Potential employers, clients and dates are all Googling your name. BrandYourself, a new website launching Thursday, helps make sure they find what you want them to.
The website guides you in search optimizing the links you want to push up in Google results for your name.
Here’s how it works: You choose the links you want to “boost,” for example your LinkedIn profile. The platform assigns SEO tasks that will help those links show up higher in Google search results. For LinkedIn, suggestions include setting your name, customizing the URL and adding a profile photo.
BrandYourself tracks the links you choose and lets you know if their Google rankings change. The free version of the platform will help optimize up to three links and track the first page of Google search results for your name. For $10 per month, you can boost to unlimited links and track the first 10 pages of results.
The startup also provides a profile page where you can link to all your other online profiles. Because linking out and in are factors in how Google ranks pages, this step is important. BrandYourself claims that 80% of its profiles appear on the first page of Google within the first two weeks.
Co-founders Pete Kistler and Patrick Ambron launched the first beta version of BrandYourself in 2008. That product also helped expand online presence by suggesting people to follow on social networks and content on which to comment. It was, Ambron admits, a bit cluttered.
“By focusing on one important thing, we were able to make the product more powerful and effective,” BrandYourself Co-founder Patrick Ambron tells Mashable.
That one thing – boosting positive links in search results – has been proven to be important. According to a 2009 study commissioned by Microsoft, of the almost 80% of U.S. hiring managers who had searched for candidates online, 70% of them said they had rejected a candidate based on what they found in his or her search results.
While other products such as Reputation.com offer to manage online reputation, they are significantly more expensive and tend to focus on crisis control. BrandYourself is just helping you do your own SEO, but even its premium version is a justifiable maintenance cost.
“The whole reason we made this product is because everybody should be managing and improving their search results,” Ambron says.
No comments :
Post a Comment