I recently caught up with BrandYourself’s CEO, Patrick Ambron, to learn more about the BrandYourself platform and its implications for helping job seekers take control of their online identity.
What is BrandYourself?
BrandYourself is the only “do-it-yourself” platform that makes it easy for anyone to take control of their own search results. It started when our co-founder, Pete Kistler, couldn’t get an internship in college because he was being mistaken for a drug dealer when prospective employers searched his name on Google. We realized Google is an incredibly important part of your reputation, but unless you know how SEO works–most people don’t–or have thousands to spend on a reputation company to do it for you, there’s nothing you can do. We wanted to put that power in everybody’s hands and create a free product that made it easy for anyone to manage their online identity themselves.
How does BrandYourself work?
The only way to improve your search results is to push positive links to to the top of Google and bury unwanted results. This process is known as SEO and it’s what reputation companies charge thousands of dollars for. With Brand Yourself, you simply submit any positive links you WANT to show up at the top of Google. This could be your personal website, an article written about you, or anything else.
Our software immediately analyzes that link and gives you specific boost steps you can take to help it rank higher. For example, if you submit your LinkedIn profile, you might learn it currently ranks 25 for your name, but there are 12 boost steps you can take to make it show up higher.
Once you submit a link and take your boost steps, we’ll track it and send you alerts whenever something important happens: something weird pop ups on your first page, one of your links rises or falls, or even if someone ends up Googling your name, say , after a job interview.
One of our most VALUABLE features is your BY profile which is the only profile on the web automatically optimized to show up high in Google for your name.
What is your favorite site feature?
My favorite site feature is the Boost section, where you track where all of your positive links currently rank in Google, and can take all the steps you need to help them rank higher. This is where we literally took the SEO process that costs thousands of dollars and automated it so you can do it yourself. There is NOTHING a reputation company could or would do, that you can’t easily do yourself to push your best links higher.
Can you share a BrandYourself success story
There are so many. One example is an ivy league professor who was wrongfully accused of shoplifting (in a very weird circumstance). Though it was all a big mistake, it got some press and whenever a student or colleague Googled him, they found this negative information. He originally turned to a reputation company who charged him a total of $17K to help bury it off the first page. The problem was, every time the algorithm changed, the digital dirt crept back up, and the reputation management company would charge him more.
With BrandYourself, he’s been able to push it down to the third page himself. He pays a nominal fee and every time something changes he gets an alert and he can handle it himself. He couldn’t be happier.
What’s on the horizon for BrandYourself?
We’ve worked hard over the last year building this product. We’re getting great feedback and there are so many ways to make the product simpler, and so many features to make it more powerful, so we will continue to focus on product development. However, now that we’re live, our goal is to get this in as many hands as possible. Everybody should be actively improving their search results, and now by creating a free account with BrandYourself, everybody can!