Michael B. Jordan, Thomas J. Henry and The Wisdom of Changing Your Name.

In today’s media environment, the first impression of your brand is what Google says it is.

What kind of impression are you making?

Or, perhaps more urgently, are you making an impression at all?

Let’s do a quick exercise, or what we call a Brand Audit.

Open up your computer, open a private browsing tab (to remove location) and head over to Google. When you type in your name, what comes up?

We know from a summary done by Backlinko of Semrush stats that the top 3 organic search results in a Google search get 54.4% of clicks and the #1 organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click than the #10 result.

In short, if someone is looking for you by name, they need to be able to find you very quickly if you want them to actually click through and, well, find you.

How are you doing right now on a search for your name?

If you own the results above the fold, ideally with a personal brand website landing at #1, congratulations—you’ve aced the first metric of branding success in Pre-Engagement, discoverability.

Ideally you should own all of the top results, but if you’re not landing at all in the top three results on a search for your name, we have a major problem to solve before we worry about what kind of impression you are creating.

We have to start with actually creating an impression.

If you don’t show up at all, our first order of business is to consider why. Typically, it’s one of two reasons:

1. You have an exceedingly common name that you share with many, many others ?
2. You have a unique name and are unlucky enough to share it with someone who is very visible, like an NFL player, a prominent politician, an actress or an ax-murderer from the seventies. Hopefully not the last one.

If you land in either category, as crazy as this may sound, I want you to consider changing your name.

Yes, you read that correctly.

While you may not have expected to change your name as a result of clicking on this newsletter, this is a foundational starting point to building a brand.

Let’s take David Meerman Scott , who was kind enough to write the foreword for our new book.

His name is David Scott. Or was.

He wisely recognized early in his career that David Scott was a name he would have a very hard time owning search for based on how common it was. He added in his middle name to ensure that when people referred to him or googled his name, he would be the person that would own that first impression, instead of some other David Scott.

See also Michael B Jordan, Thomas J Henry and many others…

Similar to David, Michael & Texas media's favorite advertiser, TJH, your name is a piece of digital real estate.

If you have a common name like David Scott, you are currently sharing real estate with lots of other David Scotts. If you stick with that brand name, it’s going to be very difficult to outrank all of the others to own search on that name.

The longer you stick with that name, the harder you’re making it on yourself to generate results from marketing or referrals you receive because they will have a hard time finding you.

I realize to some this sounds a little crazy.

Maybe you haven’t thought of your middle name or initial since grade school. It probably even sounds weird when you say it. Either way, it’s about to come in very handy (and maybe even make that grandmother you got that middle name from even prouder of you!).?

When you add a middle initial or middle name, you essentially walk across the street to a new piece of digital real estate that is completely empty. This allows you to plant your flag,?lay claim to that land and often immediately own search around your name.

The next step is to head to GoDaddy and see if your brand name is available as a URL (for example AdamWitty.com or RustyShelton.com). If it’s available, buy it today. While you’re at it, buy the URLs for each of your kids and grandkids. This may seem silly at first blush, but you’re essentially purchasing “lots” of virtual real estate that are valuable now and will only become more so in the future.

Your official brand name (middle initial or not) now goes on everything—on your business card, speaker bio, press mentions, your book cover, your Facebook page, your LinkedIn account, and everything else. It’s “your” brand and anywhere you are (whether being introduced for a keynote or shaking hands at a networking event), this is the brand you want out in front because it’s the one you own and can build on.

I see a lot of leaders make the mistake of using inconsistent versions of their names. For some reason, this seems to be especially true for medical doctors and PhDs. On LinkedIn, they might have “Dr.” before their name, while their website has “M.D.” after it. Oh, and their email signature might throw in a middle initial for good measure, even though it’s nowhere else to be found.

This kind of inconsistency is like scattering bricks on a bunch of different pieces of digital real estate. Not only do you confuse your audience, you also lose by not stacking all those bricks on one piece of real estate—so you can ensure you build the tallest tower of visibility when it comes to Google and other search engine algorithms.

I want you to be militant about consistency with your “brand” name. Once you decide what you’re going with, we want the exact same name to appear everywhere.

Despite the title, you may not have opened this newsletter expecting to end up changing your name, but getting clear and consistent with your brand name is a foundational step to building visibility and creating your Authority Advantage.

Once you have a name you can own search for, the next step is to build an intentional brand, which I’ll dive into in more detail in my next newsletter.

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Portions of the content for this newsletter was adapted from our new book, The Authority Advantage: Building Thought Leadership Focused on Impact, Not Ego (ForbesBooks, May 2023), coauthored with Adam Witty .