Key takeaways
- Page one for your name is often the first impression a customer gets of you.
- Count how many results you control, and look for ads, reviews and anything misleading.
- Most problems are fixed by building out your own pages and profiles, not by removal.
Type your business name into a search engine and read the first page as a stranger would. What appears there is often the first thing a prospective customer learns about you, and it is not always what you would choose.
What to look for
- Does your own site come first?
- Do you own other results, such as your profiles and local listing?
- Who else appears: directories, review sites, news, a competitor?
- Is anyone advertising on your name?
- Are there old, inaccurate or negative results?
- Does the panel on the right describe you correctly?
Count what you control
Of the first ten results, count the ones you own or can influence: your site, your profiles, your business listing. A healthy page usually has several. Two or three owned results out of ten suggests room to build.
How to respond
- Make sure your site's title and description include your name clearly
- Build and complete the profiles search engines trust for businesses like yours
- Respond to reviews, and ask happy customers to leave real ones
- Where a result is inaccurate, contact the site and ask for a correction
- Watch the page regularly, so changes do not surprise you
What not to do
Do not try to pay or pressure a site to remove an honest negative review, and do not create fake profiles to push it down. Both tend to backfire. The durable fix is more good, real material that you control.
Tracking this is what our brand search service does, and one of our example results shows what changed for a firm that fixed its own name search.