible to remove unwanted content from search results. We mentioned suppressing the unwanted content. But, you’ll have to wait for Google to index and rank your new content.

The process can take a few months or up to a year. Eventually, the unwanted content will be pushed down to the second or third page or beyond, where people are less likely to see it.

If you don’t like the idea of waiting for years, get in touch with an online reputation management service like Webimax. Come up with a plan for moving forward today.

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The Beginner’s Guide to the Best Strategies to Manage Your Online Reputation

Negative customer reviews are part of running a business. Stuff happens. The tricky part is that the bad press lingers long after you’ve solved the problem.

You don’t have to accept negative publicity forever. Here’s how to take an active role in protecting and managing your online reputation.

The Top-Rated Online Reputation Management Companies for Managing Online Reputation

Our top recommendation for most people is WebiMax. They can solve current issues quickly and provide guidance to keep your reputation spotless moving forward. Get a free custom quote from WebiMax today.

The fastest way for most people to really take control of their online reputation is by using a professional service. Here are our top picks:

• WebiMax – Best overall
• NetReputation – Best for ultra-responsive customer support
• InternetReputation.com – Best for personal reputation management
• Reputation Defense Network – Best for permanently removing false content
• Podium – Best for getting reviews automatically
• SEO Image – Best for legal and medical practices
• Gadook – Best for rebranding after reputation attacks
• BirdEye – Best for getting Google and Facebook reviews
• Reputation.com – Best for knowing your company’s reputation
• Go Fish Digital – Best for improving Yelp reviews
• Netmark.com – Best for hands-off, fast responses to reputation hits

You can read the full reviews for each of these online reputation management companies here.

What is Online Reputation Management?

Online Reputation Management (ORM) refers to a set of actions to control the online conversation about an individual, brand, or organization. These actions often include monitoring, analyzing, addressing, and leading the online discussion in a positive direction.

Generally, online reputation management efforts may cover multiple digital touchpoints, including:

• Social media platforms
• Videos
• Review sites
• Press coverage
• Websites such as blogs and news sites

Successful ORM offers multiple benefits, including improving brand credibility, building trust, increasing web traffic, and reacting quickly to potential crises.

Deciding How to Handle Online Reputation Management

As you can see from our list of the touchpoints involved in reputation management, keeping on top of your online reputation can be a significant challenge. It requires a lot of time and some expertise to dial it in just right.

Some business owners enjoy handling these processes on their own, but they may end up being unable to devote as much time as they would like in managing the company’s reputation. That’s why some companies choose to hire an online reputation management company to take care of these items for them. Many of these companies are able to customize the services they provide to you, perfectly matching what your company requires.

Obtaining Other Services

Additionally, some online reputation management companies will help you with local marketing and other locally based services. This could be helpful for your company.

You may not receive the maximum level of marketing benefits from an online reputation company that you would receive from a marketing-only company. However, you may appreciate the ability to focus on using just one company for all of these types of services. 

The Basics of Online Reputation Management

The particulars of online reputation management may vary depending on the organization and its ORM goals. However, the process is typically concerned with three fundamentals:

Reputation Monitoring

Every brand has ideas about how it would like to be perceived online. But it’s difficult to shape that narrative when you don’t know what people think of you in the first place. Reputation monitoring can help you understand what people are saying so you can come up with a specific action plan to steer the conversation in the desired direction. 

Online reputation monitoring may be manual, automated, or hybrid. For instance, an employee may be tasked with daily monitoring and reporting on the organization’s social media and relevant review sites. On the other hand, online monitoring tools automatically crawl your social media accounts and report the results to an administrator.

Examples of good online reputation monitoring tools include Google Alerts, Semrush, and BuzzSumo. Other places to monitor your reputation may include ads, blogs, search results rankings, and relevant press.

Reputation Repair

Inevitably, reputation monitoring will uncover at least some harmful content. These types of content may include negative news articles and negative reviews on review sites. However, the information doesn’t even have to be true to damage your reputation.

Successful ORM should suppress the negative content and promote brand-affirming positive content. Common reputation repair tasks may include:

• Owning up to mistakes
• Increasing a positive online presence
• Taking down negative content
• Pushing down negative search results
• Responding to negative reviews
• Increasing online engagement
• Continuous reputation monitoring

Most of the reputation management companies we listed earlier also offer professional repair services. You may want to hire a professional to manage this stage of your reputation management. For instance, review sites like Yelp offer one chance to make a case for why your negative review should be taken down. A professional will have a much better chance of making this case on your behalf.

Reputation Building 

Reputation monitoring is passive, while reputation repair is reactive. Therefore, you need a proactive element to manage your online reputation, which comes from reputation building. This process involves actively building the online image you’d like to portray.

Depending on your strategy, online reputation building can take various forms, including:

• Designing a user-friendly website
• Sharing achievements and awards
• Expanding your online presence
• Building social media engagement
• Creating an online review strategy
• Partnering with reputable influencers
• Delivering on your promises

This element of managing your online reputation is arguably the hardest and takes the most time. However, the ROI from a solid strategy can make the process worth it. Again, some reputation management companies we mentioned earlier offer reputation-building services.

Ways to Improve Your Online Reputation Management Strategy

It’s worth exploring a few tools and services that can make it easier to implement your reputation management strategy.

WebiMax

WebiMax is a digital marketing agency with deep experience in online reputation management. They can help your business show up in search results and maintain a positive image. Some of their reputation management services include:

• Identifying and deleting harmful content
• Suppressing harmful search results
• Creating new positive content to outrank negative content 
• Leveraging your unclaimed profiles to boost your online presence

You don’t have to be the expert if you work with WebiMax. They offer a free analysis of your reputation before creating a customized strategy around your specific needs.

Google Alerts

Not everyone has the budget or appetite for outsourcing your online reputation management. At the very least, you should sign up for Google Alerts, which offers a host of free tools and features to help you with your strategy.

Some of the things you can do with Google Alerts include:

• Monitoring your brand name
• Keeping track of media mentions
• Understanding market trends
• Keeping an eye on your competitors

Google Alerts is an excellent tool if you’re just starting with ORM. However, you might soon outgrow its features and require a more robust tool like BuzzSumo or Semrush.

A Reputation Management Plan

After the initial reputation monitoring or audit, it’s easy to get lost in the different metrics you need to address. So a solid reputation management plan will help you prioritize your action steps. The best place to start is with clear and specific goals for what you want your ORM to achieve.

Some examples of specific ORM goals may include:

• Removing or downplaying negative listings
• Strengthening and promoting a positive online image
• Defending your brand from unscrupulous or deceitful persons

Then, you can prioritize your remediation, starting with the reputation damage with the most significant negative impact on your brand. Similarly, prioritize your actions based on their result and outcome.

5 Tricks for Managing Your Online Reputation

The online landscape has changed the way businesses interact with customers. Today’s consumer has a loud voice that can impact your business for better or for worse. Therefore, online reputation management should be a priority for the discerning business owner.

Below are a few things you can do to take control of your online brand image.

Be Proactive 

Many businesses are passive or reactive when it comes to their online reputation. These businesses don’t play an active role in forming their online reputation and only act when there’s a crisis, such as a scathing news article or a flood of negative reviews. Usually, it’s too late to repair the damage by this point.

Taking control of your online brand image makes it easier to deal with the occasional negative review or bad press. For instance, a negative news article may be outranked by your high-performing and optimized content on search engine results.

You can start with an online reputation audit to determine what your audiences see when they search your business. Simply searching your brand on major search engines can reveal a lot about the information people are sharing about your business. An online reputation management company like Webimax can also help you perform the audit.

Next, take active control of the channels that contribute to your online reputation, including:

• Owned Media – Owned media makes it easy to control what people see about your business. Examples of owned media include your business website and blog. A high-quality website and updated blog can help improve your online reputation.
• Shared Media – Shared media like Facebook or Twitter allows you to engage your customers directly. These channels help create meaningful, engaging, and beneficial conversations with your audiences.
• Paid Media – Options such as social media ads and sponsored posts allow you direct control of your message and branding. You can also engage with your audience where they spend most of their time.

In short, a well-curated and solid initial online presence gives you more control over the top search results. This way, negative reviews might not cause significant damage. At the very least, the negative press will be easier to deal with.

Monitor Your Brand Mentions

Monitoring your brand mentions is an easy but effective way of staying on top of your online reputation. Ideally, you want to know about potentially damaging comments or mentions before they cause significant damage. Plus, you don’t have to spend all day on social media manually checking what people are saying about your brand.

Tools like Google Alerts, Semrush, Social Mention, and Tweet Alarm can help you automate the process. These tools continuously crawl the web for your chosen keywords. Then you’ll receive an alert any time there’s a new comment or review about your business.

However, monitoring your brand mentions shouldn’t be a passive process. You’ll need to act quickly and within the context of your mentions. Some of the things you can do in this case include:

• Ask websites that mention you to have a backlink to your domain.
• Solve emerging user problems quickly
• Use positive content in your marketing material, such as landing pages or email letters.
• Partner with credible influencers who mention your business.

Increase Positive Reviews

Unhappy clients don’t need to be coaxed to leave a review. Plus, unhappy customers are far more likely to leave a review than happy customers. So it doesn’t even matter if the negative reviews are unfair or false. They’ll still hurt your business.

You’ll need to be proactive about collecting positive reviews. Many clients are happy to leave a review if you ask subtly and nicely. However, make sure that the clients are satisfied with your product or service before asking them to leave a review.

Other strategies that you can use to garner more positive reviews include:

• Include subtle pop-ups to your website asking clients to leave a review.
• Reach out to your customers on social media.
• Add a review request to your email signature.
• Incentivize your customers to leave a review. Just be mindful of Google’s guidelines. 

If successful, the positive reviews will outweigh the negative ones. Additionally, Google algorithms prefer brands with good customer relationships, which can help boost your brand on the search engine results page (SERP). Finally, the outflow of positive reviews will encourage more people to interact with your brand or business.

Learn to Deal with Negative Reviews

Again, online reviews play a massive role in your online reputation. So it is necessary to learn to deal with the inevitable negative reviews effectively. As a rule of thumb, avoid deleting bad reviews. Instead, come up with a policy to address negative comments.

The best strategies for dealing with negative reviews include:

• Be courteous and thank the client for their review.
• Try to see things from the client’s point of view.
• Respond to the review but offer to continue with the conversation offline.
• Follow up with the customer to ensure they are satisfied with the outcome.
• Respond quickly, but be thoughtful in your response.

You might be surprised at how much you can achieve by developing an effective strategy for dealing with negative reviews. Many unhappy customers are willing to change or take down their negative reviews if you’re upfront, timely, transparent, and polite.

Improve Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Effective search engine optimization might be the silver bullet you need to boost your online reputation. A well-planned and executed SEO strategy gives you control over the content that appears on the first page of search engine results.

You can deliberately streamline your SEO strategy to support your online reputation management goals. For example, authentic and concise content helps you attract backlinks from credible websites.

This way, your content ranks high on SERPs and links back to other credible brands. It’s a simple way of dominating the most visible search engine pages. So naturally, subsequent negative reviews or content are likely relegated to the second or third pages, where they are less visible.

Examples of this kind of content include:

• Guides and tutorial articles.
• Video reviews of your product, company, or industry. 
• Your brand’s website and press page.
• Brand or author pages on authority publications.
• Whitepapers.

This strategy alone can help to push down unflattering content. It’s a slow and tedious process but is ultimately worthwhile.

Similarly, claiming your social profile lets you control what your audience finds about your business. Again, Google My Business is critical. Your listing is likely to appear at the top of the search results when people search for your brand.

Equally, your social media profiles will also likely appear on search results. These include Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Again, it’s better to control the messaging, branding, and content on these profiles.

Finally, it’s worth enlisting the help of an SEO expert to develop a long-term strategy for dominating the result pages for your industry, brand, and target keywords.

What to Do Next

Online reputation management may seem like a long, complicated process. However, it is a lifetime commitment that rewards small, incremental steps. You don’t need to do everything at once. We highly recommend WebiMax to assist you on your journey.

The best next step is to decide how you want people to perceive your business online. For example, do you want to be known for your responsiveness or social media engagement? How about unrivaled customer service? Or maybe you want people to see you as an industry leader. The answer to this question will help you shape your ORM strategy.

Then, take charge of all your digital assets and profiles. These include a business website, social media platforms like Facebook, online referral programs, and online listings like Google My Business. Finally, develop a strategy to create and publish content for each of these platforms. The idea is to control the online conversation about your business as much as possible.

Below are two related links to get you started on your journey:

• Top 11 Best Online Reputation Management Companies – 2022 Review 
• SEO Reputation Management

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The Best Strategies for Repairing Your Company’s Online Reputation

Negative reviews and bad PR can damage your company’s credibility. Lots of businesses struggle with this.

Let’s go over the steps you can take right now to repair your company’s online reputation. Then you can rest easy knowing your company looks good to customers, prospects, employees, investors, and anyone else digging for information online. 

Top-Rated Online Reputation Management Companies to Repair Your Company’s Reputation

Our top recommendation for most people who need help with online reputation management is WebiMax because of their deep experience and affordable pricing. Get in touch with WebiMax today for a free quote.

Unless you really know what you are doing, a professional service will resolve issues with your online reputation is much faster. Here are the best ones we’ve found:

• WebiMax — Best overall
• NetReputation – Best for ultra-responsive customer support
• InternetReputation.com – Best for personal reputation management
• Reputation Defense Network — Best for permanently removing false content
• Podium — Best for getting reviews automatically
• SEO Image — Best for legal and medical practices
• Gadook — Best for rebranding after reputation attacks
• BirdEye — Best for getting Google and Facebook reviews
• Reputation.com — Best for knowing your competition’s reputation
• Go Fish Digital — Best for improving Yelp reviews
• Netmark.com — Best for hands-off, fast responses to reputation hits

You can read the full reviews of each online reputation management company here.

What is Online Reputation Management Repair?

Reputation management is the process of improving your company’s perception in online reviews, social media posts, search engine results, news outlets, and other online sources.

Businesses with a negative reputation can apply different strategies to build and repair their brand image. This may include content removal, negative review deletion, claiming business profiles, responding to customer reviews, and other tactics to enhance your company’s online perception.

Understand that the steps you take to repair your online reputation may not pay immediate dividends. If you are expecting to be able to repair your brand image in a couple of hours, you are going to experience disappointment.

The repair of your brand reputation is going to take a period of time. The steps you implement today are going to need to be part of an overall brand management strategy. You may need to rebuild your website to make it more useful for visitors, and you may need to solicit multiple positive reviews from customers to negate the negative reviews.

You also should be implementing the strategy for improving your online reputation at the same time you are working to improve your overall customer service reputation. Better customer service and responsiveness should lead to more positive customer reviews, which, in turn, helps your online reputation.

The Basics of Repairing Your Company’s Online Reputation

There are a wide range of factors that can impact the online reputation of a business. But when it comes to reputation repair, the following key factors will play the largest role in this process.

Identifying the Source

What specifically damaged your company’s reputation in the first place? You can’t effectively fix something if you don’t know the root cause.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of unique scenarios that could hurt a business and its online perception. Examples include:

• Faulty or unsafe product
• Offensive marketing campaign
• Insensitive public comments made by owner or CEO
• Poor customer service
• Data breach that leaked sensitive customer information
• Bad press instigated by a competitor or other external source

One review about a single employee or broken product is not typically the source of a bad reputation. Typically, the source is something that had a more significant impact on a larger group of people.

Customer Reviews

Most consumers read online reviews before buying anything. These reviews are generally a reliable indication of how your company is perceived online. 

Not every customer is going to be happy. So a handful of bad reviews are always expected. But if your company has more negative reviews than positive ones, it’s likely signs of a bigger problem. 

Understanding your customer reviews can be really helpful in identifying the source of your damaged reputation. Figuring out ways to eliminate bad reviews and get more positive reviews will ultimately play a significant role in repairing your damaged reputation. 

Once you implement some solutions for solving customer problems and for improving your customer service, you may want to reach out to those who left poor reviews and ask them for another chance. Some of these people may revise their original review when they can see that you are trying to improve your processes.

Building Trust

Consumers won’t buy products or services from a company that they can’t trust. This statement holds true for B2B buyers as well.

As you’re going through the reputation repair process, you’ll need to come up with quick wins for showing your company is trustworthy. Examples might include:

• Using HTTPS to secure your website
• Adding trust seals to your site during the checkout process
• Providing excellent customer service
• Clearly displaying your company address, phone number, and other contact information online
• Asking for feedback
• Showcasing reviews and customer testimonials
• Eliminating ads or pop-ups from your site

Some businesses lose the trust of their customers through a lack of transparency. Things like not publishing your return policy online or setting up recurring billing without customer consent would fall into this category. If you find you’re not being fully transparent with your customers, that’s a great place to start your reputation repair.

Either way, make sure that all of your initiatives moving forward are focused on your trustworthiness. 

Establishing Credibility

Online credibility helps prove your company’s legitimacy. It shows that you’re a reputable brand that keeps its promises. 

One excellent way to establish credibility during reputation repair is by partnering with an influencer who already has credibility. Let’s say you have a weight loss supplement company. Having someone like Oprah stand behind your brand and attest to the product’s benefits would provide instant credibility. 

Obviously, not every business has access to globally recognized celebrities or the budget to attain them. But there are other ways to establish credibility using this same concept, like:

• Having a doctor provide a stamp of approval for your product’s safety
• Getting featured in a blog post published by an authoritative source in your industry
• Creating case studies and success stories to highlight on your website

Ensuring that current and prospective customers know that your products or services do what they’re intended to do is an important factor in reputation repair. 

Controlling Your Online Presence

Your website alone isn’t enough to repair your company’s reputation. You must take other steps to build, maintain, and establish a positive reputation online. 

This includes having an active presence on all relevant social media platforms, claiming business profiles on review sites, putting out press releases, and feeding positive stories to media sources.

These types of strategies give you much more control over your reputation because you’ll have more platforms to speak from.

Even small details like a notice on your Yelp profile saying that the business is unclaimed can create a negative perception of your business in the eyes of anyone viewing the page.

Establishing a positive presence on multiple platforms also gives you the chance to produce relevant content that can drown out negative stories on the web. So when someone Googles your business, the content you’re putting out can be shown above other results with a negative sentiment. 

3 Tools to Repair Your Company’s Online Reputation

These three solutions will simplify your reputation repair strategies and help you improve your reputation faster.

#1 — WebiMax

WebiMax is one of the most trustworthy and reliable reputation management companies on the market today. They provide an extensive list of services and tools that can help repair even the most damaged business reputations.

Start with an audit, and WebiMax will provide you with a realistic timeline and a customized strategy to proceed with.

They handle negative review removal, negative content deletion, positive content promotion, and online PR services, and can even help you leverage all your unclaimed business profiles. WebiMax offers useful tools including a review collection dashboard, a local listings management tool, and a social monitoring dashboard. 

#2 — Google Alerts

Google Alerts is an excellent free tool that helps you monitor what’s being said about your company online. You can use it to create custom alerts from online sources like news sites, blogs, web results, videos, books, discussions, and more. Set up alerts by location, language, and how often you want to receive notices. 

This gives you the opportunity to act quickly if a story is published about your business online. If the story is positive, you can promote it to improve your reputation. But if it’s negative or inaccurate, you can take quick steps to get it removed or changed before the information spreads.

#3 — InternetReputation.com

Sometimes, the actions of a single person could have an adverse effect on an entire company. Maybe an owner or executive-level personnel was arrested, sued, or was caught on video doing something wrong. If the company was mentioned in any of those stories or police reports, those results could appear whenever someone Googles your business.

InternetReputation.com is a solid solution. They offer reputation management solutions for personal branding through services like online PR, content removal, mugshot removal, reputation monitoring, and more. If you, an employee, or a stakeholder has a negative reputation that’s hurting the company, you can use InternetReputation.com to repair the damage. 

5 Pro Tips For Repairing Your Company’s Online Reputation

Improving your company’s reputation can feel like a daunting task. But these quick wins will help you build momentum and start trending in the right direction.

Pro Tip #1 — Claim All of Your Business Profiles

Whether you like it or not, there are review websites out there that feature your business. If these profiles aren’t claimed, you have no control over the information that’s being shared on them.

First and foremost, an unclaimed business profile just looks unprofessional. You can claim your Google Business Profile or Yelp profile in a matter of minutes by simply filling out a form. Everything should be confirmed and verified within 24 hours.

This gives you the opportunity to add photos, update your contact information, add a link to your website, share announcements, post your store hours, and more—ultimately giving you more control over business information and its accuracy. 

Some review sites might only have a handful of low-quality photos of your business that were uploaded by an unhappy customer. This is obviously not good for your reputation.

But your professional-grade photos highlighting all the best parts of your products and services will outshine those few pictures. This is something you can do in less than an hour, any day of the week. 

WebiMax can help you find all of your unclaimed profiles and leverage them to improve your reputation. 

Pro Tip #2 — Respond to Customer Reviews

You must make an effort to respond to customer reviews quickly and effectively. This is especially true for negative reviews. 

This is another really quick win that you should take less than five minutes per review. Here are some best practices to keep in mind when you’re going through this process:

• Respond within 24 hours
• Always respond from your verified business profile
• Apologize
• Don’t make excuses
• Keep it short and sweet
• Acknowledge the complaint with a solution
• Offer some type of concession or compensation to the customer

Always end your reviews with an action to take the conversation offline. You don’t want a lengthy chain between you and a customer online, and you also don’t want that person to share any personal details or private information on a public forum. 

If you have a long list of negative reviews right now, going through them might be a bit time-consuming. So just stick with the most recent ones. Responding to something that’s a year old won’t be as impactful. 

Pro Tip #3 — Remove Negative Reviews

Every review website has rules and guidelines for what can and can’t be said in a review. But for the most part, these aren’t actively monitored and enforced. There might be a system that automatically flags and removes reviews with curse words, but that could be the extent of it.

So it’s on you to flag negative reviews for removal. For example, reviews containing the following can be removed from Yelp:

• Promotional content
• Conflicts of interest
• Privacy violations
• Intellectual property
• Payment demands
• Threats, harassment, hate speech, and other inappropriate content

But going through hundreds or potentially thousands of reviews manually can be a time-consuming process, especially if you don’t know what to look for.

It’s much easier to just outsource this task to a reputation management company like WebiMax. They can handle negative review removal on your behalf, so you won’t have to do any heavy lifting on your own. 

Pro Tip #4 — Push Down Negative Content That Can’t Be Removed

Sometimes blog posts or news stories about your business appearing in search results can be removed as well. But if they can’t, you can still push them out of sight by publishing new content that outranks the negative.

Obviously, content removal would be ideal. But if there’s a negative news article about your company that doesn’t show up until page four or five or a Google search, it can drastically improve your reputation.

Online reputation management services, like WebiMax, can be really helpful with strategies that push down negative content.

But usually, it’s just a matter of getting positive stories ranking for similar keywords. This can be accomplished through press releases, HARO (Help a Reporter Out), blogging, and getting featured on authority sites. 

Pro Tip #5 — Encourage Positive Reviews

Increasing the volume of your online reviews is a great way to build trust and credibility. It’s a bonus when these reviews are positive. 

But most customers won’t go out of their way to leave a review unless the experience was amazing or terrible. This typically creates a polarized sentiment, even though the vast majority of people fall somewhere in between these two extremes. 

The solution is simple—just ask for reviews, and make it easy for customers to leave reviews.

Follow-up emails asking for a review with a direct link to a particular review site can be highly effective. This is much easier than asking the customer to do extra work on their own, like navigating to the platform and searching for your company.  

You can even reward people for leaving a review with a promotional code or some type of discount for their next purchase. Just make sure you’re not specifying that the review must be positive to receive the promo.

What to Do Next

I strongly suggest that you work directly with an online reputation management company as you’re going through this process. These services handle reputation repair on a daily basis, so they know exactly what steps to take and how to take them for maximum effectiveness. Browse through our reviews of the best online reputation management companies, and schedule a free consultation with your top contenders. 

In addition to hiring a company, you can also use online tools to help you monitor your online reputation. This will help you act quickly in the future to prevent another damaging event. Check out our list of the best reputation management software for things like review monitoring, social media listening, local search listings, and more. 

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