Getting Googled – Personal Branding & Search Engine Optimization

Personal Branding & Google Search Results

• One billion names are Googled every day
• Only 2% of individuals control the content of the entire first page of their search results
• One in four people have no positive content at all on the first page of their search results
• 15% have at least one negative item on the first page of their search results

Google Search Engine Results Page for David Erickson

THOUGHT: While most stories about the importance of your online presence put it in the context of how potential employers perceive you, I have been telling people for years that the first things most people do when meeting with someone they do not know for a business meeting are Google their name and visit their LinkedIn profile.

Being deliberate about optimizing your online presence for search visibility, then, serves both immediate and long-term business purposes.

For the business contact you are about to meet, having easily-findable information about you online allows them to learn more about you, discover more things you hold in common, and in the process help remove some of the inherent social friction that exists when two strangers meet. The more two people know they have in common, the more they’ll have to talk about; and that conversational kindling will help fuel the flame of a budding business relationship.

Long-term business and career purposes are served when you create frequent and easy opportunities for business contacts to link to you through your social networks that are returned when someone Googles your name.

The screenshot above shows the Google search results for my name.

Six of the ten links on the page are to sites that I control:

1. My LinkedIn profile
2. My Facbook profile
3. My Twitter profile
4. My YouTube channel
5. My e-Strategy blog
6. My home page

Not surprisingly, the most popular social networks get the highest ranking, but that will only be the case if those networks are active. If had little activity at LinkedIn and Facebook, for example, but I tweeted prolifically, Twitter would more likely gain the top spot.

The lesson, then, dear readers, is that you are what shows up when people search for you, so manage your online reputation by tending to your Google results.