Personal brand SEO in 7 steps
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence. See their case study linked at the end of the newsletter.
Are you interested in taking a cohort-based course for product managers to learn about SEO that I am building with Kevin Indig? Please share your insights in this survey to help inform what we should teach and join our waitlist.
When most people think of SEO for their personal brand, the first thought that comes to mind is how they can “rank” their website higher. This is wrong.
Using this as the objective misses out on the ultimate goal of personal brand SEO, which is to be more visible on search engines. If you are looking to generate more eyeballs on search for your brand, it shouldn’t really matter whether that is your website or another website that promotes YOU all the same.
This is especially prevalent when it comes to searching for specific individuals on search engines, where the dominant sites will be social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, X formerly Twitter, or even YouTube. Many people are convinced that their own websites should be the first ranking result for their name, but in most cases, this could be a near-impossible task. Even if you can get many links to your website, social networks will always have more.
This process gets even more complex when someone shares a common name with many other people around the world, as now, they need to not only outrank the social networks for their name but also every profile for people that share the same name.
Here are my results and while my website outranks Linkedin, it doesn't matter which one is first.
Go with the flow
Instead of fighting an uphill battle to push down sites that aren’t going to go away, it is a much better effort to make sure the right social media and alternative pages show up.
Here are the best practices to do this.
First and foremost, make sure you have a profile on every single popular social media network. You might have a cutesy handle on platforms like Twitter and YouTube, but ensure that they also have your real name in your bio that people might search. This means that you should use the name people use when referring to you and not your legal or formal name when you use a shortened version or nickname. This is about being found.
Once you have claimed these profiles, fill out these pages with all the best information about you that you are going to want people to see. If you are using these pages for a professional purpose (ie not making friends) then your most important professional accomplishments should be in a prominent position in the profile. Even if there is limited space to do this, you can append your name in the title with phrases like “design wizard” or “product manager” or “5x founder”.
You also want to add some content to each page so that when someone finds them, they aren't simply empty. You don't need to have a YouTube page with thousands of videos, but you should have at least a couple. The same goes for Instagram. You should have a few updates that you have shared, even if it's not going to be a place you regularly update.
Remember that because you are using these profiles for professional purposes, you shouldn't put anything on these pages that may harm or even mildly impact the image you want to show of yourself. Your birthday party and vacation videos and pictures do not belong on these pages. If you are concerned about your privacy, you can make alternative profiles visible to only select people.
Now that you have those profiles, it's time to make them start working for you. Add links to these profiles from your other profiles. Your LinkedIn should link to your YouTube and Facebook pages, and YouTube should link to your LinkedIn and Instagram pages.
All of this linking aims to tie together your online presence so search engines and searchers can find your profiles as one big cluster.After you have linked these profiles to each other, you will want to make sure they are also linked to every presence you have. If you have a personal site, drop the links to your profiles in the footer. Again, this helps search engines tie you together as a single individual when people search for you.
Be visible
Finally, depending on your name, it might be an impossible task to expect to be the only visible individual ranking on your name especially if you have a common name, but a win would be to have all your profiles show up if a searcher modified the query with the name of your company, city or your title.
To accomplish this, ensure that this extra bit of data is included in your profiles. Your company will be on your LinkedIn page by default, but possibly not your city. You might not have your company or city on YouTube, so make sure to include them in your profile.
One last thing to remember is that no one ever wants to be a part of a scandal or negative search, but it could happen even to the best of people. Please don’t wait until you need all your profiles to set them up. Make sure to claim and own your name on all the popular social networks.
Building out your online presence with top social media profiles goes a long way towards preventing a reputation issue should anything ever cause negative searches for your name. As long as you aren’t making the headlines in the New York Times, these profiles will likely hold back any negative results for your name.
[SPONSORED]
This campaign got us massive links in New York Post (DR 91), USA Today (DR 92), and Daily Mail (DR 92).
This is how we got these links for our gambling client in top-tier news outlets:
✅ We analysed the most and least commonly drawn numbers in Powerball since 2015 to determine the luckiest and unluckiest numbers, as well as those that are most overdue.
✅ We have found that:
• 61 tops the list as the luckiest number of the Powerball, drawn 90 times in total since 2015 READ MORE
