By Michael Klazema
You are about to walk into one of the first interviews of your professional life. Perhaps you are seeking a summer internship, or maybe you are going after your first post-college job. Either way, you are justifiably wondering what to expect.
How will your prospective employers react to you? What questions will they ask you? And perhaps most importantly, what will your hiring managers do after the interview to decide whether they want to extend a job offer?
I’ll answer the last of those questions with a question: If you were working on a school assignment and needed to find more information about someone or something, what would you do? If you answered, “Look it up online,” then you have a pretty good idea of what any prospective employer is going to do.
Employers will begin in different places when they start searching for you on the internet. Some will hit LinkedIn first since it is the “professional hub” of social media. Others will head straight to Facebook or Twitter to dig up more colorful findings. Plenty will start by typing your name into Google, just to see what happens.
How Visible Are You?
How relevant your Google search results are will depend, in part, on how common your name is. If you have a common name, there might not even be a mention of you in the first few pages of a Google search, let alone content that you don’t want employers to see.
Still, Google searches are easy to hone with details about your college or other location parameters, which means that a common name won’t shield your internet skeletons forever. If you have a less common name, employers won’t have to work as hard to find mentions of you.
The bottom line is this: What comes up in your Google search could impact your job chances. Doing what you can to control what ends up on those first two or three pages of Google search results is essential to helping you land that key internship or dream job.
Don’t think you’re in the clear if your name isn’t showing up near the top of the Google results, either. You want to be visible on Google. Visibility is linked with notability, and you want to be notable—whether you are trying to grow your online following or land your first job. You want to be on the first page of Google search results and you want any mentions of your name to be positive. This balancing act isn’t easy to achieve and it certainly can’t be developed overnight, but it can be done.
What Do People See When They Google You?
So how can you take control of the first page of Google? The obvious first step is just to Google yourself and see what comes up. Here are a few “Good” and “Bad” signs to look for in the results that you see:
The Good:
- You have a personal website and it is near the top of the rankings.
- Your Twitter or LinkedIn account is near the top of the rankings.
- Blogs or articles you’ve written rank highly.
- There are mentions of awards or other recognition you’ve recently received.
- Most of the top results are about you.
- Most of the top results are recent and relevant.
The Bad:
- Many of the top-ranking results are about other people who share your name.
- Top results include old information about you that is no longer relevant or accurate.
- Results include offensive or immature blogs, photos, YouTube videos, social media posts, or forum comments that you posted years ago.
- Your name comes up in association with negative things—including criminal investigations, alcohol and drugs, lawsuits or other court proceedings, and more.
- Your name does not come up at all.
Obviously, this encompasses just a few of the types of content that might come up in your Google search. However, it should give you a basic idea of what constitutes good and bad personal branding on Google.
A quick hint before we move on: Now might be a good time to take a screenshot and make a quick copy of your top 20 results or so. By knowing which results ranked where on your first search, you can track the impact of changes you might make later on.
Conquering Google: What You Need to Do
Once you’ve self-Googled, you can start building a strategy for how you are going to brand yourself more effectively online. The optimal strategy for “conquering Google” will vary from person to person. If your Google results are great, you might not have to do much. If they are exceedingly poor, you might have to do a fair amount of damage control (deleting old posts, cleaning up social accounts, etc.) before you get started on other steps.
In most cases, the following steps will be effective to improve your Google search results and boost your personal online branding.
Start producing content about yourself
If you can write, start a blog. Cover various topics related to your interests and the field in which you are hoping to work. If you aren’t a writer, you might consider hiring a branding company to pen articles that frame you as an authority or source about a topic related to your industry. In any case, content marketing that portrays you in a positive light can never hurt.
Build a website
If you don’t have a website yet, build one. The information and features of the site will vary depending on who you are, what you do, and what you want to achieve in the professional world, but having an official site with your first and last name in the domain will do wonders for your Google results.
Claim your domain
Speaking of your website, claim that domain name with your own name right now. Even if the most obvious incarnation of the domain is taken, consider variations—including using middle names. Having a unique domain name associated with your name is an essential strategy to dominating the top Google search results with positive content.
Use SEO
Smart use of keywords, keyword phrases, and high quality content can all help the pages you have rank higher on Google. We’re not just talking about blogs, either. You can optimize your LinkedIn, your other social accounts, and your online resumes on sites like Monster and CareerBuilder so that they are more easily searchable.
Don’t forget video
Written content is a great way to share your expertise, but video content is just as important. People today are more likely to watch or share videos than they are to engage with written content. YouTube is also a Google-owned company, so it gets a healthy boost in Google search results. Start a “vlog” (a video blog) where you share expertise, tips, tutorials, or even “about me” tidbits.
Be more social
A big part of personal branding online is being everywhere. There are more social networks than just Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Consider joining other sites like Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, Instagram, About.me, SlideShare, and more. The more places where your name occurs online, the better chance you have of wiping out outdated or negative results and replacing them with more current and relevant links.
Google is a competitive arena, which means there is no foolproof way to rule the first page of Google results for your name. If you share a name with a famous character or celebrity, you will find it even more difficult to climb onto that first page. However, by using these tips, you should be able to start climbing the ranks of Google while displacing the search results that you don’t want future employees, clients, or partners to see.
The post Online Reputation Management: Take Control of the First Page of Google appeared first on AllBusiness.com
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