Hi Reddit!

I’m hoping someone can help me out. My family has a renovation company. Someone I had a falling out with set up some SEO so that when the business is googled, an article about nightmare renovations in my city comes up. The article is completely unrelated to our company and our company is not mentioned anywhere in the article.

This is hurting us with prospective clients because they see the article, but don’t bother reading it.

We’ve reached out to the newspaper and told them our story, but there is nothing they can do about it as the SEO is not on their end. We’ve asked them to take the article down but they will not do that just because of our situation.

How can we remedy this, and how can we track where the SEO was set up?

Thanks in advance

  • BusinessBrokerRyan@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Fellow business owner here.

    I have been slammed by disgruntled clients / competitors a couple times through nasty reviews, the exec summary is there is no credible way to have scam google reviews or articles slandering your business removed. That said, all consumers these days are used to seeing these type of vindictive / unreasonable reviews. Best thing to do:

    1. respond to every negative review and call out that the reviewer was not a customer. Be polite but firm.

    2. respond to all positive reviews too

    3. encourage past customers to leave reviews, make this a standard practice and consider encouraging people to leave reviews by offering small discounts or giveaways

    4. create an online profile for your business on as many profiles as you can think of - it helps give your business credibility online and the backlinks are important for search ranking in your geo. This includes yelp, fb, the local chamber of commerce, bing, industry associations

    5. make it a habit to review your online platforms monthly and post something to keep these fresh - some platforms will consider your business inactive if you do not do this, therefore penalizing your discoverability in search

    Hope this helps. I work with a lot of different business owners as a Business Broker, believe that too many owners think they need to spend $$ to make their business better. Here is a post on some no cost things every owner can do:

    https://wabusinessbrokers.com/2022/10/13/no-cost-actions-to-increase-the-value-of-your-business-in-this-economy/

    Notice #1 is actively maintaining and enhancing your online presence :)