Ask a BrandYourself Expert: Ryan Eick

Sr. Reputation Specialist, Ryan Eick

Meet Ryan Eick. Ryan is a Senior Reputation Specialist here at BrandYourself. He is here to answer your questions about when you can expect to see results on Google, what to do after you have completed your boost steps, and what search engines BrandYourself Boost steps work for.

“When can I expect to see results?”

The amount of time that you can expect to see results varies person to person, and can depend on a variety of factors.  Working with BrandYourself, I’ve seen results show up after just a few days, and other times it’s taken nearly a year before something even shows up on the first page. As a general rule, how long it takes for something to rank on Google depends on how strong the results are that it’s competing against.  Let’s say you have a competitive name, like John Smith, and you’re trying to boost your personal site.  Chances are it’s going to take a lot more time and effort to see your results rank than if you had a less common name.

Typically, it takes a couple months after a site is created for it to be indexed by Google and start showing up higher.  While this might seem frustrating if you’re looking for instant gratification, it’s actually a good thing; if it only took a couple days for something to show up on Google, then somebody could just as easily post bad stuff about you!

What’s important to realize about BrandYourself’s SEO method, is that it’s more about sustainable, positive results than instant gratification. You’re not going to wake up one day and find that your negative result has disappeared, or that your sites magically jumped from page 5 to the top of page 1 overnight.  It’s a lot more gradual than that.

Building your reputation online is a lot like bodybuilding.  Let’s say that you’re Chris Farley, and you’re interested in getting in shape.  Obviously, you aren’t going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger after a month of lifting.  But after working at it consistently, you should start to see results.

“I’ve completed all of my boost steps.  What now?”

Congratulations, you’ve just completed the hardest steps!  You’re probably thinking that you now don’t have to do anything, and can just sit back and wait for your property to rank, but you’re not out of the woods yet.  There’s still more to be done.

Once you get a site or social media profile up, optimized and running, you’re going to need to make sure that it’s being regularly updated with fresh content.  This will show search engines that a site is relevant and legitimate as opposed to spammy, and help it rank higher.  Depending on what sort of site or profile you created, you’ll have different steps you’ll need to follow to make sure that you’re keeping it regularly updated. However, here are some typical ones that tend to yield really strong results.

Website: Make sure that the site is regularly updated with new, relevant information by editing and adding to what you already have on the site, whether that is text, photos or anything in-between. You could also create a blog for the site.

Blog: Make sure that you keep your blog regularly updated with posts, typically ones that are at least 300 words.  How often you want to keep your blog updated is entirely up to you, but you should typically do at least one post a month.  If you want to do more, however, it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is an extremely useful tool for both networking and online branding, therefore you absolutely need to do the most with it that you can.  Some ideas include regularly posting articles, endorsing and interacting with your connections when you can and keeping your information relevant.

Twitter: Tweet when you can.  It doesn’t have to be anything too crazy, an average of one tweet a day will more than do the trick.  It goes without saying that you should be careful what you say, since the wrong tweet can get you into a lot of trouble.

“Do BY boost steps work for search engines other than Google?”

Yes, absolutely.  Of course, Google is by far the most commonly used search engine, but a good portion of folks on the Internet use other search engines. There are hundreds of online search engines out there, but after Google, Bing and Yahoo are by far the two most popular.

BrandYourself doesn’t restrict itself to Google, although since that’s the most commonly used search engine, it is where we focus the majority of our attention.  But that’s not to say that our methods don’t work for other search engines.  While BrandYourself’s boosting steps are effective for Google, they’re often even more effective for other search engine platforms, particularly Yahoo and Bing. This is because the search algorithms for these sites put a strong emphasis on personal sites and extensively filled-out profiles, both of which are essential parts of the BrandYourself method.  No matter what search engine you’re using, BrandYourself works to ensure that your material shows up the highest.

Get to Know Ryan!

What is your favorite part about working at BrandYourself?

While at BrandYourself, I’ve been lucky enough to meet great people, learn so much about an exciting and relevant topic and have an awful lot of fun doing it!

When you’re not working at BrandYourself, what can we find you doing?

When I’m not working at BrandYourself, you can find me checking out exciting restaurants in New York City, trying the newest craft beer, going to film screenings and reading about history.

If you were to choose one fictional character from anywhere that you are most like, who would it be?

I’m Ron Burgundy, because I love scotch, and I always stay classy.

To learn more about Ryan Eick, visit his BrandYourself Profile