One of the most complex challenges in the world of organic SEO is online reputation management. The essence of the work is removing negative mentions of a person, a company name, or both from Google’s first search results page. If negative articles about you have been published on news sites, local papers, or even personal blogs, you will need reputation management. It is important to understand that this is an expensive service that is not suitable for everyone. Furthermore, in Israel there are quite a few amateurs alongside professionals in this field; therefore, before you order the service, it is important to understand what high-quality and thorough online reputation management work looks like. Here is a step-by-step guide on how the project is carried out, although there may be strategic differences between various service providers.
Online reputation management - How is it actually done?
Stage 0 - Do you have a budget for online reputation management?
Because this is an expensive service costing thousands of shekels per month, it is almost impossible to afford for private individuals without substantial capital in the bank and/or those who do not have a company budget behind them. The service starts at a few thousand shekels a month and can reach a monthly budget of over 10,000 NIS in difficult cases. So what do you do? If you don’t have a budget for the process and the damage is severe, the only thing you can do is change your last name. That is what happens in quite a few cases when people realize that such a service is not based on a one-time job of a few hundred shekels, but on ongoing work costing thousands of shekels over several months, and sometimes it is simply ongoing work alongside organic SEO. If you have an appropriate budget—you can move on to the next stage.
Stage 1: Initial conversation and situation overview
Situation assessment – Before starting the work, you must provide a situational overview to the SEO specialist you want to carry out online reputation management for you. They must check the severity of the situation, find out how many negative results there are on the first page, whether it is a few negligible sites or if the entire first page is packed with articles from news sites. Keep in mind that it is not always possible to completely clear the first page of negative results. If the entire first page is full of reports from Ynet, Walla, Haaretz, and other major sites, you must take into account that it might only be possible to minimize the damage. Therefore, the SEO specialist must be transparent and explain the situation to you so you can make the right decision. Setting expectations is one of the most important things for a proper process, and if the project manager does not initiate this process with you, it is important to initiate it yourself.
Price quote and management strategy – From here, the SEO specialist can build a price quote and reputation management strategy for you. As mentioned, keep in mind that this is an expensive service, especially when it involves strong websites ranking for the business name or your personal name on the first page. What are you actually paying for? For the purchase and publication of content on websites, and for the management of the project itself. The SEO specialist must present you with the quote alongside a breakdown of the entire management strategy tailored to your situation.
Stage 2: Kickoff meeting
As mentioned, managing expectations is critical to the success of organic SEO projects in general and reputation management in particular. During the kickoff meeting stage, it is important that the project manager interviews you and understands the issues and negative publications. It is important to understand that the main part of reputation management is actually publishing alternative content on the web under your name with the aim of pushing out negative publications. Pushing negative results off Google’s first page is only half the job; they must be replaced with positive results that drive visits to high-quality content. Therefore, it is important to coordinate with the client exactly what will be written about them. Sometimes what may suit the client personally could cause problems within their organization, resulting in a request to modify or take down the content. Hence, it is important to build a content strategy that the client can approve within their organization if the project represents not only themselves but also the company they work for. Once you have aligned expectations, you can begin the work.
Can results be physically removed instead of pushing them down? In some cases yes, but in most cases no. If you approach a news site asking the editor to remove a negative article published about you, they will not agree to do so—otherwise, nothing negative would ever be published about anyone anywhere, and we would live in a world of only good news. In certain cases it is possible to remove content, for example from various court ruling websites, but removing the mention is not free and comes with a fee. In the event that someone spread lies about you and decided to publish them on blogs and their personal website, you can ask them to take down the content, and if that doesn’t work, it’s advisable to warn them of a defamation lawsuit. In such cases, this can lead to the immediate removal of the content. In other cases, the process goes to court, but it is always worth trying.
Stage 3: Setting up promotion infrastructure
If you do not have active digital assets, the SEO specialist must set up the following assets for you:
- Social media pages: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
- A website or blog with a domain under your name and a website for your business
- A Google My Business page for your business
- A decision on which strong third-party sites will be used to publish articles (news sites, local media, and topically relevant niche sites).
If all these assets already exist, what the project manager will need to do is optimize them before starting to promote them.
Stage 4: Content writing
Why is content required? In order to push negative results off Google’s first page, content is of the utmost importance in the reputation management process.
While it is obvious that an article needs to be prepared for every news outlet or local site through which you want to rank on Google’s first page, it is important to understand that creating a single blog or website under the client’s name is not enough; articles must be updated across these assets for 2 purposes:
- To promote the asset itself with additional articles,
- To build links from these assets in order to promote other articles and assets. It is important to build a content strategy for a timeframe of 3–6 months.
Before executing the content strategy, it is important to align expectations regarding what the content will be based on. That is why the kickoff meeting is so crucial. You need to decide what is included in the content, what might be sensitive and can be omitted, and what can be written about freely. In some cases, the client’s employees or the client themselves write the content due to the sensitivity of the topic. In other cases, the content is ordered from a copywriter at the reputation management company. If the content was ordered from the company’s writer, it is very important to approve it before it goes live, as well as approving the site where it will be published and how it appears. For example, some people do not want the content to appear with a sponsored content credit, while other clients do not care how or where the content is published. There are places where you can control the content credit, and there are places where it is impossible. Therefore, it is important to understand the options, because the alternative of removing content after it has been published—especially if it ranked on the first page—is the return of the negative Google result to the first page.
Stage 5: Content publishing
The stronger the website where you want to publish and the better known its brand, the greater the chance that the article published on it will reach the top position. Reputation management project managers already know which sites to publish on first and which sites to publish on in the second stage. Keep in mind that the cost of publishing an article is also derived from the area where the article is published on the site itself and whether or not it gets exposure from the homepage. This can be the difference between 500–2,000 NIS for publishing content and 5,000–10,000 NIS for publishing content. At the same time, I have more than once integrated articles at a cost of 500–2,000 NIS without appearing on the homepage or an easily accessible category from the homepage, and watched them rank directly into the first place for the client’s name.
Things you must never do with content:
- Short content – Never approve short content at any stage, and it really doesn’t matter where it gets published. Short content is considered less effective for ranking or completely ineffective, so do not settle for articles under 400 words.
- Using thematically irrelevant websites – You work in finance and they published an article under your name on a website that deals with gardening? There is no topical connection. Such content will have less chance of reaching the first page, and people who reach such an article will leave it quite quickly. This will indirectly harm the article’s ranking on Google, not to mention damaging the client’s reputation not only in the digital world but also in the real one.
- Including your name in the title only without mentioning it in the article – Even if there aren’t many Google searches for your name, or none at all, and you are really anxious to suppress negative results, inserting your name into some existing article on a site, or into a short new article where the content doesn’t talk about you at all, is poor reputation management work. Even if you reach the first or second page this way, the content won’t stay there for long due to a lack of topical relevance. Think about the users who are exposed to your name without any context inside the article itself other than the mention in the headline. A frustrating and confusing experience.
- No commitment for the content to remain after the project ends – If there is something I am ashamed of in the SEO industry, it is practitioners who remove their clients’ content and links after they choose to terminate the service or move to another provider. More than once I have seen clients of regular organic SEO or reputation management who came to me after their previous SEO specialist removed links from the articles published for the client—articles the client paid for as part of the service—and replaced them with links to their own business. A clause should be included in the contract stating that the articles the project manager published for you and all the links built for this purpose will always remain live as long as it is within their full control. Why do some SEO specialists still do this? Either because they believe it’s simply fine to do since the client is leaving—not realizing it is roughly like a dentist demanding their client return their fillings when they decide to switch dentists—or they do it intentionally to cause the client’s rankings to drop so they will return to paying the retainer. In any case, make sure you receive tracking for the articles.
Stage 6: Link building
It is not enough to publish articles on strong websites and expect them to rank on Google’s first page at the expense of negative results. You also need to strengthen existing articles and assets such as social networks, blogs, and websites using links. A clear strategy must also be established for link building.
This is how to build links properly:
Tier 1: First publish articles on the strongest possible websites according to the client’s budget, but do not submit all of them simultaneously under any circumstances; instead, ensure linking between these assets without reciprocal links. What does this mean? One article should be submitted first, containing a link to the Facebook page or the website. Then a second article should be submitted linking to the first article. After that, a third article should be uploaded linking to the second article, and so on—it is very important to ensure that article X does not link to article Y while article Y links back to article X.
Tier 2: This can be a tier of weaker websites than Tier 1. For example, if Tier 1 consists of the strongest news sites in the country, the second tier can consist of local news sites or niche sites. From these assets, link to Tier 1 assets, and in parallel, links can also be created within the tier itself without reciprocal links.
Tier 3: Client website, blog, social profiles, and parallel business websites related to the client’s field in some way. Such links can be acquired through regular link exchanges between SEO specialists. Of course, beyond supporting Tier 2, this tier can definitely also support Tier 1 through other articles.
Which reports are important to receive from the project manager on a regular basis?
Live status file – The reputation manager should prepare an Excel file for you detailing the results appearing on the first page. Each result should be marked with one of the following statuses: negative, positive, or neutral. Once a week or every two weeks, they should update the file to see how the reputation management work has affected the first page. It is preferable for the file to be shared with you on Google Drive.
Monthly reports – Once a month, they should send you a monthly report detailing all the articles written, where they were published, and all the links built to strengthen new or existing articles. Basically: a full breakdown of their work.
Just before finishing
Can online reputation management be performed without an organic SEO service? Yes, absolutely, but this can only be done if it involves a very famous person whose every move immediately becomes a matter of public interest. For example: if it is known that on a specific date a trial begins for that person, press releases can be issued about news from the artist’s life about a day before the trial begins. For instance, that they started dating someone, that they are doing new community work, that a new movie starring them is coming out, or that they are releasing a new song to the radio. f ranking at the expense of the news about the trial opening or pushing it to the bottom of the first page.
Summary
There is no doubt that online reputation management is one of the most important things for companies and individuals in the digital age. It is also one of the most complex challenges in the world of organic SEO, so it is important to understand that this is an expensive service that is not suitable for everyone. It is important that you understand what you are getting into before ordering the service so you can align your expectations.
About the author:
Natan Lichter, has been working on SEO, reputation management, and content writing projects since 2012. Specializes primarily in strategic and content management of projects at WEBSEM.
