You are about to meet someone important: an investor, a client, a hiring committee, a journalist. Before the meeting, they will search your name. Most of them will not scroll past the first page. Whatever they see there becomes their first impression of you, and for most professionals that first page is a random mix of an outdated profile, a namesake in another state, a people-search directory and, if they are unlucky, an old article they would rather forget.
You can change that page. Learning how to rank for your name on Google is one of the most practical personal brand projects you can take on, because the search is narrow, the competition is limited, and the results stay in place for years once you build them. This playbook walks through it in seven steps.
Step 1: Run the Ten Blue Links Inventory
Start with an honest audit. Open a private browser window (so your own search history does not skew results), search your full name in quotes and without, and record the top ten results in a spreadsheet. I call this the Ten Blue Links Inventory, a nod to the classic page of ten organic results, even though modern results pages also include images, videos, AI summaries and “People also ask” boxes. Record those too.
Classify every result into one of five types. Owned results are pages you control: your personal site, your blog, your company bio. Profile results are accounts on other platforms you can edit: LinkedIn, X, Crunchbase, GitHub, YouTube, speaker sites. Earned results are pages about you that others wrote: press articles, podcast episodes, interviews, award pages. Not you results are about someone else with your name. Unwanted results are pages about you that you would rather not lead with, like old content, people-search sites or negative coverage.
Count each type. A healthy first page for a founder or executive often has two or three owned results, three or four profiles, two or three earned results, and nothing unwanted in the top five. Your gap between today’s count and that target is your work plan.
Repeat the inventory for your name plus your company and your name plus your title. These are the searches most likely to come from people who already know something about you.
Step 2: Decide the exact name you want to rank for
This step sounds trivial and causes more trouble than any other. Are you “Katherine Mendoza,” “Kate Mendoza” or “Katherine R. Mendoza”? Your LinkedIn says one thing, your company site another, your conference bios a third. Search engines and AI tools treat these as related but separate signals, and you dilute your own strength.
Pick the version people use when they search for you, and make it the canonical name on every page you control. If your name is common or shared with someone famous, a middle initial is a cheap way to stand apart. (If you share a name with a celebrity, our guide to ranking when you share a famous name goes deeper on that problem.)
Write your choice down and audit every place it appears. The list is longer than most people expect: LinkedIn name and headline, company team page, email display name, Calendly or scheduling page, podcast guest bios, conference speaker pages, author bylines, Crunchbase, GitHub, your X or Bluesky display name, and any board or advisor pages. Fix them in one sitting. A single afternoon of cleanup often moves results more than a month of new content, because you are combining signals that were already there but split across three versions of you.
Step 3: Build a personal site that ranks first
Your personal site is the single most important result to build, because it is the only one where you control every word, every link and the order in which visitors see things. It is also the page most likely to rank first for your name, once Google trusts it.
Register a domain with your name if you can get it. If yourname.com is taken, try a different extension, add your middle initial, or add a short word that describes what you do. A simple site is enough. One home page with a clear headshot, a short bio, your current role and company, a few highlights, links to your profiles and a way to contact you will rank well for an uncommon name.
Get the technical basics right. Put your full name in the page title tag and the main heading. Write a bio that states your name, role, company and location in the first sentence. Add Person structured data (schema.org markup) with your name, job title, employer, image and a sameAs list of your profile URLs. Submit the site to Google Search Console and request indexing. Link to it from your LinkedIn, your company bio, your X profile and your email signature, so Google finds it quickly and sees that other sites point to it.
If you want the site to keep earning results over time, add a simple writing section. A few useful articles on your area of expertise give the site more pages for Google to index and more reasons for others to link to it.
Step 4: Claim and strengthen your profiles
Profiles are the fastest results to win, because the platforms already have strong authority with Google. A complete LinkedIn profile with your canonical name will often rank in the top three for your name within days of updating it.
Prioritize the platforms that make sense for your role. For most executives that means LinkedIn, X or Bluesky, Crunchbase (for founders and investors), a company bio page, a speaker profile on an events site, and a YouTube channel if you speak or teach. Developers add GitHub. Authors add Amazon author pages and Goodreads. Each profile should use the same name, the same headshot, the same short bio and a link back to your personal site.
Do not open accounts you will never use. An empty profile with no posts can rank and look worse than nothing. Five strong profiles beat fifteen thin ones.
Step 5: Earn coverage that names you
Earned results carry the most trust, both with Google and with the people searching for you. A podcast interview, an article in a trade publication, a quote in a news story, a byline you wrote for an industry site: each one is a page about you that you did not write, which makes it more convincing.
Aim for a steady pace rather than a burst. One piece of earned coverage a month for six months gives you a page one full of credible results and a growing list of sources for AI assistants to cite when someone asks about you. Make sure each piece includes your full canonical name and, ideally, your title and company, and link to the best ones from your personal site’s press section.
Where does that coverage come from? For most founders and executives, podcasts are the easiest start, because hosts need a steady supply of guests and every episode page lists the guest’s name and title. Trade publications in your industry come next, through contributed articles or expert quotes. Source-request platforms such as Qwoted, Featured and Source of Sources connect reporters with experts, and a few well-chosen responses a month add up. Local business journals cover executives in their region and rank well for name plus city. Conference talks produce speaker pages and sometimes video, both of which rank. Pick two channels and do them consistently rather than trying all five at once.
Step 6: Push down what you do not want
If the inventory turned up unwanted results, do not try to delete the internet. Start with what you can control. Ask people-search sites to remove your listing through their opt-out pages. Use Google’s Results about you tool to request removal of results that show your phone number, home address or email. Update or remove old content on your own accounts.
For the rest, the practical answer is displacement. Each new owned, profile and earned result you add competes for the same ten spots. An old negative article that ranks fourth today can drop to page two once you have seven strong results above it. Do not forget image results. Upload a clear, current headshot to your site with your name in the file name and alt text, and use the same photo across profiles, so the images row on your results page shows you rather than a namesake or an old photo. This takes months, not days, and it works best when the new results are good enough that people click them, which tells Google they are what searchers want.
Step 7: Check the AI answers too
More people now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews about a person instead of scanning blue links. These systems build their answers from the same pages you have been working on, so the earlier steps help here too. But you should check them directly.
Once a month, ask two or three assistants a neutral question, such as “Who is [your name], [your title] at [your company]?” Note whether the answer is accurate, which sources it cites, and whether it confuses you with someone else. If an answer is wrong, find the page it relied on and fix it, or add stronger pages that state the correct facts. Clear, consistent pages on your own site and profiles are the best way to shape what these systems say.
Keep it current
Ranking for your name is not a one-time project. Every job change, new company, book, talk or move to a new city creates a gap between what the first page says and what is true. Update your personal site and profiles the same week anything changes, and rerun the Ten Blue Links Inventory every quarter.
To sum up: audit your first page with the Ten Blue Links Inventory, pick one canonical name, build a personal site that states who you are, strengthen five profiles, earn steady coverage, push down what you do not want, and check the AI answers monthly. That is how to rank for your name on Google and keep the first page working for you.