SEO for Personal Branding: Strategies to Empower Entrepreneurs and Facilitate Business Growth

What is Personal Branding?

In short, personal branding differentiates one person from another similar person operating in the same industry. Just as businesses seek to establish their own unique identity, personal branding accomplishes the same and helps individuals showcase their own personal identity.

People may want to establish personal branding for a variety of reasons.

For example, a content marketer may want to highlight their writing, previous work experience, and a portfolio of work in hopes of landing a new job or obtaining more freelance clients. They might have a website that captures all this information, but without proper SEO, they risk not being found by potential clients.

A study found that 4 out of 5 recruiters believe personal branding is important when evaluating job candidates.

Personal branding benefits individuals in the same way business branding helps distinguish one brand in the same industry from the other. Branding, in general, is meant to leave a positive impression on your intended audience and show that your values align with theirs. It holds the power to shape perceptions and how consumers view you.

Personal branding differs from business branding in that it focuses more on the individual’s traits, personality, strengths, and accomplishments; whereas business branding focuses on highlighting its mission, values, logo, and name.

Building a positive personal brand is exceptionally important, especially for entrepreneurs trying to establish themselves as a voice of authority in their space.

Entrepreneurs must aim to create a personal and meaningful connection with their target audience to build a positive perception built on a foundation of relatability and reliability.

An individual’s personal brand should align closely with their business goals, ensuring they live and abide by the values and mission statement their business sets forth.

Key Facets of Personal Branding

Beyond optimizing for online search engines, there are several ways entrepreneurs can enhance their personal brand and connect with their audience. A few of these methods include:

Being Authentic and Unique

In a crowded digital world where consumers are constantly inundated with options, only the most authentic and relatable individuals are standing out in the crowd.

In terms of personal branding, it’s important to stay true to yourself rather than putting on a facade of what you think your audience will enjoy. Authenticity helps entrepreneurs establish credibility and differentiate themselves from similar competitors.

Building a Consistent Online Presence

If you act one way on social media but then have a different persona in your videos, consumers may deem you to be inauthentic. This is why it’s important to create and maintain a consistent, cohesive online presence anywhere potential customers may find you such as your website, social media channels, videos, and more.

Having a Clear Vision

Every successful business and entrepreneur has a vision for where they want to go. Come up with a strategic roadmap and continue to measure performance to ensure you’re delivering on your promises and continuously innovating.

Make sure your goals fall within the realm of possibility yet are challenging enough to keep you motivated towards achieving more.

Differentiation

Every individual is unique with their own personality, quirks, and preferences. By trying to fit into a mold or mimicking others in your space, you become just another entrepreneur with nothing different to add.

Consumers want to learn and understand who you are at your core, what makes you unique, and why you are divergent from similar entrepreneurs in your space.

Gaining Consumer Trust

The trust gap is growing for consumers and they’re having trouble believing marketing messaging. A study by PwC found that consumers believe quickly responding to and resolving their concerns (74%) and delivering a consistent and reliable customer experience (73%) are very important to earning their trust.

Without trust, businesses and entrepreneurs alike stand to lose customers.

Trust must be earned, but entrepreneurs can more easily gain trust by being transparent, showcasing customer reviews prominently on social media and their website and consistently delivering exceptional customer experiences.

It can also be helpful to cross-promote your business and personal brand with a larger influencer in your space who has an engaged audience.

Image source: Edelman

The Intersection of SEO and Personal Branding

SEO and personal branding intertwine in many ways. As an entrepreneur, your goal is to grow your follower base and get more eyes on your business, which SEO can help you accomplish. SEO enables entrepreneurs to optimize their digital presence driving more qualified traffic to their social media platforms or website.

Here are a few tactics we recommend using to enhance your personal branding SEO efforts.

How SEO Enhances Personal Branding

When you navigate to Google and type your first and last name into the search box, are you happy with the results you see? If the answer to this question is no, then it’s time to leverage SEO to enhance your personal brand.

SEO plays a key role in establishing entrepreneurs as a thought leader in their industry, helping them to gain trust and credibility with their intended audience. It accomplishes this by driving relevant organic search traffic to personal websites and social media profiles.

For example, consider your LinkedIn profile. This is one of the first places people navigate to discover someone’s qualifications and accomplishments.

If your LinkedIn profile is outdated or incomplete, it doesn’t portray your skillset and career highlights. Instead, you want to create a LinkedIn profile that resonates with and impresses your potential audience by:

• Making your profile public
• Adding relevant links to your website and portfolio of work
• Seek and ask for recommendations from former employers and colleagues
• Fill out every available field
• Ensure your information is up to date and incorporates all your relevant experience
• Add all your relevant skills
• Draft a comprehensive summary of your qualifications and experience, incorporating relevant keywords where appropriate

Your website is another area where SEO strategy can boost your online presence. In the next section, we’ll share our top strategies for enhancing your website to attract and convert qualified consumers.

SEO Strategies for Personal Branding

SEO helps entrepreneurs get their content seen, attracting relevant traffic to their website through targeting terms and phrases potential consumers use to find their business. Once this traffic arrives at your website, they’re able to find out more about your business, what you stand for, and who you are as a person.

To drive the right traffic to your website or social media accounts, it’s important to leverage a mix of tried and tested SEO strategies such as:

Keyword Research

Conduct rigorous keyword research using tools, such as UNmiss’s Keyword Generator, to identify keywords and questions potential consumers use and ask when searching for your product or service.

We recommend targeting keywords that are highly searched for but have low competition when first building your website’s domain authority to improve your chances of ranking for your desired keywords.

Website Optimization

Your website is the primary endorsement of your personal brand. Therefore, it should embody the ideals you wish to promote such as making it clutter-free, mobile-friendly, easy-to-navigate, clean, and technically optimized.

Example of a clean personal brand’s website interface

Quality Content

Every piece of content you publish should be intentional and have a greater purpose like bringing value to your readers. Ensure every piece of content you create is relevant, made for users rather than search engines, and supports your personal brand.

Add new content on a consistent basis so your readers get used to a regular cadence of fresh copy and so search engines see your efforts too.

Perfect Your Linking Strategy

A healthy mix of backlinks and internal linking is necessary to help boost search visibility. When linking internally, be sure to link to pages that are logical and make sense for the reader to navigate to next to promote a positive customer experience.

To build your backlink portfolio, be certain to only work with reputable publications. Unreputable websites that link to your website can harm your SEO as search engines deem these links to be “toxic”.

Enhance Your Social Media

Social media plays a pivotal role in personal branding. In addition to finding you organically through search, potential customers can also find you on your social media channels when searching for keywords related to your personal brand.

Similar to website content, it’s essential to produce high-quality social media content and use consistent branding across every social media channel you’re on.

Networking with Like-Minded Influencers

When growing your personal brand, it can be helpful to turn to colleagues and like-minded influencers in your space to help with promotion. Look for influencers who share the same core values as you.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to them directly through social media messaging to ask how you can both promote each other’s businesses. Podcasts are also a great way to promote your personal brand while adding value to the podcast host’s audience.

Attend Events

By attending events within your industry, you’re likely to connect with professionals in a similar line of work who have the same interests as you do.

Look for events in your local area to stay more closely connected to the contacts you meet there but it also may be helpful to broaden your reach and exposure by attending networking events in other regions. Industry meet-up groups are also a beneficial avenue for meeting new connections.

Make Video Content

Videos are an engaging way to build your personal brand and capture attention. Additionally, videos posted on YouTube can often be highly visible in the SERPs. Be sure to add video schema markup to help Google understand the context of your video.

You’ll also want to create an engaging title for your video, and add a detailed description with relevant keywords, and appropriate tags.

Example of using YouTube for personal branding purposes

Personal branding requires a well-thought-out, multi-faceted approach that begins with analyzing how your personal brand currently stands in the SERPs. It then requires consistent effort to maintain and refine your online presence, continuously adding relevant content and qualifications to your website and social media.

SEO isn’t a set it and forget it solution, but rather a long-standing strategic approach to ensure optimal visibility in the increasingly crowded and competitive digital landscape.

Your personal brand won’t grow on guesswork and intuition alone. Instead, efforts should be complemented with SEO tools that can significantly reduce the burden of work and ensure you’re achieving maximum results.

UNmiss is your all-in-one solution for all your digital marketing and SEO needs, with tools to audit your website, suggestions for building your backlink portfolio, and many more!