Never heard of the Google problem?
That’s not surprising if you haven’t done much to build your personal brand and online presence.
If people find very few or zero search results for “your name”, then you have a Google problem.
That means that you are virtually invisible to the very people who can help you meet your job search, career or business goals.
To address this problem, we (Hannah Morgan, Meg Guiseppi and Andre Palko) did a LinkedIn Live Event, which you can view in the video below.
We created CareerBrandVideos™ to fill the gap for personal branding videos that can be used career-long.
Unlike with video resumes or other talking head videos, CareerBrandVideos™ don’t feature you on camera, which makes them the best option for the majority of people who don’t perform well on camera.
You’ll see the actual transcript of the event below the video.
Transcript for the Google Problem LinkedIn Live Event
Hannah
So welcome everybody. I’m gonna hide this for a second. How are you? Welcome Meg and Andre. It’s so great to see you. Good to see you.
Andre
Good to see you, Hannah!
Meg
Same here.
Hannah
Excellent. Well, and thank you all. I hope we’ve got some people watching us here today. If you are here watching us or you’re watching the replay, if you wanna just drop a note over in the comments and say hi that would be great. We’d love to see who’s here. Sort of like if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a noise? If you run a live stream <laugh> event, does anybody know anybody’s watch it? <Laugh> so I wanna thank Meg and Andre for being here with me, with conversations with colleagues.
Meg and I met many, many years ago. Meg is a personal branding expert and Andre Palko is the founder of small business Rainmaker. And he, his business is dedicated to helping small businesses with video marketing. And it wasn’t so long ago, but it feels like it was a long time ago, but maybe it doesn’t, that Meg, Andre and I all partnered.
And we’ll talk a little bit more about that backstory, but we partnered to create this really cool tool or product system to help people with video because we realized that video was hot and up and coming. And we wanted to make it simple for people who were trying to advance in their careers or wanted to have an online presence to make it easy for them to have that happen. And so that was the birth of CareerBrandVideos™.
And so I’m really honored to have them both here with me today, so that we can talk a little bit about this whole process of getting an online visibility. And let me ask you this question, Andre or Meg, whichever, what do you see as one of the biggest challenges professionals face when it comes to video and personal branding, or just personal branding?
Meg
What I found is that many people are still hesitant or even ambivalent about personal branding because they think it’s the same thing as bragging. It’s better to think about it this way: Branding is educating people about the value you offer. When you tell people who you are, they get a better idea of what you’re like to work with.
Another challenge I see people having is that they hesitate to put themselves out there to build their online brand. That’s why I’m excited that we’re talking about personal branding video today because video is one of the best ways to get your personal brand across and differentiate yourself, while at the same time building your online presence.
Hannah
Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. Anything you wanna add to that, Andre?
Andre
Well, one of the things I see, and it’s probably the biggest challenge that I see with clients, it comes down to a lack of online visibility. What happened was when the whole world went virtual during the pandemic, it caught a lot of companies off guard, especially those who’ve been in business for many, many years. And the symptom of their problem is that they were all suffering a loss of revenue and they couldn’t figure out why.
In every case, what I discovered is that it came down to a problem with their online presence. Either there was none at all, or they hadn’t paid attention to what little presence they did have. So the upshot was that clients weren’t finding them. And right now I’d say, this is the biggest problem I see. Because if people can’t find you, how are they ever going to learn about you and what you have to offer? You know, that’s really the bottom line.
Hannah
Absolutely. I just wanna give a quick shout out to some of the people that are here with us today. Hi, AJ and Mohamed, and good to see you. You too, Rebecca, we have a bunch of people here. This is great. Hi, Shelly. Good to see you. Shannon Gallagher, all these people. This is great. Got a whole bunch. This’s great to see everybody. So Andre, as you were talking about sort of that Google problem, can I put a question out there or like, the question really is well go ahead. Put the question out there. Would you?
Andre
<Laugh> okay. Well just for fun why not? Why doesn’t everybody take a second to Google your own name and as you do that, let us know in the chat what’s showing up and if you’re happy with what you see. So go ahead and take a second to do that.
Hannah
Yeah. So really go open a new window, a new browser window, a new tab, and enter in your name. First name, last name into Google or whatever your browser is and see what comes up and tell us, tell us what that is. What’s showing up on the first page. Are you surprised at what is showing up on the first page? You don’t have to, to necessarily admit it, but we have seen what happens, right, Andre?
Andre
Yeah, absolutely. I, I think you have a screenshot or I do. Okay. if you’ll pull that up, here’s a screenshot of a Google search before I started working with one of our clients. He’s a commercial real estate, executive and consultant. And as you can see, there’s one lone posting on page one and that’s his LinkedIn profile.
Then after we uploaded his CareerBrandVideos™ to YouTube, you can see if you’ll pull that up. There were five listings on the Google search page one. So what it did was by using video, it pushed his LinkedIn listing to number one. He had three videos near the top of the page. Plus he had a headshot photo in the middle of the page and all these Google results that you’re looking at here. They happened within minutes after posting to YouTube. And maybe you can see it on your screen. It might be too small, but if you look closely, you can see that when I took the screenshot, the videos were uploaded just two hours prior to that.
Hannah
It’s pretty impressive. And I don’t think that people really understand the power of Google YouTube, right? Because YouTube is owned by Google, right? And so search engine results are greatly, you know, influenced by the power and authority. So are there some things that we should know about, besides what you’ve talked about? Are there other ways that video can fix the Google problem?
Andre
Sure, absolutely. And, and here’s the problem in a nutshell. If you think about it, what’s the first thing that employers or recruiters or potential clients do when they check you out? They Google your name. It’s the same thing that almost every one of us does when we research anything.
So what shows up when they’re doing that, when they’re Googling your name? Is it somebody else with the same name and an arrest record? Is it the Zillow listing for your home, or are you getting hundreds of search results of other people with the exact same name as you? Confusion is a problem for the searcher and mistaking you for someone else can be an even bigger problem for the searcher. The other aspect to the Google problem is that studies show that about 90% of searchers don’t go past the first page of search results.
And in business searches, it’s even worse than that. Over 80% of the clicks go to the top five results on page one. So that’s why it’s so important to show up on page one with the right information about you and your expertise, because you don’t want people mistaking you for some drug dealer with your name, who beat you in a search results, because they’re constantly in the news.
Now, traditionally getting on Google page one, it conventionally means that you have to do lots of blogging, create lots of content, do technical search engine optimization work, and it could take months to get there. And today it’s getting even harder and taking longer. I just read earlier today, a couple said there are up to 300 or more websites that are created per minute, which means by the time we’re done with this event, there are gonna be, I don’t know, at least 4,500 new websites out there.
Yeah, it’s really crazy. So you can see why it’s tough to compete by using traditional website content alone. But what happened was years ago, I noticed my company’s how-to videos on YouTube were showing up on Google search. And this was before Google bought YouTube. My blog post posts were showing up too, but they would sometimes take weeks or months, as is to be expected. But I found the videos were showing up really fast sometimes in hours.
And these days, what I’m finding is that we can get videos to show up on Google even faster than we could in the past. And there’s a reason for this too. Video is what Google calls search feature, and here’s how they explain it. And I’m gonna quote Google: Google’s search features ensure that you get the right information at the right time in the right format.
That’s most useful to your query. Sometimes it’s a webpage. Sometimes it’s real world information like a map or inventory at a local store. And sometimes it’s a video. So how this all works is let’s go back to the example of our employer or a client Googling your name. The searcher’s intent is to find out about you, your background, your expertise about what others might be saying about you and a little bit about your person.
And everything about their search is to learn all about you, in a sense you are the product. And what we’re doing with our CareerBrandVideos™ is we showcase all of this in a video format. So it’s highly relevant because it gives searchers exactly what they want. It’s the information about you, and it’s in a video format that conveys a lot of information about you in a short amount of time.
So it shows up on page one as a feature. The other thing about Google features is they will show up on page one because Google knows obviously that most searchers don’t go beyond the first page. And because the search experience is the number one priority for Google. I mean, aside from making money, their number one priority is that if there is a relevant feature for a search such as video, they will use it. And it’s likely to be on the first page.
And typically when we create a CareerBrandVideos™ video for a client, it shows up on Google page one in a few minutes after posting to YouTube. And because we’re doing three videos, we get up to three spots on page one, like we just showed you in the screenshots from Rob.
There’s one other major benefit to when your videos show up on page one. Remember all those undesirable results that we talked about? And I don’t know if anybody here has been getting anything undesirable, but if there’s something you don’t wanna see in searches for you, it will push them further down the page. So if your competition is on page one, and that could be competition for a job or for, for your business, what it will do is the more you show up on page one, it will push down your competition further down the page. So that’s kind of a quick overview of how and why video can fix this Google problem.
Hannah
That’s great. There are a couple points here that I think either you or Meg could speak to. Shannon Gallagher has a pretty common name. So there are a lot of things that are coming up for her when she searches for her name, but it’s not all her. Right. And I remember this was a big deal back in the day, too. We talked about some of the tricks that job seekers could use, and people who were trying to build this brand out. Could, do you remember some of those, Meg?
Meg
Some of the things other than video?
Hannah
Yeah. Like how can Shannon make sure that the right information for her comes up on page one, besides video
Meg
Search results associated with her name is what you’re saying. Yeah. Yeah. it’s really a basic matter of building webpages that have your name on them or that, you know, that you create that support your brand, that you know, so there’d be things like LinkedIn. I’m sure she has, because we’re talking to <laugh> cuz she’s here at this event. Yeah. let’s see, what else, other social media. Some of the other tricks that people don’t think of is you know, your Amazon profile is something that would rank well. Professional associations sometimes have you know,
Hannah
Memberships
Meg
Exactly, your membership profile could show up. So things like that.
Hannah
Yeah.
Meg
Socially, regular blogging, too. Regular blogging.
Hannah
And it may be as simple as adding your middle initial to help differentiate yourself from those other people. Right. So if it’s Shannon M Gallagher, and every time you are posting stuff, you reference it and you put it in your LinkedIn bio, you put your name out there on any of your Amazon profiles or membership at profiles. If you use consistently Sharon M. Gallagher, then people will search for Sharon M. Gallagher. Right?
So that just gives somebody more data and more specific data to help find you. So a middle intitial could be that, but also the job title or profession that you were in, sort of associate that with all of your, make sure that’s early in your LinkedIn profile and in all of your bios that are on social media. Anything else that you have recommended Andre?
Andre
Meg touched on this, you know, but when you’re creating your brand it’s important to be consistent about it. And when you create your persona, your brand, use that same format every time across all the channels and that’s gonna boost your odds of showing up.
Also Meg touched on it, getting your content posted to channels that have high authority is really important because, you know, obviously like what we showed in the first screenshot. Rob’s LinkedIn profile will show up because LinkedIn has a high domain authority. So anywhere where you can post information about yourself that has good authority and is reputable, is a good place to use.
Hannah
Yeah. And all the social media sites, which are, you know, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, they all rank very well, have a high authority. So that’s another reason to build out some of those profiles in other places. So Thomas’ question is not really related to a Google problem. It may be something else. It looks great. He says, it sounds like he’s in the film industry, but he’s still not getting interviews for film industry jobs. That’s a whole nother problem!
Meg
Yeah, that’s a different issue. Could be not networking enough. It’s kind of not germane to this discussion in a way.
Hannah
Yeah. Yeah.
Hannah
So if all of that stuff is coming up on page one, Thomas, you’ve achieved a wonderful thing. The next thing is to go back and make sure that you’re using the right messaging keywords and that you’re selling yourself in the right way for the kinds of projects that you’re looking to do. I wanna give a shout out to Shelly .Shelly, you knew this from the very beginning. You see that and on Shelly’s page one search results. She’s getting her website, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and videos, all good. Right? So you’re there because you knew if you are intentional, you can make this stuff happen. It doesn’t take anything really special. And Nancy Lee has a suggestion for Sharon. What about using a nickname or your full name? If that is consistent, that could be an option sometimes if you do have a nickname that can work.
Meg
Well. Yeah. I was just gonna suggest that. And then here I can see your name, Nancy Lee. And it looks like, I mean, if you were to use no, let me say that differently. A good idea for you if you’re not doing it would be to always use Nancy Lee parentheses, Nancy Matles. Yeah. Always present yourself that way online. That differentiates you, that distinguishes you from other people with a similar name.
Hannah
Yeah. So Meg, will you tell people sort of the backstory of how CareerBrandVideos™ came to be?
Meg
I’d love to? Yeah. the three of us started discussing personal branding video a few years ago, and we each kind of looked around online to see what was out there. What kind of products were being offered. And we found basically three kinds of video, but found that they all have their own set of problems.
And everyone listening probably knows about these three kinds of video. There are the DIY video platforms, but you need some knowledge and experience working with video to make a professional looking one cuz you’re flying solo with those, and you’re often working with cheap looking templates. Besides, do you really know enough about video to know what should and shouldn’t be in it and how it should look? Because you’re on your own.
Another option is hiring a production company to do fully custom work from start to finish. But not surprisingly, those typically cost at least a thousand dollars or so for just one short video. And we felt that that was more than what most people could afford.
And the last option a lot of you may be familiar with are video resumes. They’ve been around for a while. But most people don’t perform well on camera. So it becomes a problem. And these videos
Hannah
And pick like, sorry, I just wanna throw out like tik tok videos was a big thing for a while there. That kind of thing. Yeah.
Meg
Yeah. Any of the ones where you self-make video like that, where you’re on camera, can be very problematic. And they’re often poorly made because the average person doesn’t know how to make a quality video. They’re not scripted well, the person comes off as uncomfortable, and it’s just overall not professional. And the quality isn’t that great. And these poorly made videos can really have a negative impact if you’re job interviewing or you know, you want to attract customers, as a business.
And with video resumes, since they’re typically a rehash of someone’s boring resume, the video’s gonna be boring. Another thing is that video resumes for people who are job hunting are very job searchy. You put one out there and anyone who sees it, including potentially your current employer, will know that you’re job hunting and that’s a big problem for most job seekers.
And some job seekers are not aware that there are EEOC concerns for employers. That’s the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Video resumes can open them to discrimination in the hiring process based on race, gender, gender identity, age, and even health and disability. And in fact, this is so much of a problem that many employers won’t even view a video resume when they get one. They’ll pass over that candidate and move on to another one.
So with all these problems, looking at other forms of video, we could see that another kind needed to be created. So we created CareerBrandVideos™ a few years ago. It’s a customized Done-For-You system using animation with kinetic typography. So these videos fill the gap we found for high-quality short form, personal branding videos where you’re not on camera, fidgeting and blundering through a boring script.
And since we do the work, you don’t need to know anything about video making. We felt that the three of us together had the perfect blend of subject matter expertise to develop this new product.
Hannah, as many of you know, is a leader in social media for jobs and career. Andre is a master video maker and has been creating brilliant, truly brilliant, videos for more than 15 years for small businesses, including his own. And I’ve been writing about personal branding and helping job seekers and others define their brand since Tom Peters coined the phrase about 25 years ago.
Hannah
Yeah. So when we developed CBV, which is a great story, I love how we were able to partner and collaborate and make this happen. We had, we envisioned there were about two or three different types of people who would benefit from this one. It is professionals, people who may or may not be looking for work, right? Somebody who was driven by their career. They knew they wanted to do something different. They were not afraid to take some risks and put themselves out there. So that was the professionals.
And then there were the career practitioners. We realized that career practitioners are working hand in hand with these job seekers and they would be wonderful to partner with, for us to partner with, to help us help the job seeker and offer a solution.
And the other audience was really the entrepreneurs that Andre’s been working with. Small businesses or an entrepreneur or even a small company that wants each of their people to have their own welcome video kind of thing. So there’s so many different applications for this. We wanted to make sure that we sort of developed a process and a system that would work for all three of those audiences. Right. So Andre, what about the benefit of CareerBrandVideos™ for job seekers and career professionals?
Andre
Well, you touched on one thing that always resonates with me. One of the biggest assets that any business owner has or any job seeker has is themselves! Their own assets, skills, their personality, and it’s, that is the one thing that everybody has that is unique in the world.
And what I find working with business owners, and I’m guilty of this myself, is that that’s the one thing most business owners and others are afraid to put out there to use. It’s the biggest asset they, that we have, but we’re afraid to use it, you know? So, video does that in a perfect way. Like it brings us all out and puts it into the world in a really engaging way.
Hannah
Maybe we should show people. I think we should show people a sample of what these videos look like.
Andre
Yeah. I know we can talk about it, but let’s take a look, we have a short clip here. I’ll let you cue it up and we’ll just watch for 30 seconds or so.
Hannah
Okay, great. Thanks.
Andre
Okay. So you can see how we convey those three important things that we talked about. We’ve got subject matter expertise, testimonials, or what others say about you, and a glimpse of personality And you can watch the full videos on our website. We just wanted to give you an idea of what we were talking about. And, you know, I really believe that aside from meeting someone in person, video is the best way to get people to know, like, and trust you. So they’ll hire you, whether you’re looking for a job or you’re looking for new clients.
Hannah
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So let’s talk about some of the ways that people can, will use CareerBrandVideos™. How are they gonna do this? What are they gonna do with it once they get their three videos?
Andre
Okay. I think the best way to think about these videos is to think of them as a career marketing asset. They can be used in many ways across all the social channels for years to come. So it’s not just one time thing. It’s something that gets created and you’re gonna use it as an asset to promote yourself for many years.
And the first step to get that instant online visibility is you start with your own YouTube channel. What this is, is the video component of your digital foundation or of your online presence, if you will. And if you don’t have a YouTube channel, it’s super simple to set up and we give you the exact steps to do that if you’re not sure. Then once you post the videos to your channel, that’s just the start.
There are dozens of other ways to use the same videos. You can use them in different spots to make them work for you. You can use them on your website, if you have one. If you’re part of a larger organization, you can use them on your company’s website. You know, for example, they might have a team member page or an about page. You can use them on any social media channel where your target audience is likely to be.
So in addition to YouTube, there’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and more, they’re all good spots. And just like Google, they all love video because they know how important video is to the searcher. And a couple other spots, you can use them in your LinkedIn personal profile page. There are several spots there to post. That kind of changes every now and then.
You can share them in your LinkedIn feed as an update. You can share them in LinkedIn groups where it’s appropriate. You can use them in LinkedIn articles. You can use them on your LinkedIn company page, and you can link to your YouTube videos in your email signature.
So the bottom line is that using CareerBrandVideos™, like this is a really effective way to demonstrate authority, your expertise and your personality in a way that text can’t compete with. So I think that covers most of the basic ways to use these videos, Hannah. But if I missed anything, feel free to add them.
Hannah
You covered, I mean, you covered it. And then, creativity like, okay, if there’s any other way you can possibly imagine using the video, go for it. Right?
Right. So Barbara has a really great question. And Barbara, I don’t think we have an answer for you, but do you have any stats on how effective this medium is in accelerating the job search? And it’s really hard to measure that because there are so many variables going on. We do know that the clients who are, who are using it in job search, really, it felt it was a confidence boost to them in many cases. They felt more positive and confident about what their messaging was out there. So how do you quantify that? Right? It’s very hard to quantify that.
Andre
Yeah. I will say this. I know two clients I work with got jobs within a couple of weeks after posting their videos. And I wouldn’t claim that that was the reason why, but it could be a factor, you know. And it is hard to quantify, but it certainly helps. There’s no doubt about it. That it helps.
Meg
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Hannah
And just from a visibility standpoint, right. What we know about LinkedIn and any of the social media channels is that when somebody sees a visual, they slow down and they stop and they try and digest it. Not everyone loves video, but they’ll at least look at the cover image and that might be enough to prompt them to click through.
So I think there are lots of things. Hey, Nancy Lee. Nancy, we’ll be in touch with you. Okay. <Laugh> definitely we’ll be in touch. We shared the link, and we would love everybody to do this too. Go check out our website because that does have a lot of great information. You can see all three of the videos in their full format. So the testimonial or the,
Meg
And many others too. Quite a few samples.
Hannah
So it’ll give you a better sense of what it’s all about and, and what it does. So I just, are there any other questions that I am not seeing, or any other points that Andre or Meg you wanna make before we close it down for the afternoon?
Meg
I don’t think so.
Andre
Just one quick point. If anybody else is interested in working with us, just put a, leave a comment for us, or send us, any one of us, a message and we’ll get in touch with you. We’ll send you details.
Hannah
Yeah. Awesome. I wanna thank you both for being here. Cause it was fun. Right? We covered a lot of, we covered a lot of information, in a very short amount of time.
Meg
We tried anyway. <Laugh>
Hannah
And I do wanna just mention that next Tuesday, Mark, Anthony Dyson will be my guest on conversations with colleagues two o’clock or noon next Tuesday, which is April 19th. We’re gonna be talking about job search trends. So I’ll be putting up the link to register for that shortly. Thank you, Meg. Thank you, Andre. Thank you everybody,
Meg
Thank you everyone for attending.
Andre
Yeah. Thank you. Take care.
Meg
Appreciate it.