Optimizing for a person with two variations of their first name.

[kevgrand]

Hello, I am wondering if there is best practices or ideas when doing SEO work for someone's personal name and that name has two variations. So for instance, if someone's formal first name is "James" but they go by "Jim" or "Richard" and "Rick." I thought it might be easy as choosing one and going for it, but this person has a lot of info about them indexed and google and for the most part it is two completely different set of SERP's depending on which variation of the named is searched.

[Alex-Harford]

Nicknames are often put in quotation marks so you could just write James "Jim" Jones when introducing the person (title tag and h tag) and maybe the first occurrence of their name in the text. The most important thing is that and content reads naturally - if you wrote James "Jim" Jones whenever you referred to the person in a few paragraphs of text I doubt it would read naturally.

Depending on who they are, Google might even recognise them as the same person whatever version of the name is used.

[kevgrand]

Thanks Alex. Super helpful.