Case Study: Aligning the Top 10 Search Results for Your Name - Part 1
About two weeks ago I listened to a presentation by Dan Schawbel at Bentley University on the topic of Search Engine Optimization and Personal Branding. If you are interested in viewing Dan’s presentation I have embedded the video at the end of this post. During this presentation Dan talked about creating a personal brand by controlling the search engine results for your name. Much of my background is in SEO having worked on SEO projects as a consultant as well as optimizing my own websites, but I never really gave much thought to actually building a personal brand and optimizing for my own name. When I googled my name, Andrew Nadeau, I was surprised to find that my Google results were in complete disarray. This gave me the idea to document the journey I am about to embark on of optimizing and aligning the search engine results for my name, Andrew Nadeau.
Current Rankings
Here is what the top 10 Google results look like for my name, Andrew Nadeau.
It is interesting to note that these results are out of 216,000 results. Now 216,000 results is a decent number of results, but should be easily manageable to optimize. If you have a popular name or the name of someone famous this is going to be a more difficult task, and might not be achievable. For example, Michael Jordan has 29,500,000 results. If you have a popular or famous name my advice would be to use a nickname, your middle name, a middle initial, or some other way to distinguish yourself from your generic name.
Analysis of Current Rankings
#1: I am currently ranking #1 for AndrewNadeau.com which is my personal blog. This is good.
#2: This result is a White Pages Search for my name and adds no value to my personal brand. I am going to have to work on pushing this result off the first page of Google.
#3: This is my Facebook page, but it is currently redirecting to the homepage of Facebook. I am going to have to figure out how to get this ranking to link directly to my Facebook profile.
#4: This is another Facebook result that is listed as a sub-result for someone on Facebook by the name of Eric Andrew Nadeau. I am going to try to push this result out of the top 10 results on Google.
#5: This is my profile at ArticlesBase.com. A while back I wrote some articles and published them on this website, but the articles do not relate to my personal brand. I will have to think about how to handle this ranking and will write about it in subsequent posts.
#6: This is my profile on a Ning community site that I contributed some ideas. Again, this isn’t relevant to my personal brand, so I will have to address this ranking.
#7: This is a sub-result for my Ning profile, which is for my Ning page. I will have to try to push this ranking off the first page.
#8: This is a result for the directory of all the Andrew Nadeau’s on LinkedIn. I am going to have to push this result off the first page of Google results and replace it with a direct link to my LinkedIn profile.
#9: A direct link to my LinkedIn profile, but as a sub-result. I will have to make this a main result and get it ranked higher in Google.
#10: My profile at CrunchBase.com for a start-up I founded called SyllabusCentral. This ranking is good, but I will have to fine tune my CrunchBase profile to my personal brand.
My Goal
My Goal is to completely control the top 10 results of Google for my name, so that each Google result is a page to adds value to my personal brand as a leader in social media, web 2.0 and search engine optimization.
What’s Next?
In my next post on this case study I will talk about some of the things I am working on to align my Google results and also give tips, so that other people can follow in my footsteps to build their own personal brand through their Google results. I want to make it clear that this is not going to be a quick process. It will take time for everything I do to take affect as it takes time for Google to find links and update their rankings. I think this should be a very interesting case study and I look forward to getting some results.
Dan Schawbel’s Presentation at Bentley University on SEO and Personal Branding
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