Wedding Bouquet

Can I change my name after getting married when I work in SEO?

This is the question that had been plaguing me ever since my (now husband) proposed to me. What is girl to do when you’ve been publishing information online since 1994 under your existing name? And even worse – I work in online marketing! My name is my calling card.

Emotionally I’ve always wanted to change my name. With a last name like “Watier” which is beautiful when pronounced correctly, and yet horribly mispronounced 96% of the time, I was ready to get rid of it frankly. I don’t know how many times people thought I was a “waiter”. But from a search perspective, I was the only “Katherine Watier” in the US (minus a woman in Vegas who passed away awhile back).

I decided that I needed to explore all of my options, because I certainly didn’t want a name change to adversely affect my career no matter how much I might want the same last name as my husband.

After asking around, here were my options:

  1. My husband could change his name after marriage

Actually, that’s not feasible considering he’s a professional musician and has his own name/brand equity. For the record, he’s actually progressive enough to consider it, but it would have affected his professional career too so that was out.

2. I could keep my last name.

And this option could be fine, though might have posed difficulties explaining it to get military benefits or getting on base maybe, and might cause confusion when we had kids.

3. I could hyphenate my name.

I personally hate the hyphenation last name trend, and then I really decided that I was against this idea once I read this story of two hyphenated individuals who feel in love and had to create a completely new name for their new family. Kind of complicated.

4. I could take my husband’s last name, and keep “Katherine Watier Ong” for my online profiles.

This would allow of of my online profiles to continued to be optimized for “Katherine Watier”.

(I have to give credit to Janet Driscoll-Miller from Search Mojo who helped me sort through this idea. It was great to talk to another female search marketing professional about this issue. Janet actually hyphenated her last name because it made her more unique and helped her search ranking equity).

Ultimately I realized that Google has gotten creepy enough that I was not worried about people not finding me online

What really convinced me about this option was that Google+ profiles have a field for “maiden name” and with all of the increasing online personalization, I was pretty sure that Google is now smart enough to figure out my name change.

Adjusting to the New Name after Marriage

While I’m still getting used to ultimately being part of the “Ong” family, I’m really enjoying the fact that I have the same last name as my husband.

I have to admit that the name change process has been a bit overwhelming. I had no idea how many online profiles I had created over the years, and I’m sure it will take me quite a few months to switch them all over to reflect my new name.

It’s a great happy medium actually, I can keep a name online that will maintain my search equity and online identity, share a last name with my husband, and not have to worry about my kids having to loose their last name all together if they fall in love with another hyphenated individual.

Do you work in search and recently get married? Have you decided to keep or change your name? I’m curious as to how other search women have addressed this issue.


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