Someone could be googling you right now. Maybe it’s a hiring manager you just sent your resume to, a date you matched with last week, or a client researching you before a meeting. Whatever shows up in those results is the impression they’re walking away with.
But search engines won’t show them a nice highlight reel. They surface whatever they find–old news articles, court records, an embarrassing photo, etc.
Many people assume they have no control over what shows up. That’s not true.
You have more control over your search results than you probably think. It’s called search engine reputation management. This beginner’s guide from Reputation911 will walk you through exactly how it works, and how to use it to make sure people find the best version of you online.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
- What people find when they google you directly impacts your personal and professional life
- You can remove and/or suppress negative results
- SEO is the core tool behind search engine reputation management
- What to look for when hiring a professional to manage your search results
What is Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM)?
Search Engine Reputation Management is the process of influencing what shows up when someone searches your name online. Specifically, what appears on page one of Google (or another search engine).
Why page one? Because that’s basically all that exists, as far as most people are concerned. 96.98% of clicks on desktop devices happen within the top 10 search results. Page two is a graveyard.
And if you run a business, any negative results that appear affect your bottom line. 87% of customers read online reviews before engaging with a business. A bad review can turn them away without you even realizing it.
SERM is about taking that seriously, and doing something about it.
For individuals, SERM often focuses on searches like:
- Personal names
- Executives or founders
- Doctors, lawyers, or public figures
- Professionals applying for jobs or speaking opportunities
For businesses, it usually centers around:
- Brand name searches
- Reviews and ratings
- News articles
- Reddit threads, forum discussions, or social media mentions
- Google search results and autocomplete suggestions
Key Differences Between Online Reputation Management (ORM) and SERM:
You might have heard of ORM (online reputation management). The two are related, but not the same thing.
- ORM is the umbrella. It covers your reputation across social media, press coverage, review platforms, and basically every corner of the internet.
- SERM is a more specific part of ORM, focusing on search engines, and what comes up when someone googles you. Strategies include SEO, paid search, press release optimization, and content creation (blogging, social media, etc.)
How Exactly Does Search Engine Reputation Management Work?
Your starting point for search engine reputation management is to search yourself and take note of the results on the first couple of pages.
- Positive Results–anything that makes you look good. A professional profile, a flattering news mention, your own website. These are reputational assets you can build on.
- Negative Results–anything you’d rather people not see. Maybe it’s already costing you opportunities, or you feel like it could have a negative impact on your life.
- Neutral Results–neither good nor bad, but they do take up space on page one, which is important.
Once you know what you’re dealing with, you have a few ways to tackle the bad stuff:
- Remove from the Internet entirely, either through outreach, legal, or platform violation tools
- Request removal from Google’s search results (the content will still live on the website, but won’t show up in a search)
- Suppress negative search results by applying SEO best practices to bring up positive and neutral content & pushing down negative results at the same time
The Role of Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of creating or improving a piece of content in such a way that makes it rank higher in search results for a specific keyword. In this case, that keyword is your name, or your business’s name.
The idea with SERM is to get enough positive content to rank for your name, and the negative stuff gets pushed so far down the page that nobody sees it.
That content could be your website, social profiles, blog posts, press mentions, directory listings–or basically anything you own or can get control of. The goal is to fill page one with results that you’re happy for people to find.
Take LinkedIn as an example.
Plenty of people have an outdated profile just sitting there. No photo, old job title, barely any information. That’s a missed opportunity, because Google trusts LinkedIn and tends to rank profiles highly. A few simple updates can bring it straight to the top of your results:
- Add a current photo and headline that reflects what you do now
- Write an about section that naturally includes keywords related to your industry
- Update your experience section to reflect your current role
- Publish an article occasionally to keep it active
Do that, and your forgotten LinkedIn page actually becomes an asset. Repeat this process with other profiles, your website, and anywhere else you have a presence, until your first page is full of positive, professional results.
SEO and Your Search Results
How do negative articles actually rank? Google doesn’t surface content randomly. There are a few specific reasons a negative article about you might be sitting on page one. It’s a combination of:
- Relevance. If your name is in the headline, URL, and throughout the body of an article, Google sees it as highly relevant to searches for your name.
- Authority. A story published on an established news outlet carries a lot of weight with Google.
- Backlinks. If other websites link to that article, or the website generally, Google reads that as a vote of confidence. More links generally means stronger rankings.
- Engagement. If people are clicking on a result and actually sticking around to read it, Google takes that as a signal that the content is worth showing.
Understanding this is key because your suppression strategy essentially works in reverse. You’re trying to build content that hits all of those same signals, but for positive results instead.
Your Step-By-Step Guide
1. Audit Your Results
Open an incognito browser and search yourself. Incognito is important here because regular search results are personalized to you, so you won’t get an accurate picture of what everyone else actually sees.
Go through the first two or three pages. Then try a few variations: your name + your city, your name + your employer, your business name + “reviews”. This can bring up additional results than just your name alone.
If you find anything negative that you’d rather people not see, you have a couple of options to get rid of it.
- Try removal when: The content is false, defamatory, violates the platform’s policies, contains your private personal information, or uses your copyrighted materials. These situations give you the strongest grounds to push back–either by contacting the website directly, flagging a policy violation, or pursuing legal action (in some cases).
- Try suppression when: The content is factually correct, like a court record or a news article that got its facts right, or when you’ve already tried removal and it didn’t work. Suppression is also worth considering even alongside removal efforts, because it works across multiple pieces of negative content at once. It creates a kind of protective barrier, making it harder for anything negative to break through in the future.
2. Attempt to Remove What You Can
If you’ve identified something you want gone, start by going straight to the source. Find the contact information for the website owner or platform and reach out directly–you can use a WHOIS lookup tool if you can’t find contact details on the website.
Be polite, explain your situation clearly, and make your case.
Full removal is great when it happens, but website owners have no legal obligation to take content down just because you ask. Some simply won’t respond to you. Unless you have a genuine legal basis, like defamation or a clear privacy violation, you can’t force their hand.
If direct outreach fails, Google does offer its own removal tools that let you request certain results be delisted from search, like the Results About You tool.
But, these tools are fairly limited in scope. They’re mostly limited to removing your personal information, like your home address or financial details appearing somewhere they shouldn’t.
If removal doesn’t work, that’s okay–it’s what suppression is for.
3. Use Search Engine Suppression
When content removal isn’t on the table, suppression is your best friend. Rather than fighting to take content down, you bury negative search results by building up enough positive content that it gets pushed off page one entirely.
Here’s how to approach it.
- Start with what you already have. Your website, blog, social media profiles, any unclaimed directory listings, etc. Go through them and get everything up to date. Platforms like LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, and Medium already carry a lot of authority with Google, so they tend to rank quickly. These are great starting points, especially if you’re building a personal website from scratch and waiting for it to gain traction.
- Create new content. Fresh material gives Google something positive to associate with your name. This could be industry-relevant blog posts, thought leadership articles, posts about your achievements, volunteer work, and even hobbies.
- Link everything together. Add links between your website and various profiles. This signals to Google that they’re all related. This helps bring them up as a cluster, like boats tied together in a rising tide.
Remember, suppression isn’t a one-week fix–it takes persistence. But once your owned content starts outranking the negative results, you’re in a strong position. You’ve essentially built a wall of content you control to keep your reputation protected going forward.
4. Monitor and Maintain Your Results
Progress takes time, particularly with suppression. Search engine reputation management isn’t something you do once and never think about again.
But once you’ve done the hard work, maintenance is pretty low effort. A few habits go a long way.
- Google yourself once a month. Incognito browser, like before. Just check in and see if anything has changed. New results can appear at any time, so catching them early makes them much easier to deal with.
- Set up a Google Alert for your name. It takes about two minutes and means you’ll get an email notification anytime something new about you appears in search. This way, you don’t have to always check manually.
- Keep publishing. Even just one blog post a month, shared across your social profiles, is enough to keep your content fresh and your digital presence active. Announce achievements and share updates. Stale profiles and inactive websites gradually lose their ranking power, so consistency helps.
What to Expect With Search Engine Reputation Management Services
Here’s what to look for to get the best professional reputation company for search engine management:
- A real consultation before any commitment. A reputable company will want to look at your specific situation before quoting you anything. This means going through your search results together, identifying what needs to be addressed, assessing the authority of the sites involved, how recent the content is, and what it’s going to take to clean things up. Anyone who gives you a price without doing that first doesn’t fully know what they’re selling you.
- Control over your narrative. The right company will help you identify positive content that already exists about you, things you might not even know are out there, and get it ranking. They’ll also work to build out assets you control, like a personal website, so the first thing people find is something nobody else can touch or corrupt.
- Transparent reporting. You should never be left wondering what’s happening. Look for regular progress updates and status calls so you can see results as they develop.
- A personalized approach. Life doesn’t pause while your reputation is being managed. A good team will work around what’s happening on your end, whether that’s a job interview, a speaking engagement, or anything else, and adjust their efforts accordingly.
- Confidentiality and compassion. These situations are stressful, and they rarely affect just one person. A spouse or entire family can get caught up in something like this. The right company gets that, treats every case with discretion, and leaves judgement at the door.
- Ready to take back control of your search results? Reputation911 offers a completely free, confidential consultation where we’ll walk through your results together and build a plan tailored to your situation. No pressure or judgement–just a clear picture of where you stand and what we can do about it.