Control your own search results

Brand Yourself - Google Grader I’m always interested in new Online Reputation Management (ORM) platforms and Brand Yourself caught my attention due to their use of a Facebook app to market their platform features. Their Facebook app is called Google Grader and encourages users to use their app to measure their online reputation and measure it against their friends scores. The use of gamification is a smart way to both showcase their product features and increase their user base of their free product. I thought I would see how I could further dominate the search results for Dave Iwanow, so step one of their signup process I selected “Dave Iwanow” as my target phrase I wanted to improve ranking in Google/Bing. Note that I used their actual platform and not their Facebook app for my test of their product features.

How does their platform work?

Their Brand Yourself self service platform helps link existing content and profiles that already exist so more relevant results show higher than irrelevant results.  They then use their software to do analysis on each link and gives your specific steps to make it easier for Google/Bing to correctly rank the right pages for your name. The cross linking allows search engines to understand the connected relationship between your social profiles and their relevance to you.

How is your search score is calculated?

Their platform starts by requiring you to select the top 10 results for your name that either positive, not me or negative.  This selection which are then tracked by their platform to track ORM improvements over time, the simplicity of their ORM process is key for those who are not advanced web users but who want to improve search results around their name.

Your Search Score
Looks like you’re pretty well represented on your first page — but you’ve still got room for improvement! Use our tools to fill your first page with more positive results.

Boost Steps
Their platform is fairly helpful as they offer a SEO booster feature where they step you through the profile of updating your existing profiles to be more relevant in Google. This is a smart way to ensure people correctly setup their external social profiles such as Slideshare. The explanations and details for each step is very through and is tailored specifically for your name along with a weighting for completing each step.

  • Add This to Your BrandYourself Profile +40%
  • Update Your Name +25%
  • Link to Your BrandYourself Profile +15%
  • Update Your Bio +10%
  • Add Your Location +5%
  • Add Employment Info +2%
  • Add a Photo +2%
  • Share On Social Networks +1%
This feature is a fairly organic and Google friendly process for getting the most out of your existing social profiles, but only 3 links are available in the free version I’m using for this post.
Each step you complete fills your boost meter and increases the chances that this result will rise higher in search rankings over time.

Brand Yourself Scorecard

The branding scorecard is a simple way to keep track of how you are performing around your target name in Google, along with how many profile links you have submitted and how many of these links your have Boosted (Optimised). The current search score is also a nice touch for people new to reputation management to understand how they are performing against a perfect result.
Brand Yourself Scorecard

Brand Yourself Progress Report

The big issue with any reputation management project is that it’s often slow and tedious to track how the changes are starting to have an impact.  Their platform does automate much of this process but the limitations is that they only track top 10 results so it maybe sometime before you start to see some positive movement. It would be great if their platform could track the top 100 results as a number of people with popular names will struggle to get their name into the top 30 results and those who share a name with a celebrity will struggle with top 50 results. Obviously if you have the paid version and are adding far more of your links to your profile the quicker you will see an impact than the free version that limits your profile to 3 links.

Brand Yourself - Progress

Brand Yourself – Profile Visitors

People love Googling themselves but the problem is that most of the social profiles don’t actually provide you with any web analytics to know who is actually looking at your profile besides Linkedin.  Even Linkedin is very vague on who’s viewed your profile with the data range consistently shifting but it also doesn’t advise what source they used to find your profile, was it an internal search, via Google or from a direct link. I do love Brand Yourself’s profile visitor analytics shown in the screenshot below that give you some very detailed statistics even in the free version.
Brand Yourself - Profile Visitors

If you move your mouse over the profile visitors they then provide further details about your visitors. We have included the insight they provide for the direct visitor below.

What this means: Someone in Brisbane, Australia visited your profile 29 mins ago using the Internet provider Optus, probably from their home computer.
How they found you: They found you direct, meaning they either came through an email, an instant message, a resume, or they typed in your web address themselves, so this is probably someone you know or recently talked to.

I can also see that it works for reputation management and understanding who is checking your background as someone within the Publicis group in Sydney visited my Brand Yourself profile page yesterday.

Try it out free!

I do like their platform as it’s fairly fun and easy to use and since Brand Yourself have a freemium account that you can signup for here and have a play around with it and see if you can beat my score of B+.