Your professional reputation lives online now, and it’s probably not as polished as you’d like. That embarrassing news piece from 5 years ago is still there on page one of Google. Those old social media posts you completely forgot about are still floating around, too. Capable candidates lose out on great jobs all the time because a hiring manager stumbled across something questionable during a quick Google search.
Your online image has become a part of regular career maintenance at this point. The problem is that most working professionals don’t have the time or technical expertise to actually do anything about their search results. You need to know what shows up when anybody types your name into Google, and you need a way to shape those results that doesn’t need a crash course in SEO.
BrandYourself is one company that’s been tackling this exact problem for a while. The platform actually started when the founders ran into their own search result disasters back at Syracuse University. Now they work with professionals who want to take control of their online story by optimizing their content instead of trying to delete everything.
Here’s how BrandYourself manages what shows up about you online!
What BrandYourself Does for You
BrandYourself started when three Syracuse University students came across a problem during their job search that later became the foundation for their entire business. They googled themselves and found all sorts of content that they didn’t want recruiters or hiring managers to see. What made this discovery even more significant was the fact that millions of working professionals had this same issue every day.
BrandYourself does something that most reputation management firms wouldn’t even think about. All the big firms in this industry compete for the same corporate clients with deep pockets. But BrandYourself built its entire business around regular working professionals instead. Their customers are teachers, doctors, job seekers and small business owners – anyone who wants to have more control over the search results that come up when anybody types their name into Google.
The stress and anxiety that negative search results create can completely destroy your career prospects. You might find an old arrest record from a case that was dropped years ago, or worse, another person with your exact same name did something terrible, and now it shows up whenever anyone searches for your name. These damaging results can stay in Google’s index for years or decades without professional help to fix them. One major study actually found that negative content stays visible in the search results for an average of 7 years when it’s left untouched.
BrandYourself’s strategy for handling these problems is what sets them apart from other services. Instead of trying to scrub negative content from the internet (which almost never works because once something’s online, it’s nearly impossible to completely remove it), their team helps you develop and promote positive, professional content that pushes those unwanted results lower down in the search rankings. The goal is simple – when anybody googles your name, your professional accomplishments and positive content will show up first – not the material you’d rather leave behind.
It aligns perfectly with the way Google’s algorithm actually functions. Google wants to show users the most relevant and the most recent content for whatever they’re searching for. The algorithm prefers fresh material over old content every time. Regularly creating and sharing new, authentic content about yourself and your professional life gives Google much better material to work with. The search engine then has quality options to display at the top of the results page instead of outdated or irrelevant information.
Pick the Right Service for You
We have two main options for reputation management, and which one makes sense for you is mostly a matter of the support level you’re after and the amount of time you have available for the work.
The DIY platform comes with dashboards to track your progress, along with optimization guides that break down the entire process step by step. You’ll get automated recommendations from time to time, and each one spells out what you need to do to improve your search results. It’s a natural fit for tech-savvy users who have a few hours a week to dedicate to reputation management.
The Done-For-You premium service works very differently. The professional reputation managers do all the work as clients spend their time on whatever else matters to them. Most busy executives don’t have 3 hours a week to mess around with LinkedIn profiles or to write blog posts. It makes much more sense to just hire the experts who already know what needs to be done.
Each option works for very different customers. Recent grads with tight budgets but time to spare usually go with the DIY tools to build their digital footprint bit by bit over time. Anyone who discovers negative search results about themselves usually wants to get expert help right then and there.
Most of our customers try to handle everything themselves at first and then switch to the premium service later on. The work takes up much more time and energy than they thought it would, and some of the tasks eat up entire days. And when your career or business reputation is at stake, it just makes more sense to have the experts who do this every day take care of your public image.
The Features That Help Your Reputation
After you’ve signed up for BrandYourself, the reputation score system is the first feature you’ll run into. The tool works by scanning through your search results and then calculating a score between 0 and 100. The number it generates is your online reputation report card, giving you a picture of what comes up when anybody searches your name online.
The scoring system is actually pretty simple once you see how it works. BrandYourself looks at everything on the first page of Google when somebody searches for your name. Then it figures out if each result helps or hurts your reputation and by how much. This makes perfect sense when you think about it – hardly anyone clicks past those first few search results when they’re checking somebody out online. The algorithm knows this, and it weights everything accordingly.
The dashboard is your main workspace for keeping track of everything. It’s the main place where you can track every mention of your name that pops up anywhere on the internet. New articles, social media posts, and website mentions – they all show up in a consolidated view. What I appreciate is that you’re never in the dark about what’s floating around out there with your name attached to it. The dashboard refreshes every day.
BrandYourself comes with a few tools that let you improve the profiles you’ve already got floating around online. The system takes a look at your LinkedIn profile and gives you specific tips on how to get it to rank higher when someone searches your name. Personal websites get the same treatment, too. The system actually checks out your exact situation and sees what’s going on with your profiles, then puts together recommendations that make sense for where you are at this point.
The progress tracking system is what tends to motivate users over the long haul. As you work through the different tasks, you’ll watch the progress bars fill up on your screen. Little achievement badges appear as you hit milestones along the way. The gamification might seem gimmicky to some. There’s also a keyword research tool built in that reveals what phrases users are actually typing into search engines when they look for professionals in your particular field.
When Should You Expect Your First Results
Everyone wants their online reputation fixed yesterday, and the urgency is completely understandable. But this process works much more like SEO than a magic wand for instant fixes. You’re looking at a minimum of 3-6 months before your search results start to change in any meaningful way – that’s just the reality of how these sites work with Google’s algorithms.
The whole process takes so long because search engines don’t update overnight whenever they feel like it. They crawl the web slowly and methodically and rank content based on authority markers that need to build up slowly over time. Any new positive content you create has to earn its place in the rankings, and that old negative piece about you already has years of credibility built up with Google.
The wait itself is probably the hardest part of the whole process. Most clients pull up Google first thing in the morning, and when they see the exact same results from yesterday or from last week, the frustration builds. They’ll refresh their rankings multiple times throughout the day – it’s a common pattern, and it turns into this endless cycle of checking and disappointment that doesn’t actually make anything happen any faster.
A few different factors will affect how long your particular cleanup is going to take. Having a common name like John Smith will probably move quite a bit faster than a person with a completely one-of-a-kind name. The stronger your negative content currently ranks, the longer the whole process takes to push it down the page. Your existing web presence makes a big difference, too. A person who already has an established LinkedIn profile and a personal website has a big head start over a person with zero web presence.
After some decent early progress, everything tends to completely stall out. Many clients see improvement in month two and then nothing for a few weeks after that. This plateau phase happens to almost everyone who goes through this process. The algorithm needs adequate time to adjust to all the new markers and content you’re sending its way.
One more aspect worth mentioning – stopping your reputation management work halfway through the process will cause you to lose ground really fast. Those negative results will creep back up like weeds in an abandoned garden that nobody’s maintaining anymore. Consistency beats intensity every time in reputation management.
What You Can and Cannot Expect
BrandYourself can’t actually delete any content from websites that they don’t have control over. If a news site published an unflattering story about you, that story is going to stay right where it sits. Court records that show up in online databases aren’t going anywhere either. The company can’t make your old Facebook posts or unfortunate tweets magically disappear from the social media sites themselves. What the company does do is something quite different – they work to push all that negative content much farther down in the search results, way past the point where anyone would ever bother to scroll.
The whole process is actually pretty different from what most customers expect when they first come to me. That unflattering information about you never disappears from the internet. Instead, it just gets much harder for anyone to find whenever they search for your name on Google or any other search engine. The best analogy is a bookshelf – we reorganize everything so the books you want to hide are way down on the bottom shelf, completely blocked by three other rows of much more interesting books in front of them.
The company also keeps strict ethical boundaries and won’t break any laws or bend policies just to get you the results you want. They won’t create fake websites with fabricated information about your supposed accomplishments. They’ll never hack into systems or bribe website owners to take down content. The strategies that they use stay completely within legal limits and strictly follow the search engine guidelines that Google and others have established.
Their services are great for some problems, but they’re useless for others. Some outdated information floating around from 5 or 10 years ago that has nothing to do with your life anymore – BrandYourself can usually take care of that. The same goes for an unfair piece where the facts about you were twisted or taken out of context. But legitimate scandals or criminal convictions will see extremely limited results. High-profile news stories from outlets like CNN or The New York Times are especially hard to push down in search results, mostly because the search engines automatically give these established sources tons of weight and credibility.
Viral social media posts are a very different beast. After a post has already blown up on Twitter, Reddit, or any other big platform, you won’t be able to bury it in search results. Every website and forum that picks up the story and links to that negative content makes the job exponentially harder. At that point, even the best reputation management firms have a hard time when they try to create enough positive material to outrank every one of those different sources.
Monitor and Manage Your Reputation
That gut-punch feeling of panic is completely normal, and it’s just what drives a lot of professionals to look for answers that deliver real results. Once you check out reputation management services, you’ll know that genuine reputation management isn’t some quick fix – it takes some time and genuine effort to build something that’s going to last. The days when you could hide from the internet are long gone anyway, and now you need to step up and actively shape what others find when they search your name.
I’ve watched tons of clients go through this same emotional arc – they start out convinced they need emergency damage control right away. Then they usually know that what they actually need is something more like regular maintenance of their professional image over time. It’s similar to taking care of your health – waiting until you have a serious problem is always going to be harder than if you’d just stayed on top of your image from the beginning.
The way we all think about reputation management has shifted. More professionals than ever are treating what shows up online about them the same way they treat their resume or LinkedIn profile – as something that needs steady attention and regular improvements. You might use some particular tools for this, or you might handle it yourself. But either way, the best strategy is to understand that your online footprint isn’t going anywhere. The control comes from creating positive and authentic content that actually represents who you are – not from scrambling around trying to fix problems after they’ve already shown up.
Getting your online reputation under control means that you’ll work with experts who know just how the whole system works from top to bottom.
At Reputation.ca, we’re Canada’s top reputation management team, and we can help with everything from review management to social media strategy, PR campaigns and even crisis situations. Maybe you’re dealing with cancel culture fallout, or maybe you just want to build a better reputation online – either way, we have the experience to get you there.
Contact us at Reputation.ca and let’s talk about what makes sense for your goals!
