You Ask, I Answer: Overcoming Similarly Named Brands in SEO?

In today's video, Natasha asks, I found out that the search engine ranking position, the search result for your name is shared with a namesake, an actor. I wonder what would you recommend to someone in a similar situation but who doesn't have have online presence of your magnitude and just starts working on a personal brand and sees that an influential namesake occupies most of the positions. Well, it's true. Um I do share a name with the late uh actor uh Christopher Penn. He died in 2007, I believe.

So um that uh that was a challenge in the early days. Now, there are a few ways to handle this. First, um, some people adopt a stage name, some people will pick a stage name that is more unique, that is something that they can brand, that they something they can own and not have to worry about the name conflict. Um that approach probably takes the longest, but is certainly the most uh I would say most effective because you once you've created an unusual name, uh it's yours. It's highly unlikely somebody else is going to choose that name.

Uh celebrities do this all the time. Uh Stephanie Giamatti is actual or Steph Stephanie Giametti's stage name is Lady Gaga. Everybody knows that one. That one's pretty easy, but it took years for uh for her to be able to uh have a brand around that. Uh other folks use uh full extensions of their names.

Uh my friend David Meerman Scott uh said that he chose that name for his for his professional career because there are a tremendous number of David Scots in the world. Um so by using his middle name, uh he was able to uh to do that. And I know for um for folks uh depending on your culture and your heritage, you may have a choice of middle names. Uh if I recall correctly, uh f Russian uh folks use uh patronym as part of the middle name. Um so you certainly if you were to use uh your patronym uh along with the rest of your name, that would be a distinguishing factor.

Um and finally, and the approach that I ended up taking uh was that because it's actually funny because uh even uh the deceased actor and I have the same middle initial um the you can optimize for your topic area with your name, and you'll see this the most in uh Search Console in your search results when you see like Christopher Penn and marketing or Christopher Penn and uh artificial intelligence or Christopher Penn and machine learning. However, the overall SEO strategy is pretty much the same as anything else, regardless of the name and conflict. Um reporting is more difficult, but this your strategy is the same, and that is you have to create large amounts of high quality content. You have to create large amounts of of newsworthy or um searchworthy content that people will look for. And my recommendation is if the name is a problem, yeah, like Chris Penn, then you focus on unbranded search first.

You focus on dominating uh search results for an unbranded term to attract traffic to your website, and then over time, and it's it it takes a lot of time, uh, you will start to see the branded searches creep up as well as you become better known, as you become uh more authoritative on your topic. For years, uh, my blog had nothing to do with my name, but was about the individual topics that I wrote about, uh social media monitoring and Google analytics and things like that, and that still forms the majority of my traffic. Um, regardless of whether or not you have an easy-to-find name, you have to go after the unbranded search first to attract that new audience and then use that traffic, retargeting and every other tactic you can think of to bring in to bring that audience back for branded search. Um these days, still true, you need to have a lot of content. You need to have a tremendous amount of high quality content.

What I'm doing today probably isn't enough. Right. So I'm doing a daily video plus daily audio plus uh a blog post plus social media promotion plus a weekly newsletter. That's not enough content. Today, you need to be doing ideally, if you have the budget and the and the resources and the time to pull it off, you should be doing probably five to ten pieces of content a day.

If you were doing nothing else, if that was your if building your personal brand was your sole focus, that's what you should be doing. Who would be who would have the time to do that? Somebody who is a job seeker, for example. If you are in between, you know, sending out 50 or 100 job applications a day and doing outreach and connection on LinkedIn and building your community, you should also be cranking out content like crazy. This is going to get worse.

As companies, uh, particularly deep pocketed companies have the ability to use artificial intelligence and natural language generation to have machines write content for them. This is going to become a much greater challenge for the smaller entrepreneur who may not have access to that kind of technology. So my advice and counsel would be regardless of the uniqueness of your name, regardless of the current strength of your brand, good or bad, you have an urgent need to be building content, to be creating a community, to be building loyalists to you and your company as quickly as possible and as soon as possible, so that when companies do start flooding the their websites with a thousand blog posts a day, you will not see organic search for unbranded search dry up. That's where that's where you're gonna see the biggest impact of these natural language generation technologies. So if you want to build that personal brand right now, you need to be creating content that is that can occupy a niche a niche in unbranded search right now.

Get the traffic, get the conversions, get people on your email list, get people in a private group of some kind, not Facebook groups, please, or not LinkedIn groups, not anything that has an algorithm that can suppress uh people seeing your content. Slack, Discord, Mattermost, any of those would be fine. And build those champions for your brand today. The one thing that the AI approach can't scale is human interaction, too. So make sure that you are attending as many events and as conferences and things as uh is reasonable and affordable with whatever budget you have to work with, whether it's local meetups if you have no budget, uh whether it's the biggest conferences in the world, if you can, you know, pay to be on the stage, whatever range that is, that's what you're gonna need to build your brand.

So a good question, uh Natasha, interesting question because there are a lot of considerations now that there weren't when I first started my website twelve years ago. But when you're competing for a popular term, you've gotta create better stuff than than what the leader is creating, uh, and ideally in a different niche. So uh as always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.