Start by setting up monitoring systems. Create Google Alerts for your business name, key products, and executive names. Check Google search results for your brand weekly, including page two and three where negative content often sits. Monitor review platforms relevant to your industry—Google Business Profile, Yelp, Trustpilot, or industry-specific sites. Set aside 30–60 minutes weekly for this routine. Respond to all reviews within 24–48 hours. Thank positive reviewers briefly and professionally. For negative reviews, acknowledge the issue, apologize if warranted, offer a solution, and move the conversation offline with contact details. Never argue publicly. A thoughtful response often matters more than the complaint itself, since prospects read both. Create positive content to control page one. Publish regular blog posts, maintain active social profiles, get listed in relevant directories, and earn media mentions through PR outreach or community involvement. If negative content ranks on page one, you need at least 8–10 strong properties (your website, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, industry profiles) to push it down. This takes 3–6 months of consistent effort. For serious reputation damage—legal issues, viral complaints, or crisis situations—DIY has limits. You're managing perception while emotionally involved, which clouds judgment. Removing genuinely false content requires DMCA takedowns or legal pressure that most business owners can't execute effectively. Suppressing negative results requires technical SEO skills and often paid placements. At Ottawa SEO, we typically see business owners successfully handle routine reputation maintenance—reviews, mentions, basic monitoring. They bring us in when negative content hits page one of Google or when they need coordinated content creation across multiple properties. The threshold is usually when it's affecting sales or when the time investment exceeds 5–10 hours monthly. If you're spending more time defending your reputation than building your business, that's the signal to get help. If you want a concrete starting sequence, here's the 30-day version. Week one: audit page one and two of Google for your business name and "your name + reviews," screenshot everything, and list each result as positive, neutral, negative, or not-yours. Week two: claim and complete every profile you should own (Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Facebook, industry directories) since unclaimed profiles are both a ranking opportunity and a hijacking risk. Week three: set up the monitoring stack and answer every unanswered review from the past year, oldest first. Week four: start the review-generation habit, asking every happy customer at the moment of success, with a direct link that takes two taps to complete. On review generation, stay inside platform rules: never offer discounts or incentives for reviews, never gate by asking only happy customers through a filter tool (Google prohibits review gating), and never buy reviews. A steady trickle of two to four genuine reviews monthly beats a suspicious burst of twenty, and platforms increasingly filter bursts anyway. A free tool stack that covers most DIY needs: Google Alerts for mentions, the Google Business Profile app for review notifications, a saved incognito search routine for weekly SERP checks, and a simple spreadsheet logging each negative item, its ranking position, and what you've published to compete with it. Measure progress quarterly with the same branded search audit from week one. The score that matters is how many of the top ten results you own or influence. Moving from four owned results to eight is a real, countable win, and watching a negative item slide from position 5 to page two tells you the content work is paying off.