Today’s episode touches upon the topic of Brand Building. We’ll talk about Brand SERPs. SERP stands for search engine results page, which is the page with all the search results listed you see when you’ve entered a search term in a search engine like Google. Once you have a personal brand, people will start searching your name. At this point your Brand SERP becomes phenomenally important. We’ll talk about how you can influence and optimize your Brand SERP.
You’ll learn how to design and control the search results for your brand name and your own name. Your Brand Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is like your business card. It’s important to be mindful of and intentional about what people who search for you see and are presented.
A Preview of the Topic About Brand SERPs and How to Optimise Them
[00:00:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): SERP is an acronym for search engine results page. So, a Brand SERP is what Google or Bing, but probably Google for most people, shows to your audience when they search your exact match brand name. You’ve got to remember who’s searching your brand name. It’s your A-list audience. It’s the people who are doing business with you or about to do business with you. So, it’s your prospects, it’s your clients, it’s journalists, it’s investors, it’s potential hires. So, it’s your A-list audience that you really, really want to convince.
[00:00:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): What your Brand SERP needs to be is accurate, positive, and convincing. I like to say it’s your business card. Google is your new business card. That result is your new business card. I’d like to emphasize that Brand SERPs, optimising Brand SERPs doesn’t require SEO skills. What we are doing is SEO, but it’s very simple SEO. And it’s SEO in a controlled environment, so it’s a really easy way to get to grips with all these things.
[00:00:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You start off with, obviously, your site should be ranking number one for your brand name. If you’re ranking number one, that result is what’s front and centre to your audience. And if you look through pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, you’ll see what Google thinks is important in terms of the content that’s online about your brand. And if there are bad reviews ranking, it isn’t that Google is stupid. It’s that it thinks they’re relevant and valuable to your audience. So, you need to start thinking about why it’s ranking that site and also why that site has got bad reviews about you. That’s another problem.
[00:01:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you can actually look through the multiple pages in your Brand SERP and understand what your digital ecosystem looks like, and that’s incredibly important. You’ve got business card, content, digital ecosystem, getting deeper and deeper into your actual online digital business, deeper and deeper into how much you can actually learn from them, great opportunity there. If you don’t like your Facebook platform, you don’t enjoy Facebook, which is my case, work harder on Twitter. Get Twitter to push up there and Facebook will probably disappear.
[00:02:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you can actually start to think about how you’re managing it by saying, I will work more on this aspect that’s appearing on page two because I think that aspect is more important to my business. And you will naturally, and this is the beauty of it, by doing that, you will naturally build a great content and a great digital strategy overall. What matters on Brand SERP is content, relevancy, and value to your audience. So you can really focus on the content, on the human aspect of it, what you are bringing to your audience, and what your audience expects from you.
[00:02:46] Narrator: This is the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. Get ready for the digital marketing strategies and tactics that attract great customer relationships to your business. Here is your host, Monique Idemudia.
Introducing Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) and Defining What Is a Brand SERP
[00:03:08] Monique Idemudia: Hi and welcome, everybody, to a new episode of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Monique, and you’re listening to episode number 30. And today’s episode is going to be all about Brand SERP, what appears when someone googles your name. And this topic is closely related to the topic of branding and personal branding in particular. And we’ll talk about your Brand SERP.
[00:03:35] Monique Idemudia: SERP stands for search engine result page, and it’s basically the page that appears when you search for something that lists all of the search results and search engines like Google, for example. Once you build a brand for yourself, people will start searching for your name. And at this point, your Brand SERP becomes just phenomenally important. And you’ll learn in this episode how you can strategically influence and optimise your Brand SERPs.
[00:04:06] Monique Idemudia: I am so excited to introduce you to my special guest for this episode. He’s an author, speaker, and consultant on all things digital marketing, and he’s a specialist in this subject of Brand SERPs, which is what appears when someone googles your name. And he teaches Brand SERP optimisation to his students at Kalicube.Pro. Welcome, Jason Barnard. How are you doing, Jason? I’m so excited to have you on this show today.
[00:04:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m fine. Thank you very much. Lovely to be here.
[00:04:39] Monique Idemudia: Thank you so much. I’m excited to have you. So, we’re going to talk about Brand SERPs today. First of all, let’s start off with explaining what a SERP is for the people who don’t know.
[00:04:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): A SERP is an acronym for search engine results page. It’s what Google shows you when you search on Google or Bing, if you’re using the Microsoft engine. So a Brand SERP is what Google or Bing, but probably Google for most people, shows to your audience when they search your exact match brand name.
[00:05:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, for example, my company’s called Kalicube. It’s what appears when somebody searches Kalicube or for me personally, what appears when somebody searches Jason Barnard. And the point that I’m making today overall is it’s phenomenally important, phenomenally insightful. And you should be looking at that if you’re not doing so already.
The Importance of Being Aware of What Your Brand SERP Looks Like
[00:05:28] Monique Idemudia: Yes. So, I always talk about brand building and how it’s important to build a brand, also as a small business. Once you get some traction with your brand, people will start searching for your name and then they’ll look at your Brand SERP, the search engine results page for your brand name. So, why is it so important to be aware of that?
[00:05:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, you’ve got to remember who’s searching your brand name. It’s your A-list audience. It’s the people who are doing business with you or about to do business with you. So, it’s your prospects, it’s your clients, it’s journalists, it’s investors, it’s potential hires. If you’re in a competitive industry, your potential hires are going to look you up and they’re going to make a decision partially based on what they see there. I like to say it’s your business card. Google is your new business card. That result is your new business card. So, it’s your A-list audience that you really, really want to convince.
[00:06:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): What your Brand SERP needs to be is accurate, positive, and convincing. If you look at my name, Jason Barnard, you’ll see that it’s accurate, positive, and convincing. It shows what I want it to show. I don’t leave it to Google to decide. I convince Google that what I want it to show is what it should be showing to my audience.
[00:06:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then we come another step forward is people think, well, there’s not very many people searching my brand name. That audience is relatively small. The percentage of your traffic coming from Google that is just your brand name can vary from 5% to 95%. It’s a vast variation. But even if it’s a small percentage, it’s still the most important people to your business.
[00:07:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I think a lot of businesses overlook the fact that their clients or existing clients will navigate to their website by searching their brand name on Google potentially multiple times per day. So what they see every time they go through that passage way into your site, it’s like your homepage. So, it’s incredibly important from that point of view to start with. And I’ve got two other reasons it’s important, but we’ll come to that.
[00:07:30] Monique Idemudia: Yes. You made a great point there already. People who already know you search for you on Google. So it’s a warm audience. And your Brand SERP was like an extension of your homepage. And you want to be very intentional about it and influence and optimise it so you can control what’s showing up there.
[00:07:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And you said exactly the important word. It’s control. It needs to be positive, accurate, and convincing obviously, but how can you make it that way? It’s by controlling it. And you’d be surprised at how much you can control and probably already do control.
How Do You Control and Optimise Your Brand SERP?
[00:08:04] Monique Idemudia: That’s super interesting. So, let’s get to your two other tips. How do you control it and optimise your Brand SERP?
[00:08:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You start off with, obviously, your site should be ranking number one for your brand name. There are exceptions with an ambiguous brand name. That can be problematic. For personal names, obviously a lot of us share the same name, and that can be problematic too. But generally speaking, you should be ranking number one. If you’re ranking number one, that result is what’s front and centre to your audience.
[00:08:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So you need to make sure that that blue link and the description underneath describe your company, who you are and what you do and why you are interesting, why you are a good solution for your audience, in a really short, sharp format right at the top, front and centre. And if you search your own brand name, you’ll probably see that it doesn’t do that. Most brands I work with, first thing they do is go, oh, yes, I better change the blue link in the description.
[00:09:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then right underneath that, you should have what we call Rich Sitelinks. And it’s the multiple links to different parts of your site. And surprisingly, 50% of brands do not have those on their Brand SERP, on the search engine results page for a search on their brand. And I think that figure is way too low. Most brands should be able to get them, because why does Google put those sitelinks? It puts them so that your audience, your clients, and your prospects can navigate directly to the part of the site they’re looking for without going through the homepage, because that’s a good user experience. So you need to help Google to make that user experience better.
People Coming From Google Are Not Your Users; They Are Google’s Users and They Trust What Google Shows Them
[00:09:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And remember that the people coming from Google are not your users. They’re Google’s users that Google is sending to you. They might actually be your user and Google’s users. But at the point they’re on Google, they are Google’s users and they’re using Google to get to you. And they trust Google. That’s another important point. They trust what Google shows them. So if Google shows something inaccurate or negative, it sticks in people’s minds. If you think of a client who keeps saying this inaccurate piece of information or negative piece of information or just something that isn’t convincing, how long is it going to take before they think, actually, this company maybe isn’t as good as I thought it was, and they jump ship.
[00:10:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you have that initial control right at the top, which is phenomenally important, vastly, vastly underrated, and underworked. And below that, you’re going to have things like your social channels. You can optimise those. You can optimise what appears for those. You can also, if you don’t have video boxes, you could expect to see video boxes, where it shows some videos about your company or produced by your company. If you have them, they should be great videos. And if you don’t have those video boxes, there’s no reason, if there are videos about you online, that you shouldn’t trigger them.
[00:10:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the reason that Google will show the video boxes or the image boxes or the sitelinks or the social channels is because it thinks that that content is useful and valuable to your audience. So all you have to do is convince Google that those videos, those images, those social channels are relevant and valuable to your audience.
[00:11:14] Monique Idemudia: Absolutely. You’ve made a couple of great points there. So first of all, you want to optimise your title text and you made the descriptions and stand out as the very first search result for your Brand SERP. And you also want to outrank your social media accounts, which can be like a challenge because they’re very strong and oftentimes, LinkedIn or Twitter, Facebook, or whatever, they would actually appear on top before your website. And you want your website to be first.
How Do You Trigger Rich Sitelinks and Video Boxes on Your Brand SERP?
[00:11:41] Monique Idemudia: And then you can optimise that with a Schema Markup. You can even have direct links in your search result. What you can also do is have a search box within that search result for your website as well. So make the results as rich as you possibly can and leverage those rich snippets as well. In a podcast, it’s also a great example for something that can pop up alongside the images and videos for your Brand SERP. So, you’ve talked about triggering that. How do you trigger that?
[00:12:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. You’ve done a really nice succinct summary of what I actually just said. And you’ve expanded it onto some other really interesting points, like Schema Markup and some of the more technical things. I’d like to emphasise that Brand SERPs, optimising Brand SERPs doesn’t require SEO skills. What we are doing is SEO, but it’s very simple SEO. And it’s SEO in a controlled environment, so it’s a really easy way to get to grips with all these things, like Schema Markup, meta titles, meta descriptions, and all the optimisations that we can do for images and for videos and so on and so forth.
[00:12:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the idea of triggering, for example, my company, Kalicube, if you search the Kalicube brand name, you’ll see we’ve got those Rich Sitelinks. We didn’t have them a year ago. I just made sure I used Schema Markup, and I made sure that each section of my site was very clearly defined so that Google could understand where it might usefully be able to send my users, my audience.
Triggering Video Boxes Is Easy and Isn’t Expensive; All You Need Is Quality Content That Helps and Engages Your Audience
[00:13:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then for the video boxes, we didn’t have those, so I started a video strategy. And I started creating a video once a week. And it took me a month and a half to trigger the video boxes, because I made quality videos that were engaging for my audience, that addressed questions my audience were interested in. And Google thought, yeah, that’s going to be useful information for me to show Kalicube’s audience when they search the Kalicube brand name and the same for my own brand name, Jason Barnard. If you search that, you’ll see the video boxes because I’ve done so much video and because my audience now expects to see video.
[00:13:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, one thing I would say about video is I love video. I’ve really got into it since I started trying my hand at video in February. It isn’t as difficult as it seems. It isn’t expensive. And making quality video is actually pretty easy, because quality video simply means great sound. That’s really important. But most of all, quality content that helps and engages your audience. And Google will see that, Google can measure that, and Google will put them if you are ticking all those right boxes.
[00:14:10] Monique Idemudia: That’s right. I’ve also noticed that the audio is really what makes a video more than the picture. People tend to be very forgiving when it comes to the video quality itself. So you can just use your cell phone, you can just use your webcam and zoom and record the videos as long as the audio is great. And of course, the content, it’s about the substance. Of course if your videos is great, you can see great engagement there and get all the results that you want and that you wish for because you’re providing value there. So that’s really what video is about.
Don’t Just Rely on YouTube; You Can Publish Videos on YouTube First and Then Embed It on Your Site
[00:14:42] Monique Idemudia: I think a lot of people are shying away from it because they’re like, oh, I don’t got all the professional equipment. And they feel like they’re obligated to produce this super high quality professional production, which of course is not true and they don’t need that. So, when you’ve talked about publishing videos, you’ve published them on your website and not on YouTube, right?
[00:15:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. In fact, I was talking to Greg Gifford, who’s a local SEO guru. If you don’t already know him, look him up. He’s great. I actually publish on YouTube and then I embed that in my website too.
[00:15:16] Monique Idemudia: Okay.
[00:15:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s really important. Don’t just rely on YouTube. You need a platform to publish on. He also uses Wistia. He says that’s a different audience and it gives him more control over how he presents it on his website. But for example, video boxes, YouTube dominates 80% of video boxes or videos, and video boxes come from YouTube, but that still leaves 20%. And that 20% would grow if people only optimise their videos on their pages correctly.
[00:15:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, what you can do, I have a client, in fact, who had loads of videos on YouTube. And I said to them, let’s optimise them for YouTube and then embed them on the site and optimise the page, the landing page on the site where we’re placing the video. And they now outrank YouTube for their videos using their own site. And we’ve gone from zero traffic from video to the site to over a thousand people a day onto their site onto the pages from Google search. This isn’t from YouTube. It’s not the YouTube traffic. This is just traffic directly to their site from Google, because those video boxes keep showing up because it’s not just your Brand SERP either.
[00:16:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s the beauty of Brand SERPs, because we just described a video strategy, because we wanted the video boxes on our Brand SERP because we want to impress our audience. But that also means that we’ve created a video strategy that’s going to rank for other keywords. So it brings all these bonuses of other traffic from other sources from other topics that are relevant because you’ve created this content that’s relevant and valuable to your audience. The people who are going to be finding it for other keywords will be relevant audience that you can then convert into users.
How Do You Create More Demand for Branded Search Terms and Get People to Want to Consume Content From You?
[00:16:54] Monique Idemudia: Yeah. That’s great. How do you go about creating more demand for branded search terms and get people to want to consume content from you specifically and always type in your brand name after the actual keyword that they’re searching for?
[00:17:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Ooh. I like that question. It’s very rare that anybody actually asks me that question. There are loads of ways. I’ve been using social medium. One interesting thing is that I have an event called Kalicube Tuesdays. Every single Tuesday for the last six months, I’ve had an interview, a live interview on YouTube as an event that then becomes a podcast episode. And after two months, there’s a peak in searches on my personal name and my company name on Mondays and Tuesdays. So, that’s a really obvious kind of idea is saying people are searching my name and my company name on Mondays and Tuesdays because they know there’s going to be an episode on the Tuesday and they’re intrigued to know what it’s going to be.
[00:17:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Beyond that, it’s also pushing out on social media, getting the brand out there on social media. Every time your brand appears in front of somebody, there is a slightly increased chance that they will one day search or especially, they will search for you when they need you. So just getting it in front of your audience, even if they’re top-of-funnel and they’re not ready to visit your site yet, don’t be obsessed by getting people to visit your site today. Get them to your site when they need you. So, obviously social media’s a great one.
[00:18:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I would also suggest advertising on Facebook or on YouTube. Get your brand name out there in front of people. And you can also use that advertising campaign to encourage them. Search for Kalicube on Google. Push people to search for it, because I think I know what one of the reasons you asked that question is a) you bring in new audience, people get your brand name. And once your brand name is in their minds, there’s a tendency to trust you more, but also because it’s a very strong signal to Google that you are important and relevant within your industry. If more people are searching your brand name, then your competitor’s brand name.
[00:18:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, pushing those brand searches is an incredibly powerful tactic in terms of convincing Google that you are important. And it also pushes people towards your Brand SERP. So that’s another good reason to make sure that your Brand SERP, the results on Google first search on your brand name are positive, accurate, and convincing.
Google Is Your New Business Card; Google Is Your New Homepage
[00:19:17] Monique Idemudia: Absolutely. Yes. And your Brand SERPs become even more powerful if you leverage demand generation there and strategically work on building a higher demand for your branded search terms for sure. That’s right.
[00:19:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s a win-win. The first point we were making was Google is your new business card or maybe even Google is your new homepage. If you are a local business, it’s pretty much your homepage. People aren’t coming to websites anymore. They’re using Google My Business or your Brand SERP to actually just ring you up or come to your business. So, it’s your business card, perhaps even your homepage, incredibly important point.
[00:19:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But the second point we’ve just been making without perhaps really realising it, it’s a great way to create and design and manage your content strategy, because that content that you are creating is around your brand. And it makes your brand stronger, but it’s also pushing your brand out on social media. We were talking about promoting on social media. That means you’re going to have a more healthy social media strategy. You have to think about it. If you want those Twitter boxes, if you want Facebook to rank, if you want LinkedIn to rank on your Brand SERP, you’re going to have to have a great strategy for those platforms. So, Brand SERPs force you to focus on what is relevant and valuable to your audience and pushing that out on these different platforms.
[00:20:32] Monique Idemudia: All right. So it’s about consistency and consistently publishing relevant and valuable content across all of the platforms. And by being relevant, Google picks that up as a signal as well. And they want to show the most relevant things to their users, so that’s how you get those rich results to pop up really.
[00:20:50] Monique Idemudia: And like you said, for local businesses, yes, when people google your brand name, your business name, what they want is they want your address. They want to find you and see how they can get there. They want to see some pictures, your reviews, and your opening hours. They want to see if you’re open, if they can go right now, when they can go so they can plan the trip. And that’s the most important information that Google My Business display. So, in a way, yes, that your Brand SERP will be like an extension of your homepage. And maybe people don’t even need to visit your website anymore because they get everything right there in the SERP.
Your Brand SERP Is the Window to Your Digital Ecosystem
[00:21:25] Monique Idemudia: You have this quote that says your Brand SERP is the window to your digital ecosystem. So that goes hand in hand. Everything is connected.
[00:21:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. The ecosystem idea, for me, that’s the third pillar of this. We have the audience with the business card. We have the content strategy that you can build around your Brand SERP or from looking at your Brand SERP. And then you have the ecosystem. Google reflects back to you what the world thinks about you or what it thinks the world thinks about you. It’s probably the best opinion you’ll ever get of what the world thinks about you. And rather than paying a marketing company to do market research to figure out your audience or paying some platform that tries to emulate all this information that it’s pulling in from Facebook, Twitter, on a tiny, tiny, tiny scale, Google does it naturally, easily.
[00:22:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you look through pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, you’ll see what Google thinks is important in terms of the content that’s online about your brand. And if there are bad reviews ranking, it isn’t that Google is stupid. It’s that it thinks they’re relevant and valuable to your audience. So, you need to start thinking about why it’s ranking that site and also why that site has got bad reviews about you. That’s another problem. So, you can actually look through the multiple pages in your Brand SERP and understand what your digital ecosystem looks like. And that’s incredibly important. You’ve got business card, content, digital ecosystem, getting deeper and deeper into your actual online digital business, deeper and deeper into how much you can actually learn from them.
[00:22:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I started looking at Brand SERPs seven years ago, and I thought I’ll optimise my own Brand SERP because I’m a super duper SEO expert. I’ll optimise it in three or four months and it will be over and I can go and do something else. Seven years later, I’m still working on my Brand SERP. I’m still making it better. And every time I look at a Brand SERP, I learn something new every single day.
[00:23:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, it is actually a) also, importantly, an ongoing task. It’s something that will never end. You need to keep looking after it, keep feeding it with new content. And those video boxes will disappear after a while if there’s nothing new coming up. These Twitter boxes, great example, disappear if you don’t keep that Twitter activity and engagement going. So, it’s something you need to do ongoing, but it’s also something that every single day you will find something out about your business, your digital ecosystem that you didn’t know before.
The First Page on Google Is a Snapshot of Your Business; You Can Work More on the Aspect That’s Appearing on Page Two If You Think It’s More Important to Your Business
[00:23:51] Monique Idemudia: All right. Yes. You’ve given us some amazing tips. So, actually, google your brand name and look beyond the first page, look at what’s in page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And then you get a feeling of how Google ranks your content in terms of importance. What pops up in the beginning is regarded as more important than the things that rank on the pages in the back or depending on how many pages pop up for your brand search. That’s right.
[00:24:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, sure. That first page is Google trying to paint a picture of who you are, what you do, what you offer, who your audience is. And that’s already incredibly insightful because it’s a snapshot of your business. It’s a snapshot of your business that Google is showing to its users, your audience. So, it’s incredibly important. Just at a glance, you can just look at it and say does it look right? Does it feel right? Is it positive? Is it accurate? Is it convincing?
[00:24:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then beyond that, it’s all the reserves, all the things that are just below the SERPs and Google go, yeah, could be interesting but not as interesting as what we have. Or maybe we’ve got two pieces of content that would fulfill the same role, for example, two social channels. So there’ll be one that will be bubbling under the surface, great opportunity there. If you don’t like your Facebook platform, you don’t enjoy Facebook, which is my case, work harder on Twitter. Get Twitter to push up there and Facebook will probably disappear.
[00:25:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you can actually start to think about how you’re managing it by saying, I will work more on this aspect that’s appearing on page two because I think that aspect is more important to my business. And you will naturally, and this is the beauty of it, by doing that, you will naturally build a great content and a great digital strategy overall.
[00:25:37] Monique Idemudia: Yes. It’s such a smart way of approaching things, actually. Yeah.
[00:25:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thank you. I think I might giggle now.
[00:25:43] Monique Idemudia: Right.
[00:25:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Blushing with pride.
The Technical Aspect on Brand SERPs Is Less Important Than the Rest of SEO
[00:25:49] Monique Idemudia: Yeah. It’s directly related to SEO because you optimise your website. And when it comes to social media, you optimise your content strategy there. Everything is connected. But the great thing is that even though it’s like an ongoing effort, it’s very basic on a very basic level. You don’t need to be this tech guru that knows about all the technical stuff and is an expert on that. It’s really just satisfying people and showing up consistently with great content. And then Google will pick that up.
[00:26:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And making sure that you’re presenting the content in its best light in a way that Google can understand it. And that will help you. You said, you don’t need SEO, great SEO skills. And I think that’s a really lovely point is that because it’s a controlled environment, it’s much easier to see clearly what needs to be done. And then you can just do it step by step by step. And it’s a really easy way. If you’re scared of SEO, you’ll think it’s too complicated or too technical to get started.
What matters on Brand SERP is content, relevancy, and value to your audience.
jason barnard (the brand serp guy)
[00:26:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And what’s interesting about Brand SERPs is the technical aspect is so much less important than it is in the rest of SEO. What matters on Brand SERP is content, relevancy, and value to your audience. So you can really focus on the content, on the human aspect of it, what you are bringing to your audience, and what your audience expects from you. And that makes SEO much more content focused, which is what Google wants it to be.
[00:27:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you’re actually going in exactly the same direction as Google. Google’s algorithms are now moving towards this idea of content that satisfies the need of the user. And if you are building your Brand SERP to be accurate, positive, and convincing, then you are going down exactly the same path as Google, and you’re going to win on the long term and the short term for that matter.
Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) on Tracking Brands From a Database on His Company, Kalicube Pro
[00:27:38] Monique Idemudia: Because your goals are aligned, there’s no conflict of interest there and that’s what you want. Yes, exactly. I think everybody now has a great idea and knows what they have to do to optimise their Brand SERPs right now and got some actionable tips. Is there anything else that you would like to say in relation to Brand SERPs?
[00:27:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. I’ve got a company called Kalicube, Kalicube.Pro. What’s actually sparked the knowledge, I think I’m the only person in the world who specialises in Brand SERPs. And I think it’s because everybody thinks it’s so obvious. And it is really obvious, which is the wonderful thing about it. It’s obvious and everybody needs it. So, it’s this kind of niche speciality that I’ve found that’s not niche at all because everybody needs it.
[00:28:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): One of the things I’ve started doing is I’ve got a database of 70,000 brands, people and brands that I’m tracking on a monthly basis. And it’s free. It’s a free service, and it’s not free because I’m trying to sell something behind that. It’s free because I want to research because I want to understand. And from having 70,000 brands, I’ve got 10 million Google search results pages in a database sitting on a computer that I can look into and I can say, okay, in this industry, we tend to see video. In this industry, we tend to see images. On sitelinks, for example, 50% of brands don’t have sitelinks. Why is that? What are the commonalities between these brands? So I can understand what you need to do to get those sitelinks, what you need to do to get the video.
[00:29:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And a lot of it is, as we said earlier on, incredibly simple. You just need to know how to do it. So, sorry, that wasn’t the point. The point was please go along to Kalicube.Pro, click on track your brand, and add your brand, add your competitors, add your friends, add your dog. It doesn’t matter, because I want to track as many as possible so that I can understand and share back with the industry and with brands and marketers what I’ve learned about how we can manage our own presence in Google.
Google Has No Reason to Present You In a Bad Light; You Just Need to Educate It Like a Child
[00:29:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I think one really nice way of, if we’re wrapping this up to finish it, is Google has no reason to present you in a bad light. It only wants to present you accurately to its users, to your audience. So, the only reason it would ever present you in a bad light is if your brand actually has a reputation problem or because you’ve managed it badly, because you’ve explained badly to Google. I like to talk about the idea of educating Google. We’re educating a machine. It’s like educating a child. We need to just present it in a format that it can digest and understand. And that’s actually just quality content, good copywriting, intelligent site structure, and relevant content on relevant platforms where your audience actually hangs out.
[00:30:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that brings me to my very last point, which is if you are posting content to YouTube, Twitter, Medium, Facebook, on third-party sites, I write for Search Engine Journal, that’s my audience. If I’m pushing all this content out onto these different platforms, overall, my brand strategy is growing, is improving. And Google’s seeing that. And Google’s understanding that my overall SEO strategy, Google’s opinion of my expertise, authority, and trust, which we talk a lot about in SEO today. It’s building my expertise, authority, and trust naturally, but the best part is that I’m actually reaching my audience first. And Google is the bonus.
Reach Out and Find Out More About Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) by Searching His Name and Choosing the Platform You Prefer
[00:31:12] Monique Idemudia: Absolutely. How can people reach out to you and find out more about you and everything that you do? You have a podcast as well. Yeah. What’s the best way to reach you?
[00:31:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If you search Jason Barnard, you’ll see basically my site at the top. So you can go on there and connect with me on there. Twitter box is just underneath that. I love Twitter. I actually only started on Twitter because I wanted the Twitter boxes. I wanted to see how I could get them. It took me six months from a standing start from no Twitter activity to actually getting the Twitter boxes. So it isn’t that difficult. Underneath that, you’ve got videos. You can watch the videos and you’ll end up on the videos on my podcast, where I interview some of the top people in marketing.
[00:31:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, basically, search my name, Jason Barnard, and you will find the way that suits you. I just thought about that. That’s really interesting. Rather than telling everybody go to Twitter, some people don’t like Twitter, search my name, look down the list, and see which is the way of connecting with me that suits you the best. And that’s another great beauty of Brand SERPs that I only just thought of. Thank you.
[00:32:14] Monique Idemudia: That’s amazing. Yes. Now everybody can reach out to you on the platform that they prefer and they can find everything on your Brand SERP.
[00:32:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Isn’t that brilliant? Wow. Thank you, Monique. You’ve just broadened my horizons a little bit more.
[00:32:27] Monique Idemudia: You’re welcome. Yeah. It’s an interesting way. And also don’t forget to check out Kalicube.Pro and enter your brand name. I’m going to do that for sure right now after the interview. Thanks so much for being here. You’ve added a lot of value. I really appreciate it. And yeah, thank you so much.
Yoast on Knowing the Importance of Optimising Their Brand SERP and Their Knowledge Graph Presence
[00:32:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh, absolute pleasure. And just to indicate as a closing argument as to the fact that this is so very important, one of my clients is Yoast, the plugin. They hired me to optimise their Brand SERP and their Knowledge Graph presence. They know it’s important. They know that this is where a lot of value is going to be found for them. If they think that, if they believe that, I guess I might be right.
[00:33:12] Monique Idemudia: Yeah. For sure. Yeah. A lot of people use Yoast. Most people use WordPress as the website builders. So, yeah, most people have Yoast. So it is important, you guys. Work on your Brand SERPs.
[00:33:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Yoast have got great Schema Markup baked in. So, all the Schema Markup you’re talking about, the technical stuff, it means that you don’t need to worry about that horribly geeky, techy Schema Markup stuff. They do a really good basic set of Schema Markup that serves pretty much all the purposes you would need right out the, what’s it called, out the bag, out of the box.
[00:33:47] Monique Idemudia: Out of the box. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yoast is definitely a must have plugin that I really recommend to everybody who’s running a website on WordPress and they’re interested in optimising their site for SEO for sure.
[00:33:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Brilliant. Thank you very much, Monique. That was absolutely awesome. And I do love your background.
[00:34:03] Monique Idemudia: You’re welcome. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys, so much for watching and listening. I really appreciate it. And as always, please don’t forget to check out the show notes on dragon-digital-marketing.com because there I’ve summarised all of the tips that you’ve heard throughout this episode. So you can actually take action and optimise your Brand SERP today.
[00:34:27] Monique Idemudia: And if you’re interested in learning, hey, how do I even build my own brand and generate a demand for branded search terms, you can check out my free branding course, Brand Story, that’s also available on my website, dragon-digital-marketing.com. And I’ll teach you step by step how you can build your brand and tell your story and turn your story into a fascinating brand. So make sure you check that out as well. It’s a free course, and it’ll help you to build the brand that you can be proud of. Again, thanks so much for tuning in, and I hope to see you again in the next episode. Until next time.
[00:35:18] Narrator: Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. You can visit us at dragon-digital-marketing.com for more resources and for more episodes. Let us know how you like to show and write us a review. We are grateful when you like, share, and subscribe. We appreciate you.
