Monday I discussed several of the featured speakers from Search Engine Strategies and looked at their search results branding for their names and businesses. It turned out not to be as enjoyable as I had hoped as all of them have very high visibility. Not that I wanted to point out anybody's faults, but hey, that's kinda the fun.

Today I want to look at several of the search marketers themselves. To see how well they are branded in the search results and see if we can pinpoint any gaps. In Monday's post I added a disclaimer that you might want to read if you feel you or someone you love is being attacked. They're not.

Matt McGee
KeyRelevance

Matt has done a great job of dominating the top results in Google. The first result is his Small Business SEM blog, with a handful of site links to boot. The next spot is his "about" page from the same blog.

The third result is a different Matt McGee but then Matt's personal blog is back in the fourth result. The next two results are Matt's Flickr pages. Next is another unrelated result, then Matt again, with a link to his Twitter profile, profile for the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference and then a blog post interviewing Matt and some others.

Not a bad roundup, with all but two of the top 10 links pointing to Matt. What is noticeably absent here are any links to the company where Matt works, KeyRelevance. While Matt is relatively new to the company, this shows that they have some work to do in order to capitalize on his name.

So let's move on to searches for the company. I started with a misspelling of the name, by adding a space between the two words, "key relevance". Even still, the company's home page came right to the top of the results with several sitelinks. The second result was another page from the site.

The next three results were all unrelated job postings looking for "Key Relevance Engineers". In fact, there are no additional top ten results related to the company in question.

I perform one final search for "keyrelevance" and find that all 10 results are related to the company in some form or another. Again, the number one spot and sitelinks go to the company and the second result is another article from the site. The next couple of of results are blog postings on Search Engine Watch by Liana Evans, also of KeyRelevance. There were also a couple of blog posts about Matt McGee joining the KeyRelevance team.

If you're looking for either Matt McGee or KeyRelevance, there is no doubt that you will have no trouble finding them on Google.

Scott Allen
Hybrid6

Scott has the distinct privilege of having one of those "common" names that make it extremely difficult to brand in the search results. In fact, none of Google's top ten spots point to the Scott we are looking for. This leaves us to perform searches for his company.

I started, as I usually do, with misspellings, just to see what comes up. In this case I start with "hybrid six." Unfortunately, nothing here leads me to Scott's company.

Let's try again with "hybrid 6". While there is still an extra space in there, Scott's company pops up in the first two results, one to his home page and the next to the page dedicated to the WordPress SpamFree plugin he developed. That's all we get from that search. While that is enough to get us where we want, let's try the correct spelling.

I search for "hybrid6" and saw a pretty drastic change in results, though Google asks if I meant "hybrid 6". Scott's not quite enough of a name to prevent that. Anyway, the first two results are the same from the previous search. The next couple of results are profile pages from other site's, with the fifth result unrelated. But that's the only non-related result. The rest are more profile pages all related.

Joe Abraham
SageRock

Joe has the same curse as Scott, when it comes to branding ability. A common name makes branding hard. There were several Joe Abrahams in the SERPs but none are the Joe we are looking for.

So let's move on to the company search. I start with "sage rock" and the company name gets top billing. Second result is one of Sage Lewis' videos on WebProNews. There are several more results dedicated to SageRock and Sage Lewis. There are few oddball listings for Sage's Rock Rat, Sage Rock Ranch, Sweet Sage in Rock Springs, etc. but Sage (Rock and Lewis) have a good handful of top ten results.

Performing a final search for "sagerock" and we find that all top ten results are dedicated to the company and various profiles and portals. Everything from Twitter, to YouTube to his own .org site, Sage dominates these results.

Conclusion

I'll offer a disclaimer here, both Matt McGee and Scott Allen are good friends of mine. I don't think that in any way biased my findings or the way I presented them. The only caveat is that I actually knew that Matt was new to KeyRelevance. I may not know of similar situations with others.