The problem with bad search results
75% of people never scroll past page one of Google. If something negative is ranking there for searches on your name — your actual business name — you’re losing a significant percentage of potential customers before they’ve had a single interaction with you.
It doesn’t matter if the content is unfair. It doesn’t matter if the review is from a competitor posing as a customer. It doesn’t matter if the article is five years old and completely out of date. If it’s ranking on page one, it’s doing damage. The only thing that matters is getting it off page one — and keeping it there.
That’s what online reputation management actually is. Not spin. Not suppressing legitimate criticism through legal threats. Getting the accurate, positive story about your business to rank above the inaccurate, damaging one.
Negative content suppression — pushing bad results down
Suppression works by creating and amplifying positive, authoritative content about your business until it outranks the negative. Google doesn’t remove content just because you don’t like it (unless it violates specific policies — and even then it’s a slow, unreliable process). What it does do is rank the most authoritative, relevant results. We make sure those are yours.
The content we use varies by situation. Sometimes it’s optimising your existing profiles — LinkedIn, Clutch, Google Business, industry directories — that Google already trusts. Sometimes it’s building new brand assets: press features, author profiles, podcast appearances, news mentions. Sometimes it’s creating content that directly targets the search terms where the negative result appears.
Speed matters enormously here. The longer negative content sits on page one, the more embedded it becomes in Google’s understanding of your brand. Early intervention is significantly easier than trying to fix something that’s been ranking for three years. If you’re dealing with something right now — don’t wait.
Review management — getting more of what people want to see
Reviews are one of the most visible reputation signals in search results. Star ratings show up directly in Google’s search results, in the map pack, in your Business Profile. A 3.2 average loses you business to a competitor with 4.6, even if you’re actually better.
The honest truth about review generation: most businesses have plenty of happy customers who just never thought to leave a review. They assume you know they’re happy. They forgot. They mean to do it later. A simple, well-timed follow-up process captures those reviews — and most businesses that implement it properly see a significant improvement in review volume within 60 days.
We build that process for you. Not fake reviews. Not incentivised reviews that violate platform guidelines. Just a systematic way of asking your actual happy customers to share their experience at the right moment, in the right way, on the right platforms.
We also look at your negative reviews. Responding to them properly matters — both for the customer who left it and for everyone who reads it afterwards. A professional, measured response to a negative review often does more for your reputation than the negative review damages it.
Brand monitoring — knowing what’s being said before it becomes a problem
Most businesses find out about reputation problems the hard way — a client mentions it, someone spots it, traffic suddenly drops from branded searches. By then, the content has been ranking for weeks or months.
We set up monitoring for your brand name, your key executives, and your main products or services. When something new appears — a review, an article, a social media post, a forum thread — we see it and flag it. Most of the time it’s nothing. Occasionally it’s something that needs a response before it embeds itself on page one. Early warning is everything in reputation management.
Crisis response — when things blow up fast
Sometimes reputation problems aren’t slow. A disgruntled former employee posts something that goes semi-viral. A journalist writes a critical piece that ranks immediately because of the publication’s authority. A competitor orchestrates a coordinated negative review campaign. A social media post screenshots something out of context.
These situations need different handling than standard suppression campaigns. They require speed, coordination, and sometimes a combination of SEO, PR, and legal review (though we’re not lawyers and don’t provide legal advice). We’ve dealt with enough of these to know what works, what makes things worse, and how to prioritise actions in the first 48 hours.
If you’re in a crisis right now — email us at hello@revddigital.com or WhatsApp us. We can usually get someone on a call within a few hours.
“A competitor had written a hit piece about us that was ranking number two for our business name. We’d tried to get it removed through the platform for months — nothing. REVD got it off page one in about eight weeks. Still not sure exactly how but I stopped asking questions and just kept paying the invoice.”