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Digital Persona Optimization

Digital Persona Optimization (DPO) is the process of managing and enhancing a digital persona’s digital footprints [1]. The optimization improves visibility, credibility, and search engine rankings for the persona.

Digital persona optimization uses many techniques from search engine optimization (SEO). Yet, it requires an approach that spans different websites and connects different "things".

Objectives

The objective of digital persona optimization is to trigger rich results [2] when a person's name is searched.

Specifically one wants to optimize for a knowledge panel [3] and knowledge cards [4] to appear in the search engine results page [5].

Benefits

Digital persona optimization provides all the benefits of personal branding online.

A well-optimized digital persona is visible in search results. It lists correct facts, many images, and related entities [^entity]. Related entities could be people, organizations, locations, events, articles, books, songs, or movies.

Search engines only connect the name to the rich results for notable people.

An optimized digital persona will show only related websites in the regular search results.

Process of optimizing a digital persona

  1. Make an assessment of the current state of optimization for the persona in question
  2. Collect all properties [6], including relations to other personas and entites
  3. Collect all existing profiles for the persona
  4. Craft content that describes the persona consistently
  5. Create a digital persona hub from the content and with links to all other profiles
  6. Distribute the content to all existing profiles
  7. Monitor the state of optimization

Digital Persona Optimization vs Search Engine Optimization

Digital Persona Optimization (DPO) and "regular" Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are similar and use common techniques.

DPO and SEO differ mainly in the search index they target.

Search engines index webpages for their words they contain to retrieve appropriate pages for a query. SEO optimizes for queries that can be satisfied by a single website.

Modern search engines also try to extract people, organizations, locations, etc. and create a knowledge graph with this data. This information is held in a separate index. This knowledge graph index is the target of digital persona optimization.

Challenges in Digital Persona Optimization

When optimizing a digital persona many challenges can arise.

For example, a persona can be mixed up with other personas. Especially the query of the Google Knowledge Graph API can provide results which mix information from different people.

Another challenge may be multiple personas competing for the same name.

Also, multiple targets can make the optimization process challenging. For example an author of multiple books may host a podcast and lead a corporation. The corporation may provide services and products with brand names as well.

  1. Digital footprints are the traces of your activities and presence online. ↩︎

  2. Rich Results are Google features of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ↩︎

  3. Knowledge panels are information boxes that appear on Google SERP when you search for entities (people, places, organizations, things) that are in the Knowledge Graph ↩︎

  4. Knowledge cards are a grid of small information cards across the top of the SERP. Knowledge cards are only shown for entities in the Google Knowledge Graph ↩︎

  5. The search engine results page, or SERP, is the page you see in response to a query into Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine. ↩︎

  6. A property is a specific attribute of an entity. A property describes an entity by its value. ↩︎