Personal Branding 2026 – Control Your Brand SERP (James ft Paul Truscott, Luke Bastin & Mike Lovatt)

James Dooley: Personal branding strategies in 2026.

Today I'm joined with Mike Lovatt, Paul Truscott and Luke Bastin, who are going to be talking about the importance of personal branding and what strategies you can use to improve your brand SERP. So Mike, let's kick things off. Why is it important to have a personal brand this year?

Mike Lovatt: I think it is getting harder and harder, with the rise of AI, to cut above generic advice.

If you are selling services, whether that is in the fitness niche or the SEO niche, you need something that makes you different. If you are a personal trainer and someone is thinking about hiring you, what makes you stand out? If they Google your name or search for you on social media and there is nothing there, or you have just posted generic advice, that is not going to do you any favours. In a world where everyone is turning to ChatGPT as their personal assistant, your personal brand is more important than ever. The barrier to entry is lower than ever before for anyone to start an online business. Loads of young people are doing it. Your reputation and the way you put yourself out there are more important than ever. If you just have a generic homepage, or no homepage at all, and there is no other information about you online, no testimonials, no reviews, no podcast appearances and no videos, then why would anyone want to hire you? There are people doing everything on every platform. You search for their name and they are everywhere. You cannot miss them.

James Dooley: Paul Truscott, why do you think personal branding is important?

Paul Truscott: All of what Mike just said, for sure.

It is so important now because access to information is everywhere and cheap. It is not difficult for people to find out who you are or who they perceive you to be based on your online content. If your personal brand is not visible, that is a problem. If you are the face of a business, the first thing someone is going to do is Google your name. If they Google your name and nothing appears, or worse, bad things appear and there is nothing positive there, then you are dead out of the gate. It is not simple to do because there is work involved, but there is nothing complicated about actually doing it. People just tend not to bother. Even the founders of big companies sometimes have no personal brand presence, which I find incredible. It does not make sense to me why they would not do it, or maybe it just does not occur to them. It is really important now, more than ever.

James Dooley: What about you, Luke?

Luke Bastin: I would say a couple of things.

Brand protection is really key. We all know there are hundreds of Web 2.0 websites that you can sign up to for free with a handle. You can choose any handle that fits within the character limits. If you are not controlling the narrative around who you are and your personal brand, somebody else can. That can be deliberate by a bad actor, or it can happen by accident. I have seen examples of people who started building their personal brand and then realised there was someone with the same name who had really unfavourable connections. Someone with the same name might have gone to jail for doing something awful. When someone types in your name to find out who you are, if you do not control that narrative, it can create problems. Even if they realise it is not the person they were looking for, it can still subconsciously plant a seed. It lengthens the sales cycle, and you probably lose phone calls, enquiries and connections because of that. The other thing I would say is that I have started getting asked by clients for advice on products over the last three months. These are people who have a personal brand and are looking to sell a product associated with that personal brand. I did not realise until the last few months how high the percentage is of business that gets done based on personal recommendation. Even at enterprise level, it often comes down to someone saying, “I met someone at a conference, they seemed really legitimate, they have this SaaS product, do you think it would be any good?” That personal recommendation drives business. You can really drive your own life around a personal brand. Those are the two big things I have learned over the last three to four months.

James Dooley: For me, I have gone all in on personal branding.

The biggest thing that has not been touched on yet is the multiplier. If you are ever looking to sell a business, buyers are not just looking at the asset. They are also looking at the person selling it. If they do not know who you are, and they do not know enough about you, there can be downsides. They may question whether the person is trusted, or whether the asset is being propped up by a PBN network, shady links, shady redirects or canonical issues. Because they do not know who you are, they may assume things could be happening, and that means you might not get the multiplier you expected. I have realised that first-hand, and that is what kickstarted me into doing personal branding. From there, I started to realise that whether you call it E-E-A-T signals or something else, the minute I attach my personal brand to a business, it always seems to perform better. Whether that is correlation or causation, or whether E-E-A-T is a thing or not, it always seems to perform better. I am promoting it as well, so it could be the traffic that comes through it. Another one is staff. The amount of people who reach out to me saying, “James, I love your messaging, I love the service you provide, I want to work for you,” has increased. They are willing to work at a good rate, and I am getting A-players coming through and applying. The last one for me is investment opportunities. People who would not have known who I was come to me saying, “James, I believe you have invested in this, this and this. Would you be interested in investing in that?” I can always say no to the staff. I can always say no to the investment. But I want the opportunities that personal branding brings. I think those are the biggest parts. As you mentioned, it is also controlling the message. You are controlling your own narrative, not somebody else. The big term for me is that in the AI era, it is a digital moat. It is the only digital moat you have around who you are, what you do and why you are brilliant. Let’s move on to the strategies. Mike, you have been doing a lot of this now. You have been getting your name out there. You have been jumping on podcasts, which is another great way. You have been doing videos for your business brand and personal brand. What strategies do you think are working well that people should be using to build a personal brand?

Mike Lovatt: I think video has always been a good one.

You can churn out blog posts, but nobody has time to read them. Everyone has a low attention span. One thing I have noticed is that I used to think, “Why would I spend hours teaching something for free on YouTube when nobody will hire me to do that because I have just given them the exact blueprint?” But people watch the video and think, “You know what you are talking about. I will hire you now because I am too busy.” I used to think, “Why would you share your methods of doing SEO? You are just going to help your competition.” But they are busy doing something else anyway. It is the same with a personal trainer. You could think that if they share every gym movement on Instagram and show how to do it, nobody will ever hire them. But people look at that and think, “They know what they are doing. They look confident in the gym.” Then they hire them. As you said with investment opportunities, someone might be really good at making software but have no idea how to do SEO. They might see someone who knows SEO and offer them 50% of the business to do the SEO. That software could later sell for millions. If you had been a nobody and never made a single video, nobody would know who you are and those opportunities would not come to you.

James Dooley: For sure.

What about yourself, Paul? Is there anything you are working on, or anything you have seen others doing to build a personal brand that seems to work well?

Paul Truscott: I can only speak from my own experience and what I am doing to develop my personal brand at the moment.

The key for me is everything Mike said, but multimodal. Although he is right that people do not always want to read blogs, I would still produce them because I like to see everything corroborating one another. What is really critical from Google’s perspective is that you are trying to get a knowledge panel. When someone Googles your name, like with you James, they see your picture come up on the right-hand side of the screen. That is the ultimate because it tells people subliminally that there is trust there. Even if someone does not know anything about knowledge panels or why that appears, they know Google must trust you enough to show your picture and information. Schema is the key to pulling all of that together. It also helps show where you sit within your brand. If you have a brand that lives outside of your personal brand, you want to tie those two things together. In your case, James, you have more than one brand, so you want to tie yourself to those brands. The best way of doing that is through schema so Google can understand how all those things relate to one another. It shows how your personal brand relates to your businesses, awards and credentials. One thing I found recently, which I did not even know existed until recently, was Credly. That has been a revelation to me. Credly is the standard for accreditations. A lot of universities and academic institutions use Credly so you can get an encrypted badge that tells search engines you genuinely have that qualification. It is an absolute point of truth because it cannot be faked. Mike touched on the entry barrier being low now, and that is true. But the entry bar to the second level of the game, which is actually being someone online, is high. That is why it is so important. If you can get over that bar, get yourself a knowledge panel and become known online as a personal brand, you completely differentiate yourself. Schema is the glue that binds all of that together. If people do not understand anything about schema, they need to learn a bit about it because there are not really any tools that will do all of this for you. That is kind of good because you do not want everybody being able to do it, but you do need to learn about schema.

James Dooley: What about you, Luke?

Luke Bastin: The biggest thing on personal branding was a lesson I picked up from some designers when I was working in-house in SEO about seven or eight years ago.

There is a design concept called bite, snack, meal. In terms of developing your personal brand, you need to look at three different types of messaging within the overall personal branding funnel. You have bite content, which is really short-form and high-level. It hits the main points of who you are, what you do, who you are looking to help and your purpose. Then you have snack content, which is a slightly more amplified version. What we are doing here would probably be snack content. Then meal content would be a much fuller sales page, a personal website, or even an LMS or learning management system. Those three different tiers allow people to interact with you and find out about you at the level they want and at the time they want. I find that really helpful.

James Dooley: Back to you, Mike, regarding strategies.

Are there any platforms you are using? It could be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts, Instagram or Pinterest. Which platforms do you personally feel help the most with personal branding online? Or is it just about getting as many guest posts as possible?

Mike Lovatt: I feel like when you go after guest posts, it can often take a lot of outreach and effort.

Unless you already know someone and can ask to do a guest post, or you build relationships through LinkedIn or Twitter, it can be difficult. Being able to publish on your own channels is usually the best way. That could be podcasts, YouTube or Shorts. I have never been big on Instagram myself because I always thought, from an SEO or online business perspective, it was not that useful. But when I looked into it, I realised there are people growing massively in SEO and digital marketing on TikTok and Instagram through short-form video. It is surprising how much it works. Too many people overthink things and try to make everything studio quality. They see Joe Rogan doing a podcast and think theirs has to look the same. But it can be raw. It can be a conversation. Some of the best YouTube videos I have watched in SEO have literally been recordings of Zoom meetings where people are just bouncing ideas around. That can be much better than an overly polished, scripted video. Being persistent on social media and regularly releasing content is often the biggest thing. I read the other day that around 90% of YouTube channels post one video and then stop because they do not get the views they want. The people who keep going can still win. Luke mentioned in an earlier episode that in SEO or online business, your video might only get a few views, but one of those viewers could turn into a monthly contract worth £5,000. You might think, “That video only had 20 views,” but the right person might see it, realise you know what you are talking about and hire you. Sometimes it is just about being persistent and consistently maintaining your social and online presence. It is not always about doing it in the perfect format or on the perfect platform. It is about getting out there.

James Dooley: What about yourself, Paul? Are you going all in on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter or something else?

Paul Truscott: I think all of it, to be honest.

We are in such a multimodal world now, and people consume content from so many different sources, so it is important to be everywhere if it makes sense. There may be certain platforms where there is a congruence issue depending on what you do. Maybe a lawyer would not be right on TikTok, or maybe they would. I do not know. If you do not feel there is congruence between what you do and the platform, there might be a credibility gap, so it may make sense to avoid that. Otherwise, from an exposure perspective, be everywhere. Do not forget to get as many seed platforms as possible. Sites like Crunchbase are useful, and if you are in the tech space, there are hundreds of sites where you can create a useful profile. Your YouTube channel and all your social profiles matter. If you are notable enough, a Wikidata page is useful because that will get you noticed by Google. I think it is about straddling two things. One is getting noticed by viewers and the public. The other is making sure the search engine sees you as credible. Awards are also important. If you have awards and credentials, make sure they are visible. I mentioned Credly before, but there are other ways. If you have been to a university, cite that university site. Mention what you did there. Cite associations with people too. You can do this in schema. If you know famous people, cite them within your schema, put it on your pages and use pictures of you with them. All of that is important, so do it in as many places as possible, as long as it makes sense.

James Dooley: What about you, Luke?

Luke Bastin: I tend to look at the platforms in two different ways, similar to what Paul was saying.

You have the platforms where your prospects hang out online. You want to be seen there. That can vary a lot from niche to niche, depending on what you are trying to do. I think of those as revenue-generating platforms. Then you have other platforms where you are not necessarily looking to reach people who may do business with you, but they are good for reinforcing the first type. They could be part of a syndication network. We have not touched on RSS today, but that is a great way to get more eyeballs and more traffic to the same content you already have. I would look at it by analogy as on-page and off-page. Your on-page platforms are where you want people to actually see you and get in touch. Your off-page platforms are more about amplifying your on-page platforms.

James Dooley: For sure.

For me, getting the entity hub right is key. Having that homepage for your name, such as jamesdooley.com, is important because it glues everything together with your schema. I also like the idea of having an email such as [email protected] . It looks professional when you are sending things out. I could not send something from Gmail or Yahoo if I were sending a big slide deck for an investment. It has to be done professionally. It comes back to who I am, what I do and how everything is connected. Video is also key because it is raw and it shows you as a person. People can start to understand more about you. Sharing that through podcasting circuits is also important. I think we all agree on the importance of personal branding. It also forms part of online reputation management. You can control the message so that if someone writes something negative about you, you can suppress that to page two or page three. On page one, you want positive reviews, awards and strong brand assets. From an online reputation management standpoint, personal branding is key. Guys, it has been an absolute pleasure, and I will see you all again.