How to Take Over the SERPs for Your Name

Want to take control of how your personal brand is perceived online? These SEO tips will help you own the SERPs when someone searches for your name.

Have you ever had someone say something about you online that wasn’t true? I think most of us have. 

We all understand the importance of a personal brand. It’s incredibly important to control how your personal brand is perceived online. 

But there are many things that can hurt you in that regard. Things that can pop up in the SERPs when someone searches for our name that we may not want there. 

Other people with similar names, information inaccuracies, and even outright lies. Information that might kill speaking or media opportunities or cause people to doubt your expertise. Maybe even information that can encourage people to leave negative reviews about you or your business. 

So it’s in our best interest to control what comes up on the first page – or even better, the first few pages of the search results. But how do you do that?

Building the Assets Domain / Website 

If you don’t already own your name as a domain and have a website on it, you need to do something about that immediately.

This is the foundation of your online reputation management and will be your “digital headquarters.” From your website, visitors will be able to learn more about you. 

They can: Sign up for your email list. Find your social media profiles. Browse your content – articles, videos, images, etc. But this won’t happen magically.

You can’t just have a hastily made website and expect it to rank well for your name. Unless there is nothing else about you online. 

You’ll generally face less competition than you would for other types of keywords, but you’ll still need to get the on-site factors right. You need to create useful, original content, and be able to earn links to your website. 

You can also republish content here that you’ve previously published elsewhere. Be sure, though, you get the publisher’s permission and you properly use the rel=”canonical” attribute.

I know that Search Engine Journal allows this, but the people who run it obviously have an understanding of SEO that most publishers don’t. 

My advice: When asking a publisher, try to make sure they understand how the tag works. If they understand that it tells the search engines that they are the original publisher – and it will be beneficial to them – they’ll be more inclined to give you the green light to republish the content on your own website. 

As this becomes a more authoritative asset, you can also use it to link out to other assets to help them rank higher. 

Also, while you can spin up dozens of domains with various extensions and get them to rank for your name, you also have to consider how that might look. Most would see that and think you’re trying to hide something.

Images 

Humans are visual creatures, so utilizing images can be a powerful way to control what the search results for your name are. Depending on Google’s whims, these images could show up somewhere on the first page of the search results. I’ve seen cases where they’re at the top, somewhere in the middle, or even at the bottom.

Videos 

Following the same concept, we can use videos published on YouTube to secure additional positions in the search results for our name.

And, as with images, point links to these videos. A good approach is to also embed these videos on your own website where relevant because that will help them to earn more views. 

And if someone happens to stumble across your videos in the 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 they are about. 

Social Media Profiles 

It’s just common sense that you need to own your name on all of the major social networks. But two, in particular, are especially useful because they tend to take up significantly more real estate on screen than others. 

Those two are Twitter and YouTube. We’ve already discussed the role video plays, so there’s no need to rehash that. As for Twitter, if you’re active, Google will display your recent tweets directly in the search results. This secures a significant portion of the screen, very close to the top of the page.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/take-over-serps-for-your-name/381734/