There are many approaches that communications professionals take to regain control of online reputation through search results.

First:

Optimizing social channels and profiles is a prime approach.  These pages that are intended to promote your brand can actually work against you if you don’t pay close attention to them. They can be some of the most significant drivers of traffic and command a high ranking while offering insights into what people are saying about your brand.

Second:

Generating and publishing web-friendly content is also highly recommended. Do not, however, commit a common mistake by publishing content solely as a PDF. This can be problematic because PDF files are not crawled and indexed by Google and therefore provide no benefit to RSS news lists.

Third:

Finally, advertising can be effective when looking to take charge of your search results. Bidding on your own name could be an affordable and effective means of improving your overall reputation, while driving traffic away from negative news and toward positive, business-building links.

Some of the effort that goes into ensuring solid top results could simply be routine and relatively simple – but only if the company and related organizations or key executive results are monitored regularly.