An unfavorable article appeared in the first twenty Google results for a client’s business. Our next report was still days away, so I sent the client an update that morning. We’d launched their new website the day before.
I showed them where the article appeared and which related searches were still clear. I also told them Google had indexed some pages on the new site. The site was still outside the results we were tracking. I explained what we’d check again and where I wanted to focus the next piece of work. The client replied with a brief thank-you. We later sent an editor a Q&A based on the founder’s written answers about the business.
At Reputation Repair, we help people and businesses address harmful search results, protect their privacy and make accurate information easier to find. We review what people see when they search a name, assess options for correcting or removing inaccurate information, and build professional websites and profiles. We also help businesses manage reviews and listings and help people reduce the personal information available through data brokers.
What Reputation Firms Get Wrong
The mistake I see too often in reputation management is treating published work as proof that a client’s search results improved. A firm can launch every website and profile it promised in a week when a damaging article moves higher. If my report says things are improving while the client sees a more prominent negative result, I wrote the report wrong.
At Reputation Repair, we identify the searches that matter to the client and record what appears before we start. We compare those same searches over time. Each update shows what we delivered, what changed in search and what we’ll do next. The person who helped set the plan stays responsible for explaining the results. When a material change appears between reports, the client hears from us ahead of schedule.
In this case, the new article showed up for the business name. The site we’d just launched gave people a place to find the individual’s professional work. For people searching for the business, we wanted to answer a different set of questions about what it does, who does the work and what to expect when they call. Seeing which search had changed gave us a reason to focus there.
What the Client Hired Us to Do
Before I founded Reputation Repair, I led teams in sales, customer experience and operations. I learned to pay attention to what happens to a customer’s request once the sale is made. By the time the work reaches the person doing it, a conversation about a real problem can become a line in a brief. If it says “build a website,” you know what to deliver. You still need to know why the client asked for it.
Some professional relationships stay with you long after your responsibilities change. Over my career, clients continued reaching out to me for guidance because I understood their circumstances. That helped shape the kind of business I wanted to build.
For the professional site in that engagement, we brought the client’s research and speaking work together so a visitor could find it in one place. On a project for a local service business, the owner needed people to see photos of completed jobs and request an estimate. We built the gallery from photos of actual jobs and sent a test estimate request to make sure it reached the right inbox. Knowing why the client needed each site told us what to check before we could call it finished.
A useful brief records the client’s reason for buying, the decisions they’ve made and who owns the next step. When someone new picks up a task, they can use that information to answer the client’s question without asking them to tell their story again.
If you run a service business, pick one engagement where you delivered something recently. Give the original proposal and the latest update to a colleague who wasn’t involved in the sale. Ask them to explain why the client hired you, what the client can now see or use, and what they need to hear next. The first answer your colleague has to guess tells you what to fix in the brief or the next update.
Written by Chad Angle, founder and managing director of Reputation Repair. He lives in Gilbert, Arizona.