Apart from review funneling, what other elements make up online reputation management?

What other things does "online reputation management" entail besides doing the 7878 system exactly? Say a company asked you to manage their online reputation. What exactly do you do for them?

ORM is mostly just controlling what shows up when someone searches the brand/name, not only blasting the 7878 style stuff. I usually start with a SERP audit, map the bad pages, then build/strengthen assets that can rank: site pages, socials, press profiles, niche directories, web 2.0s, videos, image results, review sites, etc. Then you monitor mentions, push happy customers to leave reviews, answer bad reviews without sounding like a robot, and if something is removable you try removal first before suppression. The boring part is reporting and keeping the client calm, because ORM is slow unless the negative result is weak or brand has decent authority already.

It’s usually less about one tactic and more about cleaning up the signals Google sees. If it’s seeing mixed names across old profiles and directories, you fix that first. Then build enough consistent sources so the bad result gets pushed down and forgotten.

@The WP Nerd pretty much covered the meat of it. One thing nobody mentioned yet is the intake part. Before you touch anything you wanna know why the negative stuff exists in the first place... is it one angry ex employee, a real product issue, a news story, scraped mugshot sites, whatever. Changes the whole approach.

For an actual client I usually split it into protect, recover, monitor. Protect is locking down all the brand owned properties and getting them ranking so nobody can squat on their name later. Recover is the suppression/removal grind everyone here talked about. Monitor is the part most agencies sell as retainer because mentions never stop, and one bad reddit thread can undo months of work if you're not watching.

Honestly the reviews side is half the gig too. Steady drip of real reviews does more for trust than any web 2.0 stack imo. Just dont fake them, google's gotten way better at sniffing review velocity that doesnt make sense.

And yeah @Godspeed Agency manage expectations hard upfront. Clients think this is a 2 week thing. Seen people burn relationships because they promised a buried result would drop in a month when the brand had zero authority to begin with.

Big thing missing is setting the “source of truth” for the brand before you start pushing stuff around. Like if their site has thin about/contact pages, no founder profile, dead socials, no schema, no press page, then you’re trying to suppress with weak ammo.

For a company I’d first clean up owned assets, make sure their branded search looks legit, then build out stuff Google already likes for entity signals. Crunchbase, LinkedIn, YouTube, industry profiles, BBB/Trustpilot if relevant, podcast mentions, local citations if local biz, etc. Not just random web 2.0s.

Also @Campaigns By Mike is right on intake. If the bad result is ranking because the company actually keeps screwing customers, ORM turns into mopping the floor while the sink is still running. You can hide some stuff for awhile, but reviews and reddit will keep coming back if ops are trash.

I will apply all your idea

One thing I’d add is dont sell ORM as “we remove bad stuff” unless you already know it can be removed. That’s where people get themselves in trouble.

For a company, first job is usually making their branded SERP look like a real company owns it. Homepage, about page, socials, founder/management profiles, review profiles, citations, press, videos, images, all matching same name/address/entity info. Then you decide what needs removal, what needs suppression, and what needs responding to.

Also document the negative assets before starting. Screenshot rankings, dates, keywords, URLs. Clients forget how bad it looked once things improve and then wonder what they’re paying for lol.

One thing that gets missed with ORM is the “policy” side of it. Like who inside the company is allowed to reply to reviews, what tone they use, what gets escalated, what proof they keep, etc. If every angry comment gets a random emotional reply from staff, you’re fighting your own client half the time.

For @Godspeed Agency I’d package it more like branded SERP cleanup + review management + mention monitoring + asset building. Then separate removal work as “case by case” because some stuff is legit and some platforms just won’t care. Also worth making them fix the actual complaint source if there is one... otherwise you’re just pushing water uphill.

yeah autocomplete and related searches are another beast entirely. you can push the bad links to page 2, but if the user types the brand name and google suggests "scam" or "lawsuit" before they even hit enter, you still lose. cleaning up autocomplete suggestions usually takes search query manipulation which is a whole different headache...

also agree with @BidNomad on documenting everything. clients have short memories. once the bad link drops to page 3 they forget how bad it was and start questioning the monthly invoice. i always keep a shared folder with weekly screenshots of the top 3 pages so they can actually see the progress.

I can remove news articles, online content, social media links, and Google Business Profile reviews from the internet.

Is not only about reviews but how peoples see when they search for that brand like not having bad press released highly ranking or other bad articles

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is how to actually get those new assets to rank over the bad stuff quickly. Just building social profiles wont do much if the negative link has high authority. You need to pump some power into the new assets. Parasite SEO is huge for this... hosting content on high authority domains like Substack, Medium, or even Behance and mapping them to the brand entity.

Also @SidarJabari do not pay Yelp. Once you pay them they own you and the second you stop paying those bad reviews magically reappear. Better to run a campaign targeting your email list of happy customers to dilute the rating naturally.

Oh and CTR manipulation is another thing if you want to speed up the suppression. Getting real users to search the brand name and click the positive assets instead of the negative one tells google the bad link isnt relevant anymore. Hard to scale but works if you use micro workers properly.

One thing I don’t see mentioned much is cleaning up the domain/email side of the brand. Old domains, typo domains, dead campaign domains, broken redirects — all of that can turn into a reputation problem later.

Godspeed Agency said:

What other things does "online reputation management" entail besides doing the 7878 system exactly? Say a company asked you to manage their online reputation. What exactly do you do for them?

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ORM is much more than just reviewing in my view. the branded SERP, owned channel mention nd monitoring are all thing that people ignore vry often. another time-saving thing would be solving problems where they originated and not worrying about complaints only.

Moraina said:

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is how to actually get those new assets to rank over the bad stuff quickly. Just building social profiles wont do much if the negative link has high authority. You need to pump some power into the new assets. Parasite SEO is huge for this... hosting content on high authority domains like Substack, Medium, or even Behance and mapping them to the brand entity.

Also @SidarJabari do not pay Yelp. Once you pay them they own you and the second you stop paying those bad reviews magically reappear. Better to run a campaign targeting your email list of happy customers to dilute the rating naturally.

Oh and CTR manipulation is another thing if you want to speed up the suppression. Getting real users to search the brand name and click the positive assets instead of the negative one tells google the bad link isnt relevant anymore. Hard to scale but works if you use micro workers properly.

Click to expand...

Yeah, this is what I was afraid of. Yelp basically extorts people and holds their reviews hostage.

The problem is I work in the personal injury space in California, which is MASSIVELY competitive and cut throat. We don't get a lot of repeat customers, either, nor do we get too many referrals.

I'll see about Substack and LinkedIn, etc. for more parasite SEO ideas.