SEO Basics for Speakers: How to Get People to Find You in Google

Have you ever checked the search results after typing in your name? If not, please do so now anonymously and then consider whether what you see is satisfactory to you. 

The information and links that appear on the first page of Google after typing in your name are essential when building your personal brand. Many people are searching for you in this way, so it's worth it to ensure that they see the most important, current, and professional information about you. 

If you are a speaker wondering where to start with SEO, this article is for you. We have gathered all the most important information and tips that will help you improve your personal SEO.

What is Personal SEO?

Personal SEO applies to search results on Google and other search engines when typing your name. It's a process that has a huge impact on building a personal brand and creating your online image. 

A good personal SEO strategy can make you more visible in search results and ensure that people get relevant information about you. Whether you're a doctor, rock star, entrepreneur, or speaker, this is an element of online life you should take care of if you're looking to achieve tangible professional benefits, such as gaining new clients, fans, followers, or business partners.

Personal SEO is also relevant to search results on social media platforms themselves, such as Linkedin or Facebook.

Why is Personal SEO Important for Speakers?

Are you still wondering if Personal SEO is something worth investing your time in for you as a speaker? Here are some reasons why speakers should care about search engine visibility:

1. Increase your online visibility — ensure that your potential customers, business partners and audience can find all relevant information about you.

2. Confirm your credibility and authority — Not all audience members may know you. The first way they will search for information about you will probably be to type your name into a search engine. If they find reliable and positive information there, it will confirm your professionalism and authority.

3. Build new relationships — good online visibility is an excellent opportunity to establish new partnerships because it helps people find information about you and provides them with your contact details. Also, when your profile is displayed at the top of search results, others will be more likely to believe that it’s worth building relationships with you.

Introduction to Google Search

How Does Google Search Work?

The work of search engines such as Google consists of 3 basic steps:

1. Crawling: searching the Internet to find pages and content, and then crawling the source code of the found pages.

2. Indexing: holding, organizing, and displaying the pages and content found during the search engine's crawling. So if a page appears in the index, it will be found in the search results.

3. Ranking: to present the user with the best possible answer to their query, the robot must review all possible answers and select the best ones. The best results will be placed on the SERPs. 

Information about SEO for Google and how search engines work is generally available. Today you'll find a lot of valuable SEO courses such as SEO Academy by SE Ranking and SEO Certification Course by HubSpot. They explain all the most essential terms, and teach you how to build your brand's visibility online, both for company SEO and personal SEO. These courses allow everyone to understand and then manage their SEO independently without previous knowledge in search engine processes.

How Do People Use Google Search?

One of the reasons why Google is the most successful search engine today is that it strives to provide users with high-quality, relevant search results every time they type a search query into the search engine.

Google's most important goal is to satisfy users' search intent, as described in Google's latest Quality Score Guidelines. And what is search intent? In a nutshell, it tries to determine the goal that a particular user is trying to achieve by entering a specific search query.

Everyone has a reason for typing in a search query. People can, for example, want to look for information, learn something, or buy an item. The search intent is a key concept to build your SEO and content marketing on.

And how does this relate to SEO in general? Well, to achieve a high search engine ranking, you must first understand the users' intent and then tailor your page to it.

When working on personal SEO as a speaker, think about why people search for your name. What information are they interested in? It’s probably information such as qualifications, experience, achievements, expertise, or examples of your performances that answer the following questions:

• Are you the right speaker for their event?

• What type of events do you usually perform at?

• Where have you performed in the past?

• Is your talk worth attending?

• How to contact you?

• And much more.

The search results on your name should contain the information that searchers want to know.

How to Get More People to Find You on Google?

Ok, you now know why Personal SEO is important for building a personal image. So if you want to know how to improve SEO on Google, let's move on to tips that will help you increase your visibility and create content that matches user intent.

1. Make a Personal Website

The first step to improving personal SEO should be creating your own website. You should include all the most important information that you believe may be important to your potential business partners or the audience on your website. To ensure your website is well optimized for SEO, you should take these steps:

1. Register your personal domain name, based on your name and surname. Your website and SEO start with having a domain name, and the best choice for a personal website has your name in it. For example, if your name is John Smith, ideally, your domain would be johnsmith.com, www.johnsmith.org, or something like that. You may also wish to include something that identifies you from all the other John Smiths out there, for instance john-smith-speaker.

2. Optimize the bio on your website for search engines: Be sure to clearly describe your expertise and skills on your site to make your website the main source of information about you. To do this effectively, use keywords related to your domain of expertise that your audience may search. You will need basic SEO knowledge to do this. You should include the most critical keywords that internet users can find in your headings, meta title, and meta description. If your website is on WordPress or a similar platform, you can use ready-made plugins like YoastSEO to help you optimize it for SEO.

You can add your bio to the homepage, but another good solution is to create an "About" page where you describe your professional profile in detail.

Moreover, if you have a blog on your website, don't forget to create an author page so that a section with your bio appears under each blog post written by you. It’s another excellent place to include brief information about yourself and grow your authority.

3. Add schema markup: Schema markup is the code you put on your site to allow search engines to give users as much information as possible directly in search results. Its main purpose is to help search engines find all relevant information quickly. On Schema.org, you will find many different schema tags that you can add to your bio, such as givenName, familyName, affiliation, alumniOf, award, brand, colleague, contactPoint, email, hasCredential, EducationalOccupationalCredential, Occupation, knows, memberOf, and many more.
   Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that when you add these tags the search engine will show rich snippets, but it's worth doing anyway and checking the results. 

If this all sounds too complicated or you just don't have the time to optimize your SEO yourself, you can outsource it. Many full-service digital marketing agencies such as personalseo.com offer personal SEO for speakers.

2. Fill Out and Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

The next step is to optimize your profile on Linkedin. Why are we talking about this platform? First of all, because Linkedin ranks high in Google. Secondly, it is another valuable source for finding your name directly on the LinkedIn platform itself.

To make your profile highly ranked, you’ll need to fill it out properly. Start by adding your summary (at least 250 words), a headline, and a description of your work experience. You should also set your profile URL to include your name. It’ll help Google find your profile and show it high in search results.

You should also include important files and links that you want to highlight in the next step. They could be, for example, links to your lectures or presentation recordings. As a speaker, it's a good idea to list the conferences you've attended and also give information about upcoming events you're attending. If you have already created your own website as described in step 1, you should also add your LinkedIn URL to that.

3. Claim Your Knowledge Panel

Knowledge panels are automatically generated boxes that appear on Google when searching for entities visible in the Knowledge Graph.

Make sure the knowledge panel is visible when you search for your name. If it is, great job! If you see the "Claim your knowledge panel" option, click on it and fill in the information, such as links to your social media accounts. 

Why is this so important? Completing a knowledge panel strengthens your online credibility. Moreover, it will allow users to quickly find all the important information about you.

4. Reach out to Third-party Websites

The next step to building personal SEO is to place links to your site on other sites. How do you do that? Well, when someone mentions your name online, make sure they link to your site too. For example, if you’re speaking at an event and the organizers add information about you on their website, ask them to link to your site. Such backlinks can help improve your site's rankings by raising your domain authority. Be sure to direct links to your website rather than your social media profiles. Only links to your website will allow you to improve your SEO.

Moreover, if you want to get noticed on Google, it makes sense to get mentioned by other sites. This can include interviews, guest podcasts, bio information on event pages, and more. This content on external sites is great because such sites usually have your name in the headline or text too. This way, such materials can be found by Google users and enhance your expert image.

5. Join Speaker/Event Matching Sites

If you want to get recognized, you should consider joining a community of speakers and event organizers. Such sites collect essential information about speakers and upcoming events and put event organizers in touch with appropriate speakers for their events and vice versa. They’re well optimized for SEO and have high domain authority. 

When you create an account on a platform such as SpeakerHub, your profile URL directly includes your name, making it easier for search engines to find you. Moreover, you can add a link to your personal website there, which, as we mentioned above, helps improve SEO.

You can set up an account at SpeakerHub for free, so it's a great option, even if you're just getting started in public speaking.

Summary

As a speaker your online image is of significant importance to your career, whether you are an established expert or just a beginner. By working on personal SEO, you can increase the number of exciting speaking contracts you land, establish new partnerships, and help your audience find essential information about you and your topic.