11 Actionable Tips to Protect Your Reputation Online

Protect your reputation with the actionable tips presented in our guide below. 

Protecting your online reputation is more than just searching for your name in Google and setting up monitoring alerts. It’s also about using the tools, platforms, and content around you to effectively build a protective wall around your name in the search results.

To accomplish this successfully, you will need to have your own website and content in place and know how to use social media, outreach, and authority sites to help your content rank higher.

To help with this process, we’ve provided eleven actionable tips that you can start using today. Each method will prove highly effective in the never-ending mission to keep your online reputation safe and secure!

1 – Start a Website

It’s amazing how many individuals, businesses, and brands still lack a website. If you fall into this category, take the next 10 minutes to start a website of your own—it’s your absolute best line of defense for protecting your name and brand online.

When registering a domain name, be sure to register both your personal name and your brand name. Once your site is live, add quality content to it and link to all of your social media profiles.

2 – Write a Blog

A website and a blog are two completely different things. If you already have a website, then you should also have a blog. While a website is more about static content and information, a blog is more focused on constantly updated content, usually powered by the WordPress CMS.

The benefits of having a blog connected to your site are that Google will see a fresh supply of content being added daily/weekly, which will also help it rank higher and more often in the search results. A WordPress-powered blog also allows users to leave comments on your site and easily share its content with others online.

3 – Get Active on Social Media

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram—it doesn’t matter which you use, as long as you have an account set up on each.

Social networks are a crucial part of online reputation management because Google ranks them highly in search results. This means you could have many of your social profiles ranking at the top of Google for your personal and business name instead of other sites you might not have control over. The more your content ranks, the more control you have.

4 – Remove Negative Backlinks to Your Site

If you already have a website or blog, there is a good chance you have many links pointing back to it. Some of them are good, and some of them might be bad. Low-quality and irrelevant links can be harmful to your site and may even push it lower in the search results.

Be sure to check out this quality resource to learn more about negative backlinks and how to remove them from your site.

5 – Don’t Comment Publicly to Negative Content

When monitoring your online reputation, you will probably find comments, reviews, news (on sites like Google), and site content that you disagree with. In times like these, it’s important that you bite your tongue and not leave any nasty comments in an open forum—as they may come back to haunt you later on or even make your reputation seem worse!

Read our guide here for best practices and tips on responding correctly to negative content online.

6 – Create a Wikipedia Page

Wikipedia is one of the most authoritative sites on the internet, and it usually ranks right at the top of Google for most names and keywords. If you have many personal achievements or are running a business that deserves to be featured in Wikipedia, you should look into this. Not only will you be listed in Wikipedia, but it will also bring notoriety to your name and boost your other site properties and media mentions in the process.

Are you not sure how to get listed on Wikipedia? This guide will help.

7 – Setup Google Alerts Notifications

How often have you searched Google to see what comes up for your name or brand in the search results? Probably quite often!

Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time, and if you wanted to see what’s always ranking in Google, you would simply go crazy! A better way to monitor personal name and brand mentions in Google is to set up a free Google Alerts notification. Instead of manually searching through Google, you would receive an email alert every time your selected keyword or phrase appears within new content in Google. Best of all, it’s free!

Still don’t have Google Alerts set up? Click here to start one now. This free tool is one of the best ways to proactively protect your reputation by alerting you to problems before they can cause reputational damage.

8 – Write an Article within Your LinkedIn Account

Social networks are a great way to connect with others in your industry while making sharing content more accessible.

If you are a brand or business professional, taking the time to write a detailed article on your LinkedIn page is a great way to establish yourself as an expert among your followers and friends. It’s also a great platform for making your message go viral.

LinkedIn has millions of users on its site, and if you take the time to create something great or valuable, it wouldn’t be rare to find your article with a few thousand views and hundreds of social shares.

Are you looking for an example? This article has over 100,000 reads!

9 – Create a Viral Infographic

Infographics are one of the best ways to transform boring data into something everyone wants to view and share. They can be made for nearly any industry or statistic and are great for getting other websites and blogs to link back and share your original content.

Refer to our recent article based on this reputation management infographic to see an example of how you can create unique content for your own site.

Once you’ve created an infographic for your own site, be sure to focus on your outreach to ensure that other sites pick it up and share it with their audiences.

10 – Contribute Content to Other Industry Sites

Speaking of reaching out to other websites and blogs… content contributions are another excellent example of how you can start contributing to other sites and gaining more exposure.

With over a billion sites on the Internet today, all of them are looking for more content. If you do a simple Google search for phrases like “write for us” or “guest blogging,” you will come across many sites that provide you with an author account and allow you to create original content for their site.

The benefit is putting your name and expertise before a new audience. The author bio will also usually allow you to link back to your site and social profiles — thus helping them rank higher in the search results.

Are you not sure if guest blogging is right for you? Follow these best practices and tips for getting the most out of your content contributions.

11 – Media Outreach and Interviews

One of the best ways to gain immediate exposure for yourself or your brand is to reach out to different media outlets and writers on other big-name sites. Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, and Huffington Post all have thousands of independent writers who are always looking for new content and stories to work off of.

Look at the latest articles on any of these sites right now, and you will find the author section and contact details on the same page. Follow the author on social media, share their content, and then follow up with them in an email to see if you can help them (and get featured) in an upcoming article.

Your Online Reputation is in Your Hands

While there seems to be a never-ending supply of content being created on the internet daily, it doesn’t mean that you and your brand’s reputation must be held hostage. You can take the simple steps above to protect your reputation, giving you the power to shape positive perceptions of yourself and your business interests.

Implement each of the actionable tips above to take control of what people find when they search for your name online. Your online reputation is something you will have for the rest of your life, so make sure to put the effort in now to build a protective wall around your brand that continues to work year after year.

To learn more about monitoring and managing your brand mentions online, read through our list of the most recommended monitoring tools from other ORM experts in the industry.