Protecting your personal brand with Google: what you need to know

Did you know that your personal brand is your most valuable asset online. It your public profile that showcases who you are and it’s visible to everyone. When people are looking for answers, they usually turn to Google for information and solutions. What if you were in a meeting and people searched your name online to learn more about who you are and what you stand for. Will they be impressed with the results? Are you impressed with the results? When was the last time you searched for your name on Google? Is the information presented accurate and up to date?

Protecting your personal brand and reputation online is a must have to everyone online. It’s a reality that you cannot hide online. Since the birth of social networking a couple of years ago and everyone being a citizen journalist where they can post anything at anytime within a couple of seconds, keeping your digital footprint and brand in perfect health is vital in today’s fast paced digital lifestyle. Anything published online is there for good and nothing can actually be deleted – just hidden.

Have a look at Way Back Machine which keeps a dated archive of public websites. With this service, you can basically browse back in time to specific websites and pages and see how they looked.

It basically takes a snapshot of websites and pages. Here’s the first snapshot of Google taken by Way Back Machine on 11 November 1998 and here’s a snapshot of the Apple website taken on 22 September 1996. Pretty scary if you really think about it.

While we have all done mistakes in our lives, you never know when it will really come back to bite you in the behind. Some employers, potential business partners and people may not care about your crazy high school parties back in the day while some might.

Your personal reputation online

Your name is your personal brand and it’s extremely critical that you are aware of how it’s being displayed online if someone searches for you. Another thing to take note of is that you could be negatively affected by someone else sharing your name and surname. If your name is Bryan Adams and someone searches for you online, will they find you or the famous singer?

Your digital footprint and Google

Do a couple of search on Google and add a couple of different keywords to your name to see what comes up. Maybe you are not seeing the best results when you are only searching for your name, but your name and job title does. Never assume that if you are not seeing any results for your name on the first few pages on Google that you don’t have anything to worry about.

A very quick way to start managing your personal brand online is to set up free Google Alerts for your brand name and a couple of Alerts on the variations you searched for. Google will email you every time that it discovers your name mentioned online. This doesn’t mean it will alert you for any previous instances of your name that it has found, only future mentions. It’s also not 100% accurate and it might not find anything so make it a habit to search for your name on Google and other online channels on a regular basis.

Usually the best defence with protecting your personal brand is by having a solid digital footprint showcasing exactly who you are and what you stand for. Your name is your brand and it’s important that you stay in control of it.