BrandYourself, a startup offering a cheap and easy approach to managing your Google results, has added a new feature to answer one of those burning questions: Who are the people Googling me?
To be clear, it’s not actually plugging in to Google and sending you an alert every single time someone enters your name. Instead, it’s revealing data about who’s visiting your BrandYourself profile page in a way that’s probably more meaningful and comprehensible to your average consumer than, say, Google Analytics. So every time someone visits your profile, BrandYourself can tell you (either via your dashboard or an email alert) what city they’re in, how they found you, and what company they work for. Co-founder and CEO Patrick Ambron compares the feature to the way LinkedIn and other social sites can alert you about other members who have viewed your profile, “except applied to the entire web.”
Here’s an example Ambron provided about why this might be useful:
Let’s say an advertising student Jim is interviewing at agencies [in] NYC. We can alert Jim and let him know that somebody from Ogilvly just Googled “Jim Armstrong, portfolio” and found his profile. This information is really useful for Jim because it shows him these employers are Googling him and finding him on Twitter, so it’s important he make sure his BrandYourself profile is up to date and he’s using BrandYourself to make sure his first page if filled with positive results, and nothing negative or irrelevant.
By the way, you don’t have to have a BrandYourself profile page to use the service, but it’s highly encouraged, and as you can tell in Ambron’s example, it’s something the new feature is encouraging too.
BrandYourself relaunched a couple of months ago, paring away other features and focusing exclusively on the DIY SEO angle. It now has 25,000 registered users and nearly 1,000 paying ones.