SEO your Personal Brand (No, I’m not the murderer 🤨) – Issue #046

Learn how you can optimize your online presence and improve your personal brand by planning and implementing a personal SEO strategy.

In a world where our personal brand is just as important as our business brand, personal SEO has become increasingly vital. Personal SEO is the practice of optimizing your online presence to ensure that your personal brand is easily discoverable and portrays you in a positive light.

But why is personal SEO important? Well, imagine a potential employer or business partner researching you online and coming across negative or irrelevant information about you, or even worse, not finding anything!

This could potentially harm your reputation and opportunities. On the other hand, having a well-crafted personal SEO strategy can help you stand out and strengthen your personal brand.

So, how can you improve your personal SEO? Here are some tips:

1. Google yourself

Start by figuring out where you are right now and who are your direct competitors. The ranking difficulty will be determined by how common your name is. If your name is rare, you will have less competition, but if not, it can get complicated.

For example, I share both first and last names with a well-known golfer, an actor, a Mexican politician, a soccer coach from Spain, a man that had a heart attack while driving and ran over 10 people, and a man from Canada that murdered his son-in-law 😬

Pushing up my name through all that noise is not impossible, but it’ll take a lot of time and backlinks. Be grateful if you have an uncommon name 😂

What to do in cases like these? Niche down, which takes us to tip #2.

2. Do keyword research

Do keyword research for your personal SEO strategy as you would for your business website. Figure out what keywords people might be searching for when looking for someone in your niche or expertise. Use those keywords to write a strong bio or summary on your website, social media profiles, portfolio sites, and 3rd party sites.

Since competing with famous people will take time, I focus on long-tail, niche/expertise specific keywords.

You will find me on the first page of Google if you search for something like this:

“Roberto Robles SEO”

“Roberto Robles SEO Consultant”

“Roberto Robles SaaS”

Of course, your end game should be to rank for your name as-is, but going long-tail is a great way to start.

3. It’s not just about your website

It goes without saying that you should have a website, ideally with your name in the domain, optimized for your name and niche-related keywords you discovered when you did the keyword research.

But last I checked, there are at least 10 organic positions in search results (maybe fewer in the future 🤔), so your goal should be to cover as much real estate as possible on page #1 and beyond.

So, besides ranking your own website, focus on 3rd party sites and side projects that will also rank when someone searches for your name. Back to my example, if you search for “my name + SEO”, you will find the following on the 1st and 2nd pages of Google:

• LinkedIn profile

• Twitter profile

• Personal website

• Facebook profile

• Old agency website

• SuperSEOTips (side project)

• Agency website

• ProductHunt profile

• IndieHackers posts

• Several podcast interviews

• Guest posts

The beauty of the above list is that some of the 3rd party websites have strong authority, so it’s easy to rank those profiles.

Kudos to my friend Maxwell Davis who brought to my attention that ProductHunt maker and product profiles were indexed and ranked highly on Google 👌

4. Create valuable content

Creating valuable content in your field of expertise can help improve your personal SEO. For example, you can write blog posts on your website, guest post on other relevant blogs, start or get invited to podcasts, create YouTube videos and publish engaging posts on social media.

Regardless of where you do it, focus on creating relevant, informative, and shareable content to position you as an authority and boost your personal brand’s SEO.

And that’s it! Are you working on boosting your personal brand? Reply to this email and tell me about it or jump over to our Discord community to chat.

Are there any specific topics you want me to cover in the coming weeks? DM me on Twitter and let me know!

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