My personal stake in SEO
I work in search engine optimization, but my interest in SEO is predicated on lifelong, personal experience
I have a very common name. How common?
Test yours out, and compare. My name is Kevin Cook. ‘Kevin’ is statistically the 34th-most popular first name in the country. Home Alone introduced the world to Kevin McAllister in 1990, which is both a symptom and a cause, probably. ‘Cook’ is the 60th-most popular surname. There are (allegedly) 1,209 individuals in the United States who share both my first and last name.
Seems low. For comparison, I ran the first names and last names of my ex girlfriends (why that was my first thought, I can’t say): between the four of them (all lovely people), there are fewer than 575 individuals in the country sharing their first and last names combined.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are about 47,531 John Smiths in the United States. So it could be worse.
Until the digital era blossomed, I had only anecdotal evidence of the commonality of my name. To wit, a Kevin Cook graduated a year ahead of me at The Woodlands High School. My solution at the time (brag) was to earn a perfect score on the SAT, so my name was the one embossed in bronze in the entry hallway, but there are only so many SATs and bronze plaques in the world, and that’s not really a solution to the problem in a global sense.
This is 100% true — in July of 2016, the Houston Chronicle/Hearst acquired the group I worked for at the time, Houston Community Newspapers, making me a Chronicle community sports editor. I don’t Google my own name (only because there are so many useless results, not because I’m not vain), so I’m often the last to find these things out, and I believe it was a reader who pointed out to me that — not three years prior — the newspaper had printed a story about another Kevin Cook: Kevin Jay Cook (of Shenandoah, just next to where I graduated high school in The Woodlands) was arrested in the act of downloading child pornography. Montgomery County officials severed his internet connection as they served the warrant, and he had somewhere between 15 and 25,000 illicit files in his possession.
Definitely not company I want to keep or be associated with. However, searching ‘Chronicle’ and ‘Kevin Cook’ would often as not turn up this story as a search result. Understandably, that crime story was salacious and widely shared and commented on, but it was not the story I wanted coming up when people searched for me.
When I signed on as the Content Strategist for a marketing firm in Houston in 2014, I learned the nuances of search engine optimization. I was asked to do things I agreed with (working for Kim Ogg’s first campaign as Harris County District Attorney, a title she now holds), things I disagreed with (flooding Google’s search results with in-house-written content to push damaging items off the first page for a slumlord who had hired the company; driving more traffic to a plastic surgeon’s website through keyword research, which eventually made clear to me that he was preying on insecure, desperate people and profiting from it) and as I started to understand how thing get found online, I grappled with being Kevin Cook online.
The shift to the Chronicle, and literally working for a paper that had covered a sex criminal with the same name — not to mention employing two other Kevin Cooks at various points — brought the issue into focus.
Gradually, through branding (writing under the name ‘K. Michael Cook’ and using tags like @kmichaelcook on Twitter and other platforms) and SEO, I reached a place where, if you were looking for me specifically, you could find me.
That’s similar to the idea of targeting long-tail keywords. I may never rank for Kevin (think Kevin Durant, Kevin Bacon, all the misanthropic, antisocial Kevins in sitcoms), but I can rank for ‘kmichaelcook’ and — to a lesser extent — Kevin M. Cook.
If you own a small business that sells widgets, you will almost certainly have an easier time ranking for ‘[location] widgets’ or ‘bespoke, organic widgets’ or some other variation. Start small (i.e. long-tail), and dominate a particular, low-traffic, high-impact keyword, and then build from that.
Over time, I’ve noticed (even when searching incognito or on another person’s Google account) that I rank much more strongly for searches of Kevin Cook than I used to, indicating I’m doing at least an okay job of SEO. I’ll probably never rank higher than Kevin Durant for ‘Kevin’ (maybe; SEOs have a longer shelf-life than NBA athletes, but I’m not holding out hope for that, if I’m honest), but through careful curation of my content, consistent production and growth in my various content channels and engagement across social media and networking platforms, I’m much more visible today than I was graduating high school or even 5–10 years ago.
So when I founded my own Local SEO company here in Houston in October, I had the opportunity to do what I never could with my own name: choose. And in choosing, optimize.
search/local HTX is weird-looking, especially on a list. It’s meant to be. It also sums up exactly what it is we do. We help optimize businesses for local search, and we do it in Houston, TX.
Search engine optimization can be a lot of things — gaming the system, tricks and tips, cheats and hacks, etc. — but at its root, SEO is about providing users the best-possible experience and taking advantage of all the levers and mechanisms that allow you to be more prominent without obscuring or misrepresenting your self, business or purpose.
I’m not saying it’s the perfect name — I don’t know that there is such a thing. And I do have to fight with platforms and publications and so forth every so often about not capitalizing the first letter, making ‘search/local’ all one word, capitalizing HTX at the end, etc.
But users who do manage to find their way to my email inbox or Google My Business messages tend to know exactly what I’m up to, and come to the table with a good, general sense of how I can help them, and how what I do applies to what they do.
The point is that I come to this from the perspective of someone who — without a personal investment in SEO — would likely drown among the similar results. That’s the prospect most of my clients are facing, in some form or fashion, when they come to me. And one reason I’m able to help them is because, since I was knee high to a grasshopper, I’ve been fighting my way through oceans of other Kevin Cooks.
How do you stand out? I’d be curious to hear stories from other SEOs or business owners about how they’ve branded, adapted or leveraged their legal names or business names for search engine optimization. Leave a response below, and I’ll be sure to check it out!
