On this occasion, what I am going to talk to you about is what SEO Branding is and how to enhance your personal brand with it .
This concept is very fashionable in the world of digital marketing . And I don’t need to explain how important it is to show up where you’re wanted as a professional, as it’s something we all strive for.
But before entering the game let me clarify some concepts.
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What is SEO?
SEO is all the techniques, strategies and methods used to gain visibility in search engines.
Yes, the definition is that simple.
SEO can be divided into two well-defined groups:
- The SEO on page , which is all work that is done internally (within the web).
- SEO off page , which is all the work that is done externally (outside the web).
What you are trying to achieve with SEO is that you appear in searches for the services, products or information that your market demands and that those searches generate direct or indirect conversions.
SEO has evolved (a lot) to the way it is currently known. So much so that today it is almost impossible to be successful with this technique if you do not work with professionals and make an adequate investment.
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What is personal branding or personal branding?
The personal brand or personal branding (in English) is a concept that comes from the discipline of personal development, which starts from the basis of considering oneself as a Brand.
It is intended to develop a person’s reputation, just as it is developed by companies, corporations and other entities (for profit or not).
In the last 10 years, this concept has evolved quite a bit and is becoming hotter, due to the element that has revolutionized our lives in recent years: the Internet.
Regarding the concept of Personal Brand, we have to contemplate two elementary points:
- We all end up developing a brand (professional, personal, family, business or family), whether we are aware of it or not.
- Personal branding, as we have mentioned, is not something new. It is more: thousands of years ago it already existed, although they did not know how to distinguish it as such at that time.
And, if not, you only have to consider personalities like Jesus Christ, Confucius, Plato, Attila or Hitler: all of them consciously developed their personal brand. Society attributed intrinsic qualities to them, be they faith, revolution, passion, terror, or wisdom.
Believe it or not, you already have your own personal brand (whether you are working or not in the professional or digital world), since for the people who are in your social circle you transmit certain sensations that become attributes that differentiate you.
They may see you as a sociable and caring person, or perhaps as insecure or with bad intentions.
The point is that when you are aware that after all you are developing your personal brand (whether you like it or not), this makes you reconsider and try to be a better person.
But I’m here to talk to you about the digital world. Personal branding is your online reputation , that is, how others see you, what attributes they assign to you and the mark you leave on other professionals.
What is SEO Branding?
Clarified this, we have two concepts that we must unite: SEO and Branding .
In principle we could define SEO Branding as the ability of a brand to be visible in search engines when a user is looking for it.
If we turn to practice and interconnect the two terms, we can say that when someone’s branding is powerful, their Internet domain acquires considerable authority for Google, which means that any SEO action you carry out within your Personal Brand strategy quickly favor you in search results.
I also want to clarify that there are two ways to achieve the goal of being visible on the Internet when they search for your own brand:
- When you already have competitors: that is, when your name (your personal brand) is already occupied by a famous person and that the algorithm considers especially relevant to users.
- When you have no competitors: or when there is no famous or relevant person for the algorithm.
Now let’s look at the pros and cons of each type.
1. When you already have competitors
If your first and last name is the same as that of a famous or “relevant” person , you have a problem (I call it a challenge), since you have to overcome it.
Imagine that your name is Rafa Nadal and you dedicate yourself to networking professionally. If a person is looking for you to provide your services, the first thing they will find is this:
Although the networking professional “rafa nadal” that I have created is fictitious, it may be that you come across a similar case. If so, it will be difficult (if not impossible) for you to overcome this.
But now let’s look at the positive side.
If you succeed, if you make a good SEO branding strategy and manage to position yourself for the keyword “rafa nadal” ahead of the famous tennis player, these will be the results:
On average, you will be visible to more than 60,000 people monthly. Not bad right?
This, in turn, also has its pros and cons. If what they are really looking for is the tennis player, the CTR (clicks per impression) of your website will be very low, not to mention the bounce rate, which will rise dramatically, seeing that your website is not that of the tennis player.
Surely you will ask yourself: “And now what do I do? I don’t want them to look for someone else and find me.”
I wouldn’t want it either, so I’m going to give you some advice:
If that happens to you, if your name and surname (your personal brand) is the same as that of a famous or important person, optimize your website so that they find you, for example, by the following keyword: “rafa nadal networking consultant” .
If you do, you will no longer appear (unless you become very, very famous) for the keyword “rafa nadal”, but you will position yourself for a keyword that will be much better for you.
2. When you have no competitors
The next case is simpler, and almost certainly includes the vast majority. We are talking about when there is no famous or relevant character with whom you have to compete .
But what can happen here? Well, just… nobody looks for you.
This is where the work you must do to generate your own personal brand and SEO optimization begins, a much-needed job so that people not only find you, but also search for you.
Before giving you advice on how you should create your SEO Branding strategy, let me show you some examples of it.
Examples of successful SEO Branding
Within these examples, we will see 5 clearly successful:
1. Berto Lopez
If you Google “Berto López”, do you know what you will see? Well, he ranks first on that search list.
Berto is one of the most recognized bloggers in Spain and, together with Raquel (his wife), they run one of the most successful blogs in the country, Shaz Vlog.
Without a doubt, this is a clear example of successful SEO Branding.
2. Miguel Florido
A curious thing happened to Miguel Florido. He says that, when he started in this Digital Marketing and was looking for his name, a doctor appeared…
Naturally, he has already unseated him, and now he ranks very high in the top 10 positions for his name.
Congratulations, Michael!
3. Luis M Villanueva
Luisma Villanueva is one of the best-known SEO specialists in Spain, and his case was different from the rest.
If we investigate the keyword “Luis Villanueva” a little, we find this:
Turns out I already had 390 searches/month for that name. And it turns out that there is a former soccer player and a businessman who are named after him.
But, far from wasting the opportunity, Luis did a good SEO Branding and placed himself in the top positions:
4. Claudius Inacio
Claudio Inacio is a Blogger and Community Manager who started at Aula CM and currently both his personal brand and the visits to his blog are skyrocketing.
The truth is that he is doing a great job and that is reflected in his SEO Branding, since his brand keyword “Claudio Inacio” occupies the entire first page of Google.
Good job Claudio!
5. Daniel Bocardo
Daniel Bocardo is an SEO Consultant who works with large projects such as Mailrelay, a mass mailing tool with great potential.
How could it be otherwise (since he is a specialist in web positioning), his SEO branding is more than enhanced:
6. A server
To finish, and if you allow me, I will use myself as an example.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Argentine, and in another stage of my life I worked very focused on tourism marketing.
I currently have a blog with more than 250,000 monthly visits. I am a digital marketing consultant specialized in blogging and content marketing, as you can see on my blog: José Facchin’s blog .
If you enter my name in the search engine, like the case that I just told you about my colleagues, I occupy the entire first page of Google search results:
What should you take into account to improve your SEO Branding?
There are many things you could do to improve your personal brand visibility on Google, but I would like to tell you 5 very useful tips that I think are the most powerful and effective to improve your SEO Branding on the Internet.
1. Optimize your who am I page description
Although there are people who do not like to index the pages of who I am, for me they are an excellent possibility to position your name, if the domain of your website is generic.
Take for example the first result of Miguel (marketingandweb); is your own “Who am I?” page. As in one of the results of Berto (citizen2zero).
2. Use plugins similar to Yoast to improve your brand positioning
If you do not use plugins like SEO Yoast or similar, you will let your CMS randomly choose the snipping of your page.
On the other hand, if you use a plugin of this type, you will be defining the rich snipped that you want to show in Google search results and you will be taking advantage of the great opportunity of including your name and surnames in the box shown in the SERP , linked to your content. , your profession or specialty.
3. Optimize the texts of all the service pages of your website
Try to describe coherently what you do and what your goals are. Include the keywords for which you want to position your brand on Google, along with your name.
In this case you are associating your personal name with a commercial or professional sector, as I showed you in the example of: “Rafa Nadal networking consultant”.
4. Include your name in the title of the page
This will help you improve your SEO Branding considerably, as it will be the SEO title that Google robots will read when they come to crawl your URLs.
It is one of the most used techniques to promote and associate a personal brand to a service, product or professional sector to which you dedicate yourself. Include your name next to the keywords in the title of web pages.
(For example: if your name is Raúl Miralles and you work in Digital Marketing, use it in the title: “Digital Marketing Consultant | Raúl Miralles”).
However, you should not abuse this advice and repeat your name + specialty or profession in too many URLs on your website, since Google is not stupid and could see it as an artificial over-optimization (note, of all these tips, this is the least I use).
5. Choose the name of your Social Networks well
Remember that social networks also position; therefore, you should carefully choose the name and description you put on your social profiles.
If you choose to choose your first and last name on one social network, try to do it the same way on almost all the others. This way you will favor that when a search is made by your name and surname, the results of the SERP are consistent with each other.
If we talk about a professional profile, you should avoid nicknames, nicknames (aliases or nicknames) for children or very strange nicknames, which will only distort your recognition as a Brand.
(For example: the name José Facchin was not free on Twitter ; that’s why I used a very simple variant of it such as @facchinjose. Name that I later also used on Instagram ).
As an extra piece of advice, I recommend that you optimize your LinkedIn profile to the maximum (name, personalized URL and description), since it is one of the social networks that ranks best for Google, as well as Google Plus and Twitter.
6. Guest Blogging as a differentiating factor in SEO Branding
Writing articles as a guest blogger on other high-authority blogs is one of the most used techniques among many professionals to increase their visibility and relevance in the digital sector… and, therefore, help improve their SEO Branding.
Especially if you are a beginner, you have a blog that you created recently and you want to make yourself known in society, you will imagine that not many people will visit you, being a complete stranger.
The advantages that Guest Blogging can bring you are the following:
- Improve Branding: by writing on blogs with much more traffic than yours, you will be getting the large audience that is already loyal to that blog to read your valuable content and also get to know you, since you will appear at the end of the content as its author.
- Improve SEO: in addition to making yourself more visible, depending on the policy of each blog, you can include links to your social profiles and one or two links to your own blog (as is the case with this post), with which you will be doing link building natural and driving more traffic to your (almost completely unknown) blog.