2 min read
How to Remove Personal Data
Step by step directions on how to remove your data from data aggregators like Radaris, Spokeo, MyLife, PeopleFinders and Intelius.
8 min read
8 examples of excellent content marketing
Content marketing is a marketing strategy focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a target audience. The key words here are ‘valuable’ and ‘relevant’. Each content piece should communicate your message in a way that adds value to your readers, answers their real questions, piques and expands their interests, and makes them trust you and your brand.
7 min read
How to Remove Images from Google Search if Google Won't
Want to remove images from Google? Sometimes negative search results take the form of images. Most often negative images cannot be removed from the internet. When they can be removed it is usually from the blog post, mugshot site, or article on which they reside and they must be removed by the publisher. Google will remove some images from search results under certain circumstances, but it is rare. Here's what to do when an image cannot be removed from the source or from search results.
4 min read
What is and is not true about your online brand
The genie is out of the bottle. In this day and age, everything is public and visible. A plethora of information floats around the internet and trying to control who posts what feels like boiling the ocean. To make it worse, it takes so much time to build a reputation and only one bad moment to tarnish it.
13 min read
Reputation Management Strategy: The Bulletproof Guide
Reputation management strategy is part of brand building, and it's so much more than making sure your company has great reviews. This guide will help you navigate the world of reputation strategy in the online environment. Online reputation — that intangible asset, that electronic chimera — is hard to assess let alone fix. And when it comes right down to the exact techniques to repair a reputation, many CMOs, publicists, or executives are downright nonplussed.
4 min read
Measure the effectiveness of an SEO agency
How do you know if your search engine optimization agency is doing a good job? Instead of waiting months for results, you can get a glimpse of whether the work they are doing will be effective early. Here are three relatively simple things you can check. Think of it as the SEO version of "trust but verify".
2 min read
How to reduce search engine lead loss
Up to 90% of business leads research a brand online prior to a buying decision.
Research indicates that salespeople lose about 22% of prospective customers when only one negative article is seen when researching whether to buy a product or service. When there are two negatives in search results, the losses can double. When three negative things are seen in search results the losses can mount to almost 60%.
8 min read
Do these things now to make your company website rank better in Google.
For all the brands looking to improve their online presence, here is a checklist of 50 SEO tips that briefly cover everything from SSL certificates to schema to search friendly URLs and much more. Note: If you are looking for an online reputation checklist click here.
8 min read
How to unlock branded search features in Google
Google is your new home page. When a brand dominates their own search engine results, it sends trust signals to prospective customers. Control of the many aspects of search results such as Knowledge Panel, carousel images, location information, Google posts, social media posts, and more not only provides brands with the ability to showcase why they're great, it also enables a company to keep competitors from sharing their online brand-space. This article discusses many of the ways brands can control how they're seen online.
9 min read
Google vs. Donald Trump's Reputation
President Trump thinks Google is rigged against him. It's probably not, but that doesn't stop the scrutiny. Google's portrayal of Trump is a reflection of people's desires - all the people, not a group or an individual. A pandemic, economic disaster, and Black Lives Matter marches don't help.
While Donald Trump has mastered the art of publicity, it's a genie let out of its a bottle. Once escaped it can have unforeseen consequences like those we are seeing today.
For example, at one time President Trump wrote that "Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED..."
1 min read
Joke: Postal Worker Reputation
There was a man who worked for the Post Office whose job was to process mail that had illegible addresses. One day, a letter came addressed in shaky handwriting to God, but with no actual address. He thought he should open it to see what it was about.
The letter read:
12 min read
Personal Reputation Management - How Individuals Craft Google Results
There’s a reason why the National Enquirer, The Sun, Daily Star, and US Weekly publish content that is all about scandalous behavior. We all love a good fall from grace story (unless it's happening to us), a red hot gossip drop, or a celebrity rumor. And when personal reputations start blowing up like Philadelphia on the 4th of July, we are tapping and swiping our devices to get the latest, juicy tell-all details.
You may not end up on the cover of US Weekly, but you nonetheless have a reputation. And that reputation needs to be managed.
9 min read
Local Business Reputation Management
Reputation matters, whether you’re an ordinary individual, an extraordinary individual, a crook, a saint, a political figure, or an entertainer. But reputation matters for more than just individuals. In the world of business, reputation has an ever broader impact than ever.
11 min read
How Political Reputation Management Works
It’s hard to change someone’s mind. However, it’s easy to confirm one’s biases. And nowhere is this more true than in the world of political reputation management.
Whether you’re running for the vice president of your neighborhood HOA or vying for election to the president of the United States, political reputation is an untamed beast. It’s complicated. It’s tenuous. It moves rapidly. It rises. It falls. And no one in the history of the world has mastered it.
10 min read
The Cost of Negative Corporate Reputation
Corporate reputation refers to people’s collective opinion regarding a corporation or enterprise. It’s based on such features such as search engine results, news coverage, and the publicized actions of the company. There are there some corporate reputation humdingers out there. The news media loves a sizzling story of a corporation’s fall from grace and with good reason. The public is receptive, clicks ensue, money is made. This is because the human brain seems wired to generate copious amounts of curiosity when the topic is salacious or negative.
11 min read
Measuring Corporate Sentiment
Corporate sentiment, or business sentiment, is how people feel about your brand. In more technical terms, it’s the level of confidence that shareholders have in a corporation or business—the prevailing mood or attitude about that company’s success (or lack thereof).
25 min read
What Is Reputation?
What is Reputation? What is a good reputation? Reputation is the subjective qualitative belief a person has regarding a brand, person, company, product, or service. Reputation is the key to success.
Reputation is best defined as a third-party perception of your, or your brands, character. It is a malleable thing. Malleable by others, or by you. This is because today, people depend on Google to make decisions for them. Whether you're selling water or running for President, your online reputation precedes you. By changing how Google portrays a brand you can change one of the main ways people perceive reputation.
Your online identity is how others see you.
In today’s digital environment, reputation is more important, more pervasive, more unforgettable, and more meaningful than ever. It's difficult to build, enhance, sustain, and protect a reputation that'll last (even for a reputation management agency). It’s also easy to neglect, abuse, reject, or shred a reputation in just a short amount of time. A disaster can happen in minutes, circle the globe within hours, and live on to haunt your search results. That's why it's so important to maintain an active reputation management strategy.
Let's unpack what reputation really is.
10 min read
How People Perceive Reputation
A person or company’s reputation is based on information (of some kind or another). And every reputation is perceived by people (of some kind or another). Put information and perception together, and you have reputation.
4 min read
FINRA and SEO for financial services firms.
Online marketing and SEO for the financial services industry is often heavily regulated by entities like FINRA. The rules financial firms must live by make SEO and content marketing more challenging for the industry. But there are still ways to craft effective campaigns.
12 min read
Online reputation repair - Steps to rebuild a damaged corporate reputation
Your company has fallen from grace. Maybe your CEO was arrested for fraud. Maybe E. coli was found in your food and made your restaurant customers sick. Or maybe you’ve just made some ill-advised business decisions over time, and it’s finally caught up with you.
A reputation crisis can happen unexpectedly, and can be a difficult thing to overcome, but it is possible to repair your reputation. Although a damaged corporate reputation may seem impossible to reverse, the journey to rebuild it can be summarized in a few key steps: