6 Steps to Rank on Your Name or Someone Else’s

Today, I would like to discuss the ultimate guide on how to rank on your or someone else’s name.

It’s when you go into Google and search for somebody’s name, ideally your name, and you dominate those search results.

The reasons why you would want to rank are:

• Brand protection – If you dominate the first page, it’s harder if somebody tries to write a negative review about you because they have to get past all the good results you have. 
• Building a network – Let’s say there’s someone in your industry you want to get to know better, but you don’t have a great connection with her. You will either professionally stalk her on social media by giving regular comments on her post to develop a good rapport with her and then maybe interview her or ask for her contribution to a book you plan to come up with. So, this way, one can leverage Google’s trust in a name. Because if any of these people rank on the thing that I want to rank on, and if they already rank on it and Google trusts, and I quote them, that will naturally send a powerful, relevant, familiar signal, which is great.
• Getting clients or partners – This is an extension of the previous objective. Highlight the positive feedback about your products and services enjoyed by one of your high-ranking customers/contacts. And that is SEO on someone’s name. 
• Highlighting someone’s misdeeds and spoiling their reputation – The last part is called negative SEO. You can destroy somebody’s reputation.

The Six Steps To Rank

Broadly, here are the six steps you need to take to achieve your goal of ranking on your or someone else’s name (or even destroy someone’s name).

Step 1 – Google search to see how many results there are just on the name:

Google your name, look at how many there are, then in phrase match (where you put your name within double quotes), and look at how many there are, and then do a title search (intitle: Your Name).

So, the first page should be dominated by your Facebook page, LinkedIn page, website, blogs, Twitter account, images, and videos in a carousel or group of these videos together. And they don’t have to be videos that you made. They could be videos that feature you or have you in the name. Your name should also feature in Related Searches that you would see at the bottom of a Google search page.

People also ask diagnostically whether they can rank on the secondary related searches to then be able to rank on these big searches. So, they all kind of tie together.

If you ever want to rank something, please do not put it on a subdomain; put it on a subfolder. So, for example, ‘fiverr.com/learn’ is going to be better than ‘learn.fiverr.com’.

Step 2 – Use Analytics

Use SEO tools like Ahrefs and SemRush to see how difficult it is to rank on that term. How many other pages are showing up? Is it a commercial term? Are there ads being run against it?

Step 3 – Determine content and link strategy

Do you want to do a podcast? Do you want to speak, do you want to interview some personality? Do you want to go heavy on Twitter and LinkedIn? You assemble all this into your personal brand manager. So, you’ve got your topic wheel, the six topics you care about, and the people mapped to those topics; how you are going to use inception to try to reach those other people through connections you already have, through the content you’ve already created.

Step 4 – Outreach

This includes professional stalking on all channels, engaging intelligently, and creating content.

Step 5 – Activate Content Factory

Then, once you have created content, run the Content Factory to put it through Descript; to have the VAs from Fiverr or Upwork, Fancy Hands, turn this content into lots of little pieces that you put out there, which you then can amplify for a dollar a day on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, on all that.

Step 6 – Optimize

Optimization is looking at where you have the most power stored inside your personal brand manager and amplifying those. So, the personal brand manager is your inventory of where you will put all these assets and just re-amplify and get way more power. There are different ways of amplification. It’s not only ads, but also SEO is a kind of amplification.

And so, in conclusion, that’s what the power of personal branding is. That’s how you rank on your name or anyone’s name. This is what I literally have done for years. It’ll work whether you have just you on your team or have a whole army of people.

References:

The Secret to Digital Marketing Success