How To Guarantee Showing Up In Google

You might recall the article by Kevin recently where he asked should we brand our company or oursleves.

Personally I encourage my clients to build three distinctive but interconnected brands:

• their corporate brand
• their employer brand
• their personal brand

As you are thinking of naming your company, it is critical to consider the vision of success for the business. For example, is this a business that you will want to build and dispose of; or is this a business you want to create as a legacy company and see generations of your family leading in years to come? The answers to these questions can also guide you as to whether to name your company with a name that is connected to your own name.

Naming your business is almost as challenging as naming your children – especially if like me you are parents of multiples. (I have twins and we didn’t know what sex they were going to be before they were born so that was double headache for us to come up with both boys names and girls names and permutations of each!).

However as a leader of a business it is important to ensure that we too are able to be found online. You see over 35% of people will search for us by our own name online before they make contact with us or meet us.

When I am working with clients or speaking and presenting on branding, I always encourage people to invest in purchasing their own domain name and the domain names for their children.

You see, it is becoming increasingly popular for people to build their own career porfolio online, author their own business blog or as I have done, created a portal where people can find out more about my experience and expertise.

This is particularly relevant if you want to position yourself as a thought leader and expert in your field – especially as a speaker or author of a business book.

If you are not sure about building a portal site or authoring your own business blog, you can always point the domain name for your own name to the page on your corporate website that hosts your personal profile.

In fact being found by your own name online is becoming recognised as being so important to todays Internet generation, that some parents are now considering if their babies name will be searchable before they name their newborn as reported in the Wall Street Journal recently.

But what can you do if your name is relatively common? How can you guarantee that you can be found in the search engines even if you do not have a website or business blog?

Well in the Wall Street Journal, you will see I am quoted and refer to a tool called Ziggs. I first came across Ziggs when I started my own business and wanted to guarantee that my name came up at the top of the search engines.

It is a great professional website where you can create your own career portfolio. And unlike many other resources, Ziggs will guarantee that you are placed at the top of the search engines for your own name.

I recommend creating your own Ziggs professional account – it is simple to do and will only take you about 60 minutes to create and upload a professional profile to represent your personal brand online.

Even though you can now find me in the natural search results for my name through a number of strategies I have implemented to build my personal brand online, I still maintain my Ziggs profile as it serves me well and due to the way it is constructed, provides information about my experience and career history that is not so relevant to place on my websites or blogs. 

It is also especially relevant if you are in a large organisation and want to ensure that your own name comes up in the search engines – working in a large corporate, it’s not always so easy to have press releases and information about you on your corporate website.

So why not head on over to Ziggs today – for a very small investment you too can guarantee that you will be digitally distinctive when someone looks for you in the search engines.