Customers now research relentlessly—Googling names, scanning review sites, and scrolling social channels—before they buy. Hiring managers and clients do the same. If they land on negative comments, press, or bad reviews, you’ve given them a reason to choose someone else.
If your online reputation isn’t where you want it, this guide will show you how to repair it and build durable trust going forward.
Five Steps to Repair Your Online Reputation
Erasing every negative mention may not be possible, but ignoring problems only compounds the damage and can cost you more than you think.
Even if you can’t remove everything, you can use proven strategies to highlight the good, reduce the visibility of the bad, and make future issues easier to contain.
The goal is to publish credible, positive assets that outrank negative results on page one. Here’s the playbook:
- Claim All Your Online Profiles
- Monitor What Is Being Said About You
- Request Deletion of Negative Information
- Harness The Power Of SEO
- Engage, Engage, Engage
Most of these steps are straightforward, but reputation repair is still a process—measured in weeks and months, not days.
If progress is slow or you’d rather not manage it yourself, hire a reputation management company. A good partner will work daily until the situation is resolved while you stay focused on operations.
BetterReputation and Reputation Defense Network are two of our favorites. BetterReputation is transparent, affordable, and fast with a small-business feel. RDN offers broader services—including content removal and legal support—at a higher price point.
The Easy Parts of Online Reputation Repair
There’s no magic switch, but several foundational tasks are quick wins.
Claim all social media profiles and business listings you’re eligible for—especially Google Business Profile, Yelp, and TripAdvisor if you’re in hospitality. Even if you don’t post often, filled-out profiles act as trust signals and help you control more of page one.
Over time, these profiles tend to rank for your name and brand terms, pushing weaker or negative pages down.
Set up Google Alerts for your name, brand, key executives, products, and common misspellings. Choose “as-it-happens” for the fastest heads-up so you can address issues before they spread.
You can also enable Google’s “Results about you” dashboard to automatically look for your personal contact info in Search and let you request removals from one place. This adds proactive monitoring beyond Alerts.
Operate against a simple reputation management strategy so your responses are consistent and timely.
The Difficult Parts of Online Reputation Repair
Claiming profiles is easy. Consistently managing them is not.
Social media management is a full-time job for a reason—and profiles alone rarely fix page one. You’ll often need a sustained content and SEO program to outrank entrenched negative results.
Ask yourself if you’re prepared to publish high-quality content regularly and learn enough SEO to compete.
Expect the grind: weeks of publishing and monitoring punctuated by slow-moving ranking changes. It’s frustrating to check negative results repeatedly, so pace yourself and follow the plan.
If that sounds daunting, you’re not wrong—many teams engage professionals to run point (BetterReputation and Reputation Defense Network are solid options).
Step 1: Claim All Your Online Profiles
Start with an audit: list every profile you have and every profile that exists but isn’t claimed. Claiming verifies authenticity for leads, employers, partners, and journalists.
Social Media
Choose the channels that matter for your audience and complete each profile fully. That may include a Facebook Business Page, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn company page, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, or YouTube. Ensure bios, contact info, and branding are consistent across platforms.
Two benefits: these profiles often rank near the top for brand searches, and they give you additional surfaces to control your narrative.
Customers also use social to understand your day-to-day and to share experiences—good and bad. On platforms like Facebook, they can leave reviews. Staying active helps you engage positively, spot issues early, and respond before problems snowball.
Business and Review Sites
Don’t skip listings like Google Business Profile and Yelp. They rank well, add legitimacy, and create easy paths for satisfied customers to leave reviews.
On Yelp, people can review your business even if you haven’t claimed it.
You won’t be able to respond until you claim the listing—engagement matters, so lock these down early.
Claim niche listings, too. Restaurants, hotels, and attractions should secure TripAdvisor; B2B software companies should prioritize sites like G2; healthcare, legal, and home services have their own high-visibility directories.
Step 2: Monitor What Is Being Said About You
Set up systematic monitoring so you’re the first to know when something new appears online.
The faster you’re alerted, the faster you can respond, correct, or de-escalate.
Identify Past Mentions
Search for your name, business, products, and executives. Use this to gauge how much negative information exists today and to establish a baseline for improvement.
Log each negative result you find. Capture the URL, site, contact details, and notes—especially helpful if you plan to remove negative news articles from the web.
Keep this list updated to track outreach status and responses over time.
Set Up Google Alerts for Future Mentions
Knowing what’s already out there is only half the job. Automate future monitoring with Google Alerts.
Create alerts for your brand, executives, products, and common misspellings.
Choose “as-it-happens” if you want immediate notifications so you can address potential issues quickly.
Once created, you’ll receive emails at your chosen cadence with links to new mentions.
For personal contact info that appears on the web (like your phone, email, or address), Google’s “Results about you” can run regular checks and let you request removal directly from a unified dashboard.
Pinpoint the Source of the Problem
Sometimes the cause is obvious—a single incident, article, or viral post. Other times, patterns emerge across reviews and mentions.
Scan your list for recurring themes.
Is the issue isolated to a product, location, policy, or employee? Fixing root causes reduces future negatives while you work to clean up what’s already live.
Take action internally now; reputation repair sticks when operational issues are resolved.
Step 3: Request Deletion of Negative Information
Negative content generally falls into three buckets: URLs (articles, blogs), reviews, and videos. Each has a different approach.
Articles and blog posts are “negative URLs.” Processes to request deletion vary by site and situation.
Negative URL Deletion Requests
If a Google result includes untrue, misleading, or unlawful personal content (like doxxing, exposed IDs, or explicit images), you can request removal under Google’s personal content policies or submit a legal request when appropriate. Start with Google’s removal forms and Legal Help Center.
However, even if Google removes the result from Search, the content remains on the source site. To eliminate it entirely, contact the site owner directly with a clear request.
Note: In the EU/UK, people may also request delisting of certain search results under the “right to be forgotten.”
This is where your tracking sheet is essential. Record every outreach, contact, and status so nothing falls through the cracks.
Skip generic contact forms when possible. Look for an editor, webmaster, or site owner’s email to increase your odds of success.
Review Deletion Requests
For reviews on Google that violate policy (spam, conflicts of interest, off-topic, etc.), flag them for removal via your Business Profile; for Yelp, report questionable reviews with details moderators can verify.
If the review is tied to a real transaction, treat it as salvageable feedback: respond, fix what you can, and show accountability. We’ll cover responses below.
Videos
Videos can be harder to triage—you’ll often need to watch to verify the claims.
Use the Videos tab on Google for a quick scan, then check platforms like YouTube or Vimeo directly.
When deciding whether to pursue removal, weigh reach and risk. Low-view videos may not be worth the effort; high-visibility videos might require a formal policy or legal complaint.
Focus your energy where the impact is greatest.
Step 4: Harness the Power of SEO
SEO helps your positive assets outrank negative ones. Most people never look past page one, so winning those top results is the fastest way to bury harmful content.
The more credible, up-to-date content you publish—and the better it’s optimized—the quicker you reclaim the narrative.
Develop a Solid SEO Strategy
A strong SEO reputation management strategy maps the keywords you want to own, builds a logical site structure, and earns authoritative backlinks to the pages that should rank for your name and brand.
It’s a substantial undertaking. If you don’t have in-house expertise, designate an owner or bring in a partner to plan and execute.
Either way, consistency wins.
Create Great Content
Keyword research tells you what people search for; your job is to publish content that genuinely answers those searches. Incorporate target phrases naturally, demonstrate expertise, and keep information current.
Google favors fresh, high-quality content. A regularly updated blog is a great start for news, FAQs, helpful tips, customer stories, and thought leadership.
Round it out with strong evergreen pages describing your company, team, services, pricing philosophies, and policies—pages that deserve to rank for branded searches.
Make the site easy to navigate. If visitors can’t find what they need, they bounce—sending negative engagement signals. Intuitive structure, fast load times, and clear calls to action help keep visitors engaged.
If you’re strapped for time, reputable reputation management firms can help design structure, produce content, and manage outreach to build authority.
Amplify every new asset with press releases (when truly newsworthy) and consistent social sharing to accelerate discovery and links.
The more authentic, positive information you publish, the faster negative results are displaced.
Build Authority
Use external platforms to establish expertise so searches for your name surface leadership, not controversy.
Diversify your presence across formats and outlets.
- Look for guest posting opportunities
- Be a podcast guest
- Create video content
- Speak at an event
These initiatives both improve what searchers see and help you get backlinks—a double win for rankings.
Over time, your branded results should tilt toward high-authority mentions you control or influence.
Step 5: Engage, Engage, Engage
Once the foundation is set, build goodwill through ongoing, visible engagement with customers and followers.
Ask For Reviews
Unhappy customers speak up on their own; happy customers often need a nudge. Proactively ask satisfied customers to share honest feedback on the platforms that matter most for your business.
Use social posts, package inserts, in-store signage, and follow-up emails or texts to request reviews—make it easy and timely.
Normalize reviews as a standard part of the customer journey. Do not buy reviews or offer incentives in exchange for positive reviews—U.S. regulators finalized a rule banning fake/incentivized reviews with significant penalties, and platforms like Google are increasingly cracking down.
For detailed tactics, see our guide on how to ask for reviews.
Respond To All Reviews
Respond quickly to every review—good and bad. Positive reviews deserve gratitude; thoughtful replies encourage more of the same.
For critical but accurate reviews, stay calm and transparent. Acknowledge the issue, apologize, explain what changed, and—when appropriate—offer to make it right. See our guide on responding to negative reviews. If a review violates policy, flag it in your Google Business Profile or report it on Yelp.
If bandwidth is tight, professional partners can centralize review management, keep profiles current, craft responses, and spotlight your best feedback.
Own Your Mistakes
One of the best ways to handle bad publicity is to turn it into a proof point for improvement.
When appropriate, reference past issues and describe the fixes you’ve made. Transparency builds credibility.
Example: if slow service drove poor reviews at your restaurant, acknowledge it, share what changed (more kitchen staff, streamlined menu), and consider a make-good guarantee.
Customers reward honesty—former critics often become advocates when they see real progress.
Other Ways To Engage
Use social to spark conversations: post thoughtful prompts, ask for feedback, and reply quickly. It won’t delete negative content, but it strengthens relationships and increases the reach of your positive updates.
When you later ask for reviews or share new content, an engaged audience is far more likely to respond.
Final Thoughts About Repairing Your Online Reputation
Reputation repair takes time, consistency, and a calm, methodical approach. If you lack internal bandwidth or expertise, investing in a reputable firm to lead the effort is often the fastest, least stressful path to results.
Read our full reviews of our top online reputation management companies to learn more. Or, if you want recommendations now, we like BetterReputation and Reputation Defense Network.