Table of Contents
What SERM actually is
The first place most people go to find information is a search engine. What users see in the results for your company shapes how your audience perceives your brand, and directly affects your reputation. The more positive mentions at the top of search results, the higher the audience's trust. Negative reviews, low ratings, and negative press coverage can seriously damage that reputation.
SERM is what lets you actively manage your reputation in search. It's a set of practices aimed at building and maintaining a neutral-to-positive information environment online. Put simply, the goal is this: when existing or potential customers search for your company or your product, they should find more positive information than negative.
What SERM is meant to accomplish
When clients ask us what SERM actually gets them, we usually point to the same handful of things:
- Building customer loyalty
- Establishing and reinforcing a positive brand image
- Improving visibility in search
- Managing negative content and minimizing its impact
- Strengthening employer brand (HR reputation)
- Managing the overall information landscape around your brand in search
How SERM differs from ORM
SERM is part of a broader discipline called ORM (Online Reputation Management). The key difference: SERM work focuses specifically on search results, while ORM covers all of a business's digital assets — social media, industry platforms, review forums, map listings, and more.
Both SERM and ORM typically include:
- Ongoing monitoring of what's being said about the company or personal brand across different platforms, including tone and sentiment
- Review management
- Creating and promoting SEO-optimized content
- Encouraging your audience, including brand advocates, to share and amplify positive content
- Crisis management
Tools for pushing out negative content
The goal of SERM is to push negative and irrelevant information out of search results and minimize the overall damage it does. The core approach: get search algorithms to rank positive, relevant content about your brand above negative articles and reviews. We tell our clients to aim for one clear target: no negative content anywhere in the top 10 search results.
1. Audit and monitor mentions
The first step is auditing your current search results. Check every mention tied to your brand, your products, your services, and your employees, using keyword and mention-research tools to review results for your most common queries:
- "[Brand name] + reviews" — reputational queries
- "[Company name]" — brand queries
- "[Brand name] + employee reviews" — HR-related queries
In an ideal world, we're always aiming for 100% positive, relevant search results. But it's worth treating it as urgent once negative content makes up more than 30% of what shows up. A healthy target is 70–80% positive content across the board, with 100% being the ideal outcome.
— Ekaterina, Head of Search & Reputation
2. Dispute negative reviews on map and business-listing platforms
This means reviewing the content of negative reviews across different platforms. If a review violates a platform's policies, it can be reported to that platform's moderation team and taken down, which helps reduce the overall share of negative content.
3. Build out your own owned channels systematically
The assets you fully control — your website, social media, company blog, video channels — are where SERM overlaps with content marketing and SEO. The goal here is building a body of positive content that becomes a reputational asset in its own right.
Practical steps include:
- Optimizing key pages on your site (homepage, FAQ, testimonials). Well-structured, optimized content is favored by AI systems too, and in 2026, showing up in AI-generated answers is a priority for most businesses.
- Publishing SEO-optimized articles
- Producing expert content for social media and blogs
- Managing information on your map and business-listing profiles
4. Manage reviews across platforms
Responding quickly when reviews come in matters a lot. This part of SERM work also includes:
- Encouraging your audience to leave reviews and share user-generated content (for example, offering a discount or a small gift in exchange for a review from a loyal customer)
- Building out and actively managing your brand's profiles, not just on map listings, but on relevant review platforms as well (think Trustpilot or Google Reviews for customers, and Glassdoor for your employer brand)
- Promoting the positive reviews you already have, so they consistently rank at the top of your existing profiles
It's worth going beyond just the first two or three listings in the results. Aim for all 10 of the top positions to be positive. More than 90% of consumers check somewhere between 6 and 8 links before making a decision, not just the first one or two.
— Ekaterina, Head of Search & Reputation
The short version
In practice, the work of pushing out negative content rarely happens in a straight line. It happens in parallel, across several fronts at once. SERM isn't a one-time project; it's an ongoing, systematic process, because search results are always shifting.
And even if there's no acute negative situation right now, we'd still argue it's worth building a strong positive foundation. That's the best insurance against reputational risk down the line.
Want to understand how your brand looks in search right now? Get a free reputation audit →
