Making Use of Personal SEO
In the realm of digital marketing, we spend a lot of time talking about SEO—search engine optimization, the practice of making your website more appealing to search engines like Google so that you’re going to show up more often (and more prominently) in searches. A vital subset of search engine optimization is what’s known as personal SEO. That’s when you use keywords specific to your business and brand, such as your business name itself, or your name as the business owner, to improve your online visibility.
Consider the way personal SEO is different from generic SEO. If somebody is looking for a real estate agent in your immediate area, they might type “real estate agent” plus the city, state, and zip code. They would get a list of all real estate agents within your area, and if you’ve done a good job of optimizing your website for search engines, your site might end up at the top of the list of results.
But personal SEO would be what people would see if they searched for your name and maybe a specific word or two about your industry (in this case, real estate). The results would be all about you: your website, feature articles about you, shoutouts to you in blog posts from outside sources, and even your social media platforms.
It probably goes without saying that mastering your personal SEO is just as important as mastering generic SEO for your brand. Anyone with your name might be searching for you, and customers will want to see a strong presence if they are going to invest in you. The same goes for business-to-business clients. And if you’re looking to move jobs to a different country or even a different industry, hiring managers will be searching for you online—so ask yourself whether that online presence reflects your professional experience as well as it can.
If you’re working to improve your personal SEO, here are our top seven tips to make the process more effective.
Top 7 Tips For More Effective Personal SEO
1. Be authentic and personal
Be authentic and personal in all content you share that mentions you. There’s no reason to mention your name (or your business name) over and over again just to get as many uses of it as possible onto your website. This practice is called keyword stuffing, and it makes your content very difficult to read. Be conscious of using your name where you can, but don’t do it more often than is natural.
2. Create a team bios section
A good way of increasing the mention of everyone on your team is to create a bios section on your website. Each bio should be broken up with what are known as scheme tags, which make the bios easy to skim. Scheme tags include elements like title, bio, awards, education, and contact information.
3. Make your name unique
If you have a common name, then you’re unfortunately going to be competing with others in those search results. Find a way to make your name unique, whether that’s by including your middle name (or middle initial) or adding a prefix like “Dr.” or “Professor.”
4. Maintain a presence on social media
Maintain at least some kind of presence on major social media platforms. You don’t need to be active on all of them (especially if there’s a niche platform, like Twitter or Instagram) that’s not relevant to you and your business. But having your name out there in more places is good for your searchability. Social media platforms tend to rank well in searches.
5. LinkedIn profile is the most important for personal SEO
And if you have to choose just one social media platform to focus on? For professional purposes, a LinkedIn profile is the most important out of all of them (yes, even Facebook). Fill out your LinkedIn profile as completely as you can, making a point of addressing any key questions people would likely have in the About section. As your career develops, be sure you keep your LinkedIn profile updated.
6. Link reclamation
When other websites post content about you (for example, if you are featured on a human interest website, or if you write a guest post for somebody else’s blog), you ideally want that website to link back to your website. But sometimes whoever is managing that content won’t remember to link to you, or they will make an error and link to the website. In this case, you should make a point of doing what’s known as link reclamation—that’s when you reach out to the website’s administrator or digital manager and provide the preferred link so that it can be updated. In most cases, all it takes is asking!
7. Be more present online
Finally, be more present online. Creating content for your social media pages, writing content for your blog, and keeping your website updated will show search engines that you are active, and therefore, search engines will be more likely to show your fresh content to searchers.