Welcome back to the Leadership Stack Podcast! This is our fifth and last episode with Mr. Barnard. For our final episode with Mr. Barnard, he will be talking about some the technicalities in digital marketing.
Also, learn what other parts of a website should you be handling to secure the first-page ranking, how vital is Brand SERP in making Google understand your brand message, and how can your Brand SERP help you protect your brand in times of unforeseen crises. Don’t miss out on this valuable episode of the Leadership Stack Podcast!
SERP 101: How To Protect Your Brand SERP With Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)
[00:00:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): What you should do is what I call leapfrogging, is find the content underneath that is valuable to your audience, that is helpful to your audience, and help Google to understand that that is better content for it to be showing your audience more representative of who you are more helpful to them, than the negative content that’s currently ranking and then leapfrog over it.
[00:00:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I do things because I believe they’re fundamentally interesting, important, or helpful to people, whether those people know it or not. And I think Brand SERPs is a great kind of follow-on, although, but it is saying, hey, this is really important. It’s actually really interesting. And you will get an awful lot out of it even though you’ve never thought about it before.
[00:00:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): My job is to educate everybody. You don’t have to work with me but think about it. Think about how important that is. Think about how important that business card on Google is for you.
My job is to educate everybody about the power of Brand SERPs. You don’t have to work with me, but think about it. Think about how important that business card on Google is for you.
jason barnard (the brand serp guy)
Your Semi-Controlled Websites, Your Social Media Channels, Are As Important And Valuable As Your Own Website
[00:00:57] Sean Si: I guess one of my last questions would be what is something that for you is super important aside from the website? So, you mentioned you start with your website when you want to protect your brand name or your name on the search engine results page. What other websites are important? Because that’s just one to two listings and that’s it. Google doesn’t list your website for the next 10 or 20 links on the search engine results page. So, you get to like the top one, maybe the top two results for your website and the rest is not your website. So, what are the websites would you say should people focus on if they want to secure the top 10?
[00:01:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Brilliant question. I mean, I mentioned earlier on take baby steps. First is your own website. Next is the semi-control websites, your social media channels. They will tend to rank, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. So, they’re semi-controlled. You can still control a great deal of the message even though the site will put LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook at the end of the title, but you still got a certain amount of control. And you change, you update your social media profile description. It will update on your Brand SERP within a few days. So, you’ve already got quite a lot of control there.
[00:02:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): With Twitter in particular, you can get those Twitter Boxes which are delightful, where it shows you like these tweets. That makes you or makes your audience understand that you engage with your audience, that you’ve got something to say, that you’re open and willing to talk to them. That’s a very visible, and helpful, and positive message that you can send out to your audience. So, all of these kind of like the baby steps of the social channels, the review platforms, baby steps to asking for reviews, getting reviews on the review platforms that currently rank.
[00:02:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then you’ve got Twitter Boxes, which involves social media strategy on Twitter. But if Google is showing Twitter Boxes, it means that Google can see that your audience is engaging with you on Twitter. And that’s a very good sign to you. It’s a confirmation that your Twitter strategy is effective and it’s true people and brands who have Twitter Boxes on their Brand SERP tend to have very great Twitter strategies that are effective and drive business for them.
[00:02:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then you’ve got Video Boxes, which I love personally. If you’re investing in video on YouTube, on Facebook, wherever it might be, but the Video Boxes don’t appear on your Brand SERP, it means that you’re investing badly. It means that your audience aren’t engaging with your videos or they are but you’re not communicating that to Google. And it hasn’t understood that these videos are valuable to your audience. So, your video strategy is out of whack with where it should be. So, the Brand SERP, as you improve it, you’ll see your entire digital strategy will improve whether you try to do that or not.
Leapfrogging: Pushing The Content That Is Valuable To Your Audience And Helping Google Understand That That Is A Better Content To Show Its Users
[00:03:28] Sean Si: Very, very good stuff. Now, last question would be, what do you do when you did your best to secure the first page of Google, top 10 results, you got your website, fantastic stuff, got your social media platforms, edited it as best you could. And here comes a scandal which has your name on it.
[00:03:51] Sean Si: How do you get rid of that? Cause we got people asking me that stuff. Well, not all the time, but there are those difficult questions that come by. What do you usually say to them?
[00:04:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, there are multiple aspects of this. In fact, looking after your Brand SERP. So, I’ve just said not only is it a great business card, it’s helpful to your audience, it drives you digital marketing strategy, but it also protects you, because if you’ve got control of the first two to three pages, through content that you’ve worked on actively either you control or semi-control, it’s difficult for that negative content to then rank because it has to prove itself to be useful and valuable to your audience in Google’s eyes.
[00:04:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s very difficult to do from page five or page six. So, if you’ve done what I just told you to do over the couple of two to three years, and you’ll probably got very, very stable and that’s the other thing is Brand SERPs tends to be very stable once you’ve worked it properly. You will have a protection against that kind of problem. Then you have the question once it does happen, I’ll tell you what not to do. And that’s try to drown it. Traditionally, ORM will say, let’s create lots of our articles and we will create so much content that we will drown it.
[00:04:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, if you think that through it doesn’t make sense and it simply doesn’t work because what you’re doing is creating brand new content that has no value in Google’s eyes and expecting Google to put it right in front of your audience front and center. It won’t do that. What you should do is what I call leapfrogging, is find the content underneath that is valuable to your audience, that is helpful to your audience, and help Google to understand that that is better content for it to be showing your audience more representative of who you are, more helpful to them than the negative content that’s currently ranking and then leapfrog over it.
[00:05:33] Sean Si: Got it. I got an answer now. Thank you for that.
[00:05:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, in fact, as, as The Brand SERP Guy, I’m going against traditional ORM techniques, Online Reputation Management techniques, and saying the best way to do is to control. If you can control your Brand SERP, then you control the message. If you control the message, that negative stuff has trouble getting anywhere near it.
Google Wants to Represent You Accurately And Honestly To Your Audience
[00:05:53] Sean Si: Got it. Do you advise people to post something about it to address it?
[00:05:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You can. Certainly Google is very interested in hearing from the horse’s mouth, so it’s interested in your point of view. You’ve got to be a little bit careful and I would say, you know, go quite carefully beyond that, but generally speaking, what Google is looking to do, I mean, I built a platform Kalicube Pro and it’s a SAS platform that helps people do this and brands do this. It’s basically say, we want Google to understand that this page on this site is the reference for this entity, this brand, this person, this podcast, this book, whatever it might be, this page is the specific representation.
[00:06:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And this is the horse’s mouth. This is the brand, the person, the podcast, the book saying itself about itself, what the brand message should be. Then Google is, okay, I know what you want. Now, I’m going to go around the web and see if the rest of the web agrees. If the rest of the web, agrees, I will show that. So, what you’re saying is potentially a good thing to do, but it is a little bit dangerous because expressing yourself on something negative can make it worse, you can create a fire storm, so you’ve got to be really careful.
[00:07:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But certainly giving your point of view on what I call the Entity Home, which is what Google recognises as being the place of reference from the brand, the person, the podcast, the book itself is incredibly powerful. Google wants your opinion. It wants your point of view.
[00:07:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It doesn’t want to misrepresent you. It wants to represent you accurately to its audience, its users, because it wants to serve them as best it can. And if a negative point of view about you is relevant, helpful, and valuable to its users, it’s going to show it. So, the other thing about that negative result is if it’s fair criticism, sort yourself out, make sure that you address that criticism and you change the way you’re working, especially with bad reviews. That’s a very good example of something that a lot of brands say, oh I just need to get rid of that, I need to drown it. Saying that maybe you need to actually look at how you’re working with the clients.
Get In Touch With Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) For Your SEO Needs
[00:07:51] Sean Si: Good stuff. Jason, we have learned a ton from you and you’ve had a very colorful journey. From when you started in the band. And it’s an amazing thing. And I am really happy that you shared it with us. I am very full, you know, as a listener from you right here, listening to your story. I wonder where can people find you when they want to get in touch?
[00:08:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Well, if you search my name, all the results are about me and not any other Jason Barnard. So, search my name. My site comes up top. You can contact me through my site. I am on Twitter a lot, so I’ve got the Twitter Boxes. And the Knowledge Panel on the right-hand side, you’ll see all the different things I’ve done. You can LinkedIn, I hang out a lot. So, Twitter, LinkedIn, my site, search my name, come along to Kalicube Pro which is my SaaS Platform. Write to me from there, please.
[00:08:42] Sean Si: There you go. Perfect. And we’re going to have that in the show notes, go to leadershipstack.com and search for Jason Barnard, B A R N A R D. Make sure to check it out. We’ll have his links there, but I’m sure we don’t have to link to him. Cause if you search his name, you’re going to find his website. That’s what we’ve been talking about for the past 15 minutes. So Jason, been a really, really brilliant pleasure of mine to have you on the show. I learned a lot and I’m sure that our listeners have learned a lot and we are better for it.
[00:09:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Thank you very much for having me. I love the questions and it’s delightful to approach this from a point of view of all the companies I’ve set up and left behind in capable hands. Some of them are not in capable hands for others, but it’s an interesting way of going through that kind of life process and thinking about how I’ve built teams and how I want to build the current team at Kalicube Pro. So far as we said, six people and they are all delightful, they are all doing great work and bottom line, we all get on and we trust each other.
[00:09:45] Sean Si: That’s amazing. Amazing stuff right there. Well, thanks, Jason.
[00:09:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thanks a lot, man.
[00:09:49] Sean Si: And God bless.
[00:09:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Bye-bye.
[00:09:51] Sean Si: Oh hey, and since you’re here, can you do me a favour, can you hit on the subscribe button and hit the bell button and select all notifications so that whenever we have a new video, you’re going to be the first one to know until then keep leading.
