What's In A Name? Ranking for Bob Bardsley

Last week, I wrote about how this blog was not ranking well for variations of my own name - chiefly Bob Bardsley and Bobble Bardsley, the two things most people call me these days.

I started Phronesis as a place to collect testimonials, offer pricing information and show off my portfolio, and any SEO that happened was always meant to be in my blog posts - so, topics like 'freelance copywriting', 'SEO consulting' and so on, rather than my own name.

But my Analytics results show that people arrive here after searching for 'Bob Bardsley Phronesis', which is pretty solid proof that people are searching specifically for me, rather than for the topics I write about in my blog posts.

I haven't yet made changes to my blog template in order to include more mentions of my name, but my past two posts have included my name in their headline, and several times in their body text.

The result? Front-page rankings for both 'Bob Bardsley' and 'Bobble Bardsley', without the need to include 'Phronesis'.

It's probably no coincidence that my number of hits for people Googling 'Bob Bardsley' has also increased over the past week.

Insta-Keywording with Blog Posts

While it's a very specific term, this goes some way towards proving the value of even a single blog post about a topic area your site may have missed - if it's not a particularly competitive area, you're in with a good chance of ranking highly within one or two published posts.

It also serves as a useful reminder that, even if you don't intend your site to be accessed via search primarily, there's no harm in making sure it serves both your search audience, and the traffic you drive directly to it via social networking or word of mouth.

There's still work to be done to get Phronesis to the top of the search results on variations of my name - and ironically, I'll have to topple my own 'Bobble Bardsley' Twitter account if I want to get it all the way to number one! - but this hasn't been a bad start, for the few minutes' work each blog post took.

Watch this space for more...