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A Pew Research study shows that 56% of Americans search their own name to see what comes up in the results. For some, it’s vanity, but for entrepreneurs, showing up can mean the difference between success and failure.
When someone searches your name, what do they find? Do the search results provide a powerful impression of you and your experience? Do you look like a ghost or do the results present a negative impression?
Taking control of the search results for your name is critical in today’s digital landscape because potential customers, JV partners and journalists will absolutely seek you out before engaging with you.
In this article, we’ll unpack the tactics you can use to dominate the search results for your name.
1. Optimize your personal branding website
This is your online headquarters and a great way to control at least one listing in search results. However, it is essential to ensure that your website is optimized for search engines so that it ranks highly for your name.
The first step is to use your first and last name in the domain. Ideally, it should be exactly that, but if that’s not available, you can add something to it or use a non-dotcom extension to find an available domain. If you add anything to the domain name, you should add it to the end, not the beginning.
It’s also critical to incorporate your name into your title tags, headings, image names, image alt text, and text on your website.
Schema tagging provides search engines with additional information about your website, such as your profession, social media profiles, and contact information. In addition to helping you rank better, it also changes the way your site appears in search results, making it more likely that people will click through.
You should also create a concise and engaging meta description that includes your name and your value proposition. This won’t affect rankings, but can help increase click-through rates.
Related: 5 Simple Steps to Building a Personal Brand
2. Optimize your images for SEO
Humans are visual creatures, so using images and videos can be a powerful way to control what’s in the search results for your name.
This medium, if properly optimized, will usually appear somewhere on the first page, occupying a significant portion of the search results. While it’s important that it conveys the impression you want to make, it’s also important to make sure it meets the criteria that search engines are looking for.
Your images should be large, high quality and appropriately named based on your name (eg jeremy-knauff-speaking-rec-2023.jpg).
Size-wise, bigger is better, and if you use srcset, which you should, you can easily load extremely large images without degrading website performance, because a user’s browser will only load what is. best suited for your screen resolution.
These images could be almost anything you can imagine, such as:
Images with quotes from you. Covers of books you have published. You speak on stage or virtually.
When you post these images on your website, you’ll use the appropriate alt attributes to help search engines understand what they’re about. If your website is built with WordPress, you will have the opportunity to add the appropriate alt text when you upload them using the media uploader. Then when you place them in your content, they will already have the appropriate alt text in the code.
In some cases, you can also set alt text when uploading images to some social media platforms. If you have the ability to do it, you should.
And finally, we should point out links to these images. Especially if they are on your own websites or other authorized websites.
3. Optimize your videos for SEO
Your videos should also be large and high quality, but the name doesn’t really matter. I generally aim for at least 1280 pixels wide, but ideally 1920 pixels, which is considered HD. It’s worth noting that while 1920×1080 is still considered HD today, 4K resolution at 3840×2160 will soon become the new standard.
Unlike images, you’ll want to upload these videos to YouTube, as the platform has a superior technology stack for delivering videos. Also, Google loves to rank its own properties in search results, and YouTube is a Google property.
You’ll also want to embed these videos using the YouTube embed code on your website, if applicable, as this will help them get more views. And if someone finds your videos in search results, more views create a stronger impression.
I also recommend properly implementing schema markup where you’ve embedded these videos to help search engines better understand what you’re about. It’s pretty easy to get into the technical weeds on this, but it’s worth the effort.
Related: Personal branding: the key to success in the digital age
4. Build and optimize your social profiles
You should have your name on all the major social networks, but two in particular, Twitter and YouTube, are especially useful because they tend to take up a lot more screen real estate than others.
We’ve already talked about the role video plays, so there’s no need to reiterate this benefit.
As for Twitter, if you’re active, Google will show your recent tweets directly in search results. This takes up a large portion of the screen, very near the top of the page.
You also want to make sure your social profiles have consistent branding, so you should use the same header and cover photo on each platform. Dimensions will vary slightly from platform to platform because each has different size and positioning requirements, but the general layout should be the same.
It’s also important to properly use schema on your website and link to your social profiles from your website to help search engines connect the dots between you and your social profiles.
5. Public relations and guest posting
Part of controlling search results depends on creating new digital assets, but we can also leverage existing digital assets.
Getting them featured in the media and guest posting can be powerful tools because we’re leveraging existing authoritative digital assets, such as media, trade publications, and high-traffic blogs, to get an authoritative article ‘fit your name.
Getting featured in the media comes down to presenting yourself to reporters in a way that demonstrates how your vision and story will benefit their audience. But be aware: this is a busy and noisy industry, so most of your pitches will not get a response no matter how awesome they are.
This means you need to focus on the long game, which means investing time in building and nurturing relationships with the journalists who cover your industry.
Guest posting can be a little easier, especially when it comes to smaller outlets like trade publications and blogs. You will start by submitting to the editor, in some cases, an abstract of the article, and in other cases, a full article. This depends on the outlet and most list exactly what they want.
This is a great strategy because most outlets are dying for quality content. The more articles you contribute, the more likely your author page on this outlet will rank for your name. In addition, each article gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise, which helps to improve your image with both potential clients and journalists.
Related: 6 Steps to Improve Your Personal Brand on Google
6. Build high quality backlinks
Links from other websites to your own website, social media profiles, articles and media coverage will significantly improve where you rank in search results.
You can do this by creating quality content that is informative and engaging. Next, reach out to industry influencers, other content creators, and website owners to ask them to link. The concept is simple, but the execution is more difficult because most requests will go unanswered. In many cases, they will ask for payment in exchange for a link.
When it comes to paying for links, it is important to evaluate the website properly first. The quality of the website will determine the impact it will have in helping another website rank higher. It’s also worth noting that buying links is considered a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines, so there may be some risk involved.
You can also guest post on reputable websites where you will have the opportunity to contribute high quality content. This usually includes a link to your personal site in the author bio. In some cases, you may also be able to include one or more links in the body of your article. And of course you can link to anything from your website.
Use these tips to reclaim the power of your own name and personal brand. Owning your name image on Google will pay dividends in the long run.
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