Brand yourself better with BrandYourself

Interview with CEO and co-founder Patrick Ambron to learn about the use of BrandYourself to boost online reputation

By: Christina Zha, Staff Interviewer

Patrick Ambron is the CEO and co-founder of BrandYourself, the first DIY platform that makes it simple for anyone to take control of their own search results. Ambron emphasizes your first impression to employers and colleagues is the first page of your Google results, so it’s important that you have the tools to manage your online reputation. BrandYourself offers free instructions on how to boost your Google results and premium services for those who need extra control. In the interview, Ambron talks about opening up the search engine optimization industry to a greater audience by the DIY method and gives us some examples of steps to improve your search results.

What are BrandYourself’s methods in improving online reputation?

When you are googled, because you will be googled, we want to help you make sure that it’s positive, accurate, and relevant. The whole company started when my co-founder Pete couldn’t get an internship because he was mistaken for a criminal. So Google is your first impression and we want to help people put their best foot forward. We help people update their profiles so that the good and relevant things appear above the negative things.

What makes your company’s method different from other companies?

The whole reason we went to the reputation management industry was because we found the industry was broken. Pete couldn’t fix the problem himself because all the reputation management companies charged $5000-$6000 a month to fix the problem. The industry was broken because it was only for wealthy people and there are a lot of people who wants to fix a problem or become more visible and it doesn’t make sense for them to work with a company like that. We created a product for people to do it themselves, it’s like turbo tax instead of paying accountants. We changed the market by opening the market for everybody. As we grow, we have started offering higher level services for people who want them, but the core of our service and the core of why we started is giving people tools to do this themselves.

Can you give an example of a boost step to improve a link?

Boost steps are steps that make links more search engine friendly. Let’s say that you submitted your LinkedIn profile because you want that showing up much higher than it is. And we will tell you that there are twelve boost steps you can take. One of the boost step might be as simple as you are trying to show up for Patrick Ambron but you are using the name “Patty-boy,” so go change your name. Another might be putting your name in your url to make it more Google accessible. Whatever it is, we are giving you specific steps that make your links more search engine friendly and Google friendly.

Why does it take a couple of week for the results to appear and what indicates a positive result?

For results to show up in a couple of week is how search engines work. Google wouldn’t be a great place if it were constantly changing. They have to go in and index things and run it through the algorithm and crawl the web, which is the timeframe between you changing things to the information showing up. A positive result is anything that you are glad to have on your profile because you think it helps. Anything that allows you to be represented the way you want to be represented. You want things that you control, you want things that you can update and add things do.

Why should users upgrade to the premium features?

The way our site works is that you submit things that you want to appear higher on your profile and we give you boost steps. Then we are tracking things for you, we will tell you if your links have moved up or down and if something weird showed up on your first page and you should log back in and what you can do about it. We will even tell you when someone googles you after you went on a job interview. All that is free. The main feature of the free account is that you can submit up to three links, which would be perfect for the average person if they want to be more visible. But if you want to boost an unlimited amount of links, for someone who is trying to promote a lot of stuff or bury something that you don’t want, then you can update to premium.

What are the benefits of investing in search engine optimization services?

It’s the idea that you are going to be googled once or googled everyday. It’s your first impression so that is your first opportunity to put your best foot forward. When you think about it, it’s important to manage because bad results hurt you and good results help you so you might as well control as much as you can.