Ellie's Blog

Do You Own the Search Results for Your Name?

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I won't even attempt to deny I'm not a marketing geek. One of the things I loved about Kyle James' blog post "Jokes: 36 Reasons You Might be Addicted to Social Media" was "#6: You own the Google search results for your name." That definitely held true for me.

Here are all the top results for my name - x right in a row.

1. My blog
2. My blog "about me" page
3. Twitter
4. Facebook
5. FriendFeed
6. MITX
7. LinkedIn
8. Twitterholic
9. SEMPO Meetup
10. AMA Boston
11. Amazon.com
12. RSSmeme
13. one of my recent tweets
14. BoardReader
15. one of my flickr photos
16. my comment on a blog post
17. Digg
18. FriendFeed (again!)
19. Tweetree
20. another flickr photo
21. Twitter mobile
22. a mention on another blog
23. BackType
24. Insightory presentation I did on Twitter
25. HubSpot blog article I posted
26. my comment on a blog post
27. a reposting of one of my articles from the HubSpot blog
28. my comment on a blog post
29. SlideShare presentation I did on Inbound Marketing
30. my comment on a blog post
31. my listing as a speaker for Geek Girl Camp

OK, I'll stop there. The results actually go on and on - and rightfully all about me. I actually made it 12 results pages deep before giving up on finding that first non-me-related result! Of course, I understand that there aren't a lot of Ellie Mirmans out there (if any!), and that even my first or my last name separately are not very common. But, damn, that was a lot of content!

Some things I realized:

• It's easy to create a lot of bits of content. I don't consider myself to be such a prolific writer / content producer (at least for the public web). Most of the results were either profiles on different social media sites, blog comments, presentations I had posted on sharing sites, or blog posts themselves.
• I've got a lot of social media profiles. Set up, not necessarily in use. Funny enough, they're almost ranked in the order in which I use them the most. First Twitter, then Facebook, then LinkedIn... In any case, social media profiles rank very well because of the reputation and optimization of the sites, and this actually serves as a good way for helping people connect with you online even via a Google search.
• What do your search results say about you? At first I was going to say, no one searches for your name (most likely) anyway, so who cares. But really, there may be a few who do, and they are probably either (1) trying to find/connect with you or (2) trying to learn more about you. Getting found in these top search results ensures that you're enabling connections. And producing more content ensures that you have good results (instead of potentially damaging results) at the top. What do my search results say about me? Well, that I work at HubSpot, and I'm pretty active in social media.

Of course, for those folks out there with less content or more competition for their name on the web, the Google profile gives everyone a good opportunity to get prime real estate on the first page of search results for their name.