Have you Googled your name lately?

I wrote an article for the American Bar Association’s Family Law publication: The Family Advocate. It is called “Have you Googled your name lately?”

The article is about your online reputation management.

If you are like most divorce lawyers and divorce professionals, you rely on referrals for new business. These days, most people will “google” you before they contact you even if your name was given to them by a friend. When someone googles you, it is important that positive information (web pages, videos, pictures) about you show up. If you cannot be found, that’s bad news. You also don’t want to be lost among pages of other people who share the same name as you. The worst case is when the Google search returns lots of pages with negative information about you.

While you don’t have 100% control over what is published about you, you can take steps to improve the search results when someone googles your name.

This article talks about what you can do to rescue your online reputation if it is tarnished, it also tells you how you can be proactive and dominate google search results when someone googles you.

As an example, if you google my name “Martha Chan”, you will see that google returns over 8 million web pages. On the first page of the google search results (which displays 10 web pages about “Martha Chan”), you will find 5 to 6 pages about me and the rest of the pages are about 3 or 4 other people with the same name as mine. That’s what I call dominate the google search results.

Another intersting point: a lot of the pages displayed are my social media pages. So, for those of you who do not believe in social media, you might want to take another look at the value of having social media pages and being active with them.

 

You can read this article “Have you googled your name lately?” on www.FamilyLawyerMagazine.com.

If you have not googled your name lately, do so now. You maybe surprised at what you will find.