Masterclass in Brand SERPs, Knowledge Panels, and Generative AI in Search Using the Kalicube Process

In this masterclass, Jason Barnard, The Brand SERP Guy, CEO and Founder of Kalicube, explains Kalicube’s goal of controlling clients’ brand narratives and making sure Google understands brands correctly. His presentations focus mainly on the importance of Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels and how they shape your company’s digital footprint. He stresses the importance of understanding Google’s mechanisms and educating the search engine about your brand. Jason emphasises the value of clear copy that uses semantic triples, context clouds, and strong relationships between entities. He also explains the concept of Darwinism in Search, which is based on the idea that the Blue Link Algorithm competes with the other Vertical Algorithms. With Kalicube, Jason focuses on creating rich content and he believes in providing large amounts of free, valuable information because everyone needs it. His goal is to help businesses optimise their visibility online and increase their brand awareness.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Is the Only Person Who Can Manipulate Google’s Knowledge Graph From the Outside

[00:00:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’d like to correct that I’m not the father of the Knowledge Graph at all. But as far as I’m aware, I’m the only person in the world who can manipulate Google’s Knowledge Graph from the outside and make Google flip and jump and do whatever I feel it needs to do. And it’s been 11 years working on that. And John Mueller, as we’ll see, actually says, outside of Google, he doesn’t know anybody who knows more about the functioning of Google’s Knowledge Algorithms than me, which is delightful. 

[00:00:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But first story is I came yesterday on a bus from Nimes, 14 hours sitting in a bus, very bored. And I wrote an entire talk for you today. That’s what I do. I take long haul flights, long haul buses, and long haul trains. And I sit, and I think, and I try to figure things out. And a lot of the best things I’ve thought of have come from those long haul travels. I’m turning the microphone on. But I’ve got a very loud voice, so it probably wasn’t such a problem. Could you hear at the back? I don’t need to start again? I don’t even need the microphone. 

[00:01:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I’ll tell you why that is. I used to play music in the street. I played double bass, the big Kontrabass, and I sang. And when you play in the street, you have to sing very, very, very loud. And the other thing you have to do is put on a show, or people don’t stop and give you money. But we actually managed to make quite a good living, playing in the street and playing in clubs for 10 years, being a professional punk folk musician. Lovely. 

[00:01:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Anyway, back to the bus. And then I woke up this morning, the blues song, and saw that it was a practical day today, and I’d written entirely philosophical. So, half past day, I rewrote the whole thing. This is completely original, and I’ve never done this before, so please do bear with me. That’s it for the introductions.

An Introduction to Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) and His Topics of Expertise, Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels

[00:02:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m Jason Barnard. This is the Kalicube Process. And it’s a process I believe we’re going to be talking about SEO without backlinks, does the same thing. So, there’s going to be a comparison of techniques and strategies. What we do is build your SEO and indeed digital marketing strategy from the Brand SERP outwards. And it’s future proof, we think. You can never know with the future, can you? 

[00:02:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m The Brand SERP Guy, Jason Barnard, and that is my Brand SERP. What is a Brand SERP? It’s what appears when somebody googles your personal name, your company name, your product name, your album name, your music group name, and I made some cartoon characters as we’ll see, or your cartoon character’s name.

[00:03:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The Knowledge Panel Guy, John Mueller, paging Mr. Knowledge Panel. I think some of this is that he’s not allowed to say things. So, he pages me and he says, what do you think? I give my answer, and I hope for the most part within what I could be saying.

A Little More Background About Jason Barnard and His Journey of Becoming The Brand SERP Guy

[00:03:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Currently living in Paris, that’s actually not true anymore. I’m living in Nimes or near Nimes in the countryside, because I’ve gone back to the South of France to play music again, me and my double bass. In French, it’s called your grandmother. So, me and my grandmother, living together in the South of France. I shouldn’t have said that, should I?

[00:03:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I used to be a voice actor, a cartoon blue dog. That’s me there. I can actually come over here and show you. This is me, the cartoon blue dog. And the reason I started working on Brand SERPs in 2011 is because my business partner at the time, unfortunately, took the characters away, took the business. I had to make a new career. We had 5 million visits a month, 1 billion page views a year in 2007.

To Relegate His History of Being a Cartoon Blue Dog, Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Convinced Google to Show Him as a Digital Marketer

[00:04:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I thought a good way to make a living will be to do SEO, pitch to clients. The clients then googled my name, and they saw Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog. And they didn’t sign on the dotted line. So, I set about changing Google’s perception of me not to drown the blue dog. That suddenly sounds really horrible. Me, my grandmother, and the blue dog being drowned is the theme for today. 

[00:04:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But to relegate the blue dog to a lower importance within Google’s understanding of who I am and what my audience at that time wanted to see, and convince it to show the digital marketer. And that opened up a whole rabbit hole. I thought it would be maybe 3 months, and it’s been 12 years. And I’m still digging down the rabbit hole, and I still haven’t finished.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Was a Punk Folk Musician Who Toured for 10 Years With His Band

[00:05:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then I was a punk folk musician. This is the group here, The Barking Dogs, 10 years, 4 albums. I played in Milan 30 years ago. I played in a pub next to the Sansiro on the same night U2 were playing in the Sansiro. They had 50,000 people. We had three, and they were our friends. 

[00:05:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And talking of grandmothers, I stayed in an absolutely palatial flat in the Piazza del Duomo. We were playing in the street, and some nice guy came along and said, do you want to come and stay at my house? Four smelly street musicians, staying at his very, very rich grandmother’s house, looking out on to the Piazza del Duomo. That’s my Milan story from 30 years ago.

Currently, Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Is a Podcaster, an Author, and the CEO and Founder of Kalicube

[00:06:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’ve got a groovy podcast. I recommend it, not because it’s mine, but because I interview super smart people and they share so much stuff. 250 episodes, so well worth watching. It’s a broad array of marketing, digital marketing, and even running your business or running your team. And they’ve helped me enormously learn about what I need to do. I’m also an author, Brand SERPs for Business, on the left there, writing for various journals and publications.

[00:06:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And this is the most important part. Today, I’m the CEO and founder of Kalicube. And we take control of your brand narrative online and dominate the competition. I think what’s important there is dominating the competition is what we all want to do with SEO, and most people start with that.

Kalicube’s Job and Goal: Controlling Your Brand Narrative and Making Sure Google Understands Your Brand 

[00:07:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And what we do at Kalicube is start with making sure that we’re controlling our brand narrative online, that Google understands who we are, what we do, and which audience we serve. Because at the end of the day, it’s only if it understands who we are and what we do and which subset of its users are our audience can it offer us up as the best solution to that problem. And we’ll see much more of that later on. 

[00:07:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, this idea of understanding who you are is fundamentally important. And your Brand SERP, what appears when somebody googles your name, your personal name, your company name, your product name, a song name, a music group name, is Google’s representation of the facts and its understanding of what is helpful, valuable, and useful to your audience. 

[00:07:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you can immediately see that if you can manage that, control it, and make it ultra positive and reflect your brand narrative, you know Google has understood you. And that puts you in top position for being presented to Google’s users as the best solution to their problem when they’re searching. And that goes, and this is the cool part, for search, answer, and assistive engines. That’s why it’s future proof. And we’ll see later on that with the advent of Bing Chat and now Bard, we’re still ahead of the game.

The Plan: A Breakdown of the Contents of the Presentation of Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) 

[00:08:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): This is the plan. I’m letting you read. Because I know that if I start talking at the top, you’ll be reading the bottom while I’m at the top. And when I’m at the bottom, you’ll be still reading the top or the middle. So, I might as well just let you read and talk about something completely different. And you can take a photo. Brilliant.

Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels: Why They Are Way More Important Than You Think

[00:09:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels, and why it’s way more important than you think. What I’ve found is that, I started doing this in 2011, tried to sell it to clients, failed, got work as a traditional SEO, make some money. 2015, I created Kalicube and built a machine called Kalicube Pro. Kalicube Pro is a mad machine. If you’ve ever heard of Heath Robinson, who’s heard of Heath Robinson? I’m really old, aren’t I? I’m very depressing. He used to draw these mad machines that would never work. 

[00:09:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Kalicube Pro is a mad machine, but it does work. And what it does is analyse Google’s understanding of you, its appreciation of your digital strategy, and its understanding of your audience by analysing the Brand SERP. You just put a brand in. And within 10 minutes, it will spit out your entire digital ecosystem organised by priority, and it will spit out your digital strategy that I’m about to explain today. And it’s hugely cool, but it took me 8 years now. 2015 I built it, and it’s only just started making money because nobody was listening to me about Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels. And this is the foundation.

Brand SERPs Are Critical to Your Business; Every Brand SERP Is Different for Every Exact Match Brand Names  

[00:10:26] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Brand SERPs are critical to your business. There you go. This is where I should have started 8 years ago, and I only realised this about 3 weeks ago. If you look at these, they’re all screenshots of exact match brand in Google Search Console. There is no one size fits all. Everybody is different. 

[00:10:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The only thing that’s the same in all of these, the commonality is that branded traffic is relatively, humongously more important to a brand than any other traffic. Relatively less impressions, relatively more traffic, bottom of funnel, easy to convert, highly profitable. And I really wish I’d thought of that 8 years ago.

[00:11:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But one of the reasons I didn’t think about this 8 years ago is because all of these are my clients, and it takes 3 years to get to a stage where you’ve got the entire Kalicube Process in place. And these are all clients I started with, somewhere between 2015 and 2018. And one of them 2021, and he was the best ever. He implemented everything in 2 years, and we’ll see him later on. So, that might be a screenshot you’d want to take.

[00:11:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You are saying, don’t tell me what to do. I’ll give you some numbers then. This one is 0.7% of queries, 9% of traffic; 1% of queries, 65% of traffic; 1% of queries, 6% of traffic; 0.4% of the queries, 11% of the traffic. This one’s good, 0.03% of queries, 0.63% of traffic. So, as you can see, relatively speaking, you’re looking at between 5 and 20. One of them is 20 times bigger, 5, 10, or 20 times bigger. That’s huge.

Google’s Recognition of Capitalisation for Entities as Proper Nouns 

[00:12:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The Kalicube Process works from the Brand SERP outwards. And here I’ve made a huge mistake. There’s no capital K on Kalicube. Kalicube is a proper noun. Google focuses very heavily on capitalisation for proper nouns. It will recognise an entity with a capital letter, and it will not recognise it more often than not without. So, somebody like, what are they called, eBay? Do they start with a small e or do they start with a big one? I guess Etsy maybe then starts with a small one. 

[00:13:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Any brand who tries to brand themselves with the first letter as a small letter is putting themselves at a huge disadvantage in terms of understanding in Google’s brain, simply because the first letter is a small letter. So, it assumes it’s not a proper noun, and you have to convince it otherwise. So, if you’re branding a company, if you do that, understand that you’ve got a huge mountain to climb.

Some Client Reviews for Kalicube and Jason Barnard’s Job in Making Sure the Client Doesn’t Need Him Anymore

[00:13:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): There you go. This is Robin. He’s a French guy, absolutely lovely client. In two years, he’s implemented the Kalicube process from beginning to end. He was experiencing a drop in traffic for 31% year on year when he started working with us. He wanted to buy links. I told him, if you’re going to buy links, you’re not working with me. He then said, okay, I’ll not buy links and I’ll trust you. 

[00:14:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Two years later, we’ve turned it around, we’ve got his traffic back, and he’s now seeing 33% increase in SEO traffic from Google, 21% increase in brown searches, and 28% increase in SERP visibility. And he said only last week, I’m incredibly happy with Kalicube, they turn my search strategy around, profits are up, and I feel serene about the future. And those last two, for me, are the most important. He’s making more money. He sleeps well at night.

[00:14:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And one of the reasons he sleeps well at night is I no longer work with him, because he doesn’t need me. I’ve taught him how to fish. And I taught him how to fish using his Brand SERP, the analysis of his digital ecosystem, to create the strategy that works for him using the resources he has at his disposal. And he just goes through and reiterates and redoes and reworks, and he is now on his own.

Another Client Review Where Kalicube Helped Her to Gain 44% SEO Traffic and 32% Branded Searches Year on Year

[00:15:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): This is another client from earlier on, and she talks about that. She started 2 years ago. Coupled with content production, it led to a veritable flywheel, 44% SEO traffic and 32% branded searches year on year. And that’s the key. It turns into a flywheel. They’re going up and up. And this one, started with them actually in 2015, so they’ve been working with me for 8 years. They stopped last year for the same reason. It’s going so well. They don’t need me anymore.

As an agency and as a consultant or a coach, I’m there to make sure that I can give you a strategy where you don’t need me anymore.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)

[00:15:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And as an agency and as a consultant or a coach, I’m there to make sure that I can give you a strategy where you don’t need me anymore. And after two, maybe three years, you can let go. Now if you are an agency, that sounds really scary. But at the same time, everybody needs this. There are no shortage of clients, so it doesn’t matter. And after two years, everything gets boring, and you start again with a new project. It’s brilliant. We have no trouble getting new clients, and we have no trouble getting happy clients to give us great recommendations.

Knowledge Versus Recommendations: Facts on the Right-Hand Side and Google’s Recommendation on the Left

[00:16:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, that was all the salesy part about what Kalicube Pro does, what the Kalicube Process is, how we help our clients. And this is knowledge versus recommendations. Now, we get into a bit of philosophy. Any SERP on desktop is facts on the right hand side, recommendations on the left hand side.

[00:16:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): When Google presents you with a Knowledge Panel or a Google Business Profile or See Results About, or even in fact, Bing Chat often shows you on the right hand side, if you’ve got access to that, a summary of the information that you’re looking for. They consider that to be facts and so do we. On the left hand side, it’s recommendations of what you might want to look at, investigate, and look into. 

[00:17:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And in a Brand SERP, the fact is the Knowledge Panel for my company, has Google understood me. On the left hand side, it’s what does Google feel my audience will think is helpful, valuable, and engaging.

Three Is the Magic Number: Human Brains and Knowledge Graphs Function in Three’s

[00:17:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Everything in three’s, by the way. A friend of mine, a teacher, who teaches in the North of England, said he gets the best results for his A-level students because he does everything in three’s. If there are four, you remove one. And if there are two, you invent a new one, even if it’s not important. Because we all remember things in three’s, our brains function in three’s, Knowledge Graphs function in three’s. Three is the magic number, which was a song from my childhood 50 years ago. 

[00:18:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, recommendations and facts, that now helps us build the Kalicube Process that leads to the success we’ve shown.

Google Needs to Understand Who Your Company Is, What Are the Offers of Your Company, and Which Audience Your Company Serves

[00:18:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): A corporate Knowledge Panel, more understanding on the left, less understanding in the middle, no understanding at all on the right. And if we think back to what I said earlier, if Google understands who you are, what you offer, and which audience you serve, you’re in a winning position. If it doesn’t understand, i.e., you’re on the right hand side with no corporate Knowledge Panel, when somebody googles the corporate name, then Google is not in a position to recommend you on fact based algorithms.

[00:18:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And we know now with Bard, with ChatGPT, with Gemini coming, with Knowledge Graphs, and with fact being integrated more and more even into the left hand side, that factual understanding is now foundational.

An Example of a Corporate Knowledge Panel From WordLift and a Knowledge Panel Sprout From Another Company

[00:19:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And here in the middle is WordLift. If you’ve never heard of them, they’re an Italian company in Rome, who do an amazing tool for building internal Knowledge Graphs for your site. We build basically into Google’s Knowledge Graph the understanding about you, and they build your internal Knowledge Graph. It’s really cool.

[00:19:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I have no idea who Perceptive Fittings Limited are, but this is what we call a Knowledge Panel sprout. It won’t appear on a Brand SERP, but you can find them if you investigate and dig down. And I love doing that, because these Knowledge Panels exist somewhere in Google’s brain, but it doesn’t show them.

[00:19:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Why doesn’t it show them? Because it isn’t sure, because it doesn’t have enough information, because it doesn’t provide a summary of who the company is, which audience they serve, so there’s no point in showing it. 

[00:19:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, if you have a Knowledge Panel, as the first four do, when you search the name, that’s great, shows confident understanding. And if you have a Knowledge Panel sprout, it shows some understanding but not enough and not confident enough. And if you have no understanding, in my opinion, you’re in deep trouble.

Ultimate Understanding Kalicube: The Difference Between a Knowledge Panel and a Google Business Profile 

[00:20:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Ultimate understanding Kalicube. Now, this happened a few weeks ago, in April, as we’ll see. Why is that ultimate understanding? The right hand side is factual understanding about Kalicube, the company. We have the company at the top in the Knowledge Panel, the head office in the middle, which is Google Business Profile. That’s just a business listing. It’s not a Knowledge Panel. It doesn’t represent knowledge. It represents your representation of your business.

[00:20:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): There is some knowledge in there, some of these aspects here. And if you look at my podcast, I talked to, I forgot the name, oh no, how terrible, about which elements of this are factual and which elements are just Google Business Profile. It’s actually very interesting. Your social profiles, for example, in your Google Business Profile is algorithmically found rather than presented by you. So, these are actually hybrids of a business listing and knowledge. And down here at the bottom, we have Kalicube Pro, which is a SaaS platform. 

[00:21:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, I’ll come back to WordLift. WordLift is a company. WordLift is also a plugin for WordPress, so it’s a software. But they only have one Knowledge Panel, and it’s the company Knowledge Panel. So, Google has understood the company, but it hasn’t understood the software. So, it can present the company to people who are interested in the company’s services, but it cannot present the software to people who are interested in implementing their own WordPress implementation using the plugin.

[00:22:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Obviously, they can, but it’s much more difficult. So, this for me is perfect, company, head office, and a SaaS platform. That’s understanding that we are a company with a head office offering a SaaS Platform.

Ultimate Understanding and Recommendation: Analysing the SERP Using Kalicube Pro

[00:22:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Ultimate understanding and recommendation. This is the interface of Kalicube Pro. And it shows on the left hand side, the recommendations, on the right hand side, the facts. And we look at the quality and the control. And as you can see, we’ve got the top score for both. And these little green dots that you might not be able to see mean positive, and the blue ones mean control or semi-control or no control or not this entity. And as you can see here, Kalicube has all green, all blue. That’s perfect. And that’s taken us two years.

[00:23:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I bought Kalicube.com, having initially started the company with Kalicube.pro, two years ago in May. So, it’s our anniversary today. It takes two years to educate Google and to get this kind of result. And as we’ll see, this kind of result drives enormous amounts of benefits. 

[00:23:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you analyse the SERP using Google’s NLP, you see on the right hand side, you can see that it’s categorised Kalicube from its own SERP. Remember, I’m not feeding it with a text. I’m feeding it with its own results for my company. SERP optimisation and business services, 98% certain that is the category we’re in. And for web services, it’s about 80%, but I can’t read it either. So, that’s incredibly accurate categorisation of who we are and which audience we can serve.

Categorising Entities Through Different Colours Based on Google’s Explicit Understanding and Guessing Using Its Natural Language Processing

[00:24:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And here, why are some in blue and some in gray? The blue ones are entities, things, people, places, companies that Google has explicitly recognised and has found in its own Knowledge Graph. The gray ones, it’s guessing. So, the gray ones, it’s the natural language processing, the large language models that are guessing at what they think it is, but they’re not sure. And the blue ones are explicit understanding.

[00:24:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And as we’ll see, I hope, well, we don’t actually see it there, we see it later on. But if you look here, Kalicube Pro at the top, it’s made a mistake. That’s actually Kalicube the company. Kalicube Pro SaaS is the Kalicube Pro platform. So, from our SERP, it can explicitly recognise the Knowledge Graph entry for the company and the platform. And it’s even recognised down here our friends at WordLift, because they get a mention on our Brand SERP.

The Variety in Kalicube’s Google Business Profile and Knowledge Panel When Seen in Different Countries 

[00:25:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): This is over time. And what I wanted to show here is over here we’ve got the Google Business Profile in the UK, but my company is in France. That doesn’t make sense. Why does Google do that? Because it’s the only factual information it has. 

[00:25:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you get American companies being searched for in Australia with a Google Business Profile, with a map of how to get there. That’s obviously ridiculous. And it makes the company look small to the audience, but it demonstrates Google’s struggle to understand anything useful about them. It shows what it has.

When Building a Knowledge Panel for Your Brand SERP, Triggering and Stabilising It Would Take Months 

[00:25:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then we move here. And we can see over time, the Knowledge Panel appears, the Knowledge Panel, then Google My Business, Knowledge Panel, Google My Business, and the SaaS platform over a period of about three weeks. And then the Google My Business or Google Business Profile dominates again.

[00:25:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, we are in a situation now where we’ve pretty much nailed it, but we are not there yet. And that’s crucial that you don’t think, oh great, here we are, this is the one, job done, I can stop up. Because it can flip. 

[00:26:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you build a Knowledge Panel, you get it to trigger on your Brand SERP, you can expect six months of work to stabilise it, three months iterations for a Knowledge Panel, three months to trigger one in the background, three months to get it to trigger on your Brand SERP foreground, six months to stabilise it, or you may well lose it.

The Geographical Implementation of Google for Google Business Profiles in Different Countries 

[00:26:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then this is cool as well. And we can see the geographical implementation by Google. If you’re over there on the right in America, it’s what I showed you, same for the UK. In France, the Google Business Profile is at top. In France, somebody is much more likely to want to come to my office. We’re tracking about 30 kilometers from my office. That makes sense. The person wants to come to my office, so we’re showing the Google Business Profile.

[00:27:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then Canada, back to the same as over here. And in Australia, the Google Business Profile is down in one of these two. From Australia, it’s highly unlikely anybody wants to come to my office.

A Summary of Who Is Kalicube Through the Use of Generative AI Search, Like Google’s Bard and Bing Chat

[00:27:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Okay. And how will that look like in generative AI search? Google IO was what, a week ago, a week and a day ago? Here we go. I’ve been messing around with Bard. And this is a friend of mine, Leanne Summers. And this is just to prove that it’s not because it’s me. I get the same answer. 

[00:27:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You can’t read that, but it basically summarises Kalicube from top to bottom. If you’re interested in learning more about Kalicube and their services, please visit their website or contact them for a free consultation. The benefits of working with Kalicube, what we do, this is highly accurate. And I suggest that you go and look at Bard or at Bing Chat, and you see how accurate they are for you, your company, your client. And the bet that I’m making now is probably not very. And the fact that it’s not very accurate is based on understanding.

[00:28:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then here we have the follow up question, which is what is Kalicube Pro? That’s even better. They actually recommend, there you go. If you are looking for a way to improve your Brand SERP and online reputation, Kalicube Pro is a great option. The platform is easy to use and provides a variety of features to help businesses achieve their goals. I agree with that, but then I pretty much wrote it.

Google Is a Child That Wants to Understand; You Have to Teach It About Your Little Corner of the Internet

[00:28:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I fed, as the teacher, the child that is Google the information I want it to share. Google is a child. It wants to understand, but it can’t understand because we’re all such messy people. The web is a huge mess. And it’s looking at the web, trying to understand, and it’s struggling. All it wants is for you to teach it about your little corner of the internet. It will accept what you say, if you follow the steps that I’m going to show you. 

[00:29:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You are the teacher. Google is a child. And if we go back to how children are, if they know something and they’re sure about something, they go to the playground at school and they shout it out. If they’re not sure, they don’t shout it out. Google is the same. It won’t show a Knowledge Panel if it’s not sure or if it doesn’t have enough information. It doesn’t want to look foolish. 

[00:29:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, the analogy for a child is hugely powerful. Go through your work thinking, Google is a child, all it wants me to do is to educate it. And there’s a book coming out in July. Google Is a Child, Make It Love You. Almost finished, and it’s going to be delightful. I’m really looking forward to it. 

[00:30:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And Bing, same thing. In fact, it’s not quite the same thing because Bing doesn’t work quite the same as Google’s generative AI. Google’s generative AI is using its huge language learning models to produce text that it thinks it’s written itself, even though we know it hasn’t. Whereas Bing does a search behind the scenes and then summarises what it’s found. 

What are the Benefits of Brand SERP Optimisation and Knowledge Panel Management?

[00:30:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And once again, here we have an incredibly accurate answer and an incredibly cool follow up questions. What are the benefits of Brand SERP optimisation and Knowledge Panel management? What’s interesting about that phrase is that I invented them. So, I’m playing with words, phrases, and ideas that nobody else is talking about. So, I get to see how well I can get these machines to understand something they’ve never seen before.

[00:30:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Obviously, most of us are working on clients where the concepts are understood. So, it’s a question of Topical Authority, building Topical Authority on entity understanding to ensure that we dominate our market and our topic. But here we get the amazing opportunity to do research and to understand how we can feed these machines and to what extent we can get them to pretty much repeat as a parrot what we have been saying.

Further Questions for Getting Machines, Like Google and Bing, Understand Your Entity or Your Company

[00:31:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then I wanted to compare who are Kalicube’s clients? Both of them are very, very, very good. And once again, I would suggest that you look at this for your clients. Ask these machines, who are they, what do they do, who do they serve? The three questions you want to ask them. And if they can accurately answer them, you’re on a really good footing. And if they can’t, you need to educate them. And if they can, that’s step one of the whole process. 

[00:32:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, the focus for this section is that. How do you get these machines to understand the facts about you in the way you want them to be presented? Who is BluBlu or what is BluBlu, if it’s a company? I don’t know who BluBlu might be, but anyway. What do they offer? What products do they have? Which audience do they serve? Who are their clients? So, if you ask those three questions to these machines, they will spit out to you their level of understanding.

Always remember that Bing is a summary, and Google is closer to understanding.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)

[00:32:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, always remember that Bing is a summary, and Google is closer to understanding. Google can sometimes be incredibly impressive and sometimes incredibly awful. But when Google is awful, it means it’s confused. It’s a child. And it’s going, oh, I’m not sure, I’m not sure, I’m not sure, I’m not sure. And it’s just talking gobbledygook.

[00:32:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you’ve got kids, any of you, you’ll know that sometimes imagination runs wild, and they add things, and they invent things, and they get things wrong, and they mix stuff up. That’s Google. Whereas, the Bing child is looking through the books and then summarising them for you. So, in some ways it’s more advanced and in some ways it’s less advanced. So, take it all with a pinch of salt.

The First Among Google’s Three Knowledge Algorithms: The Extraction Algorithm

[00:33:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, to understand how you can educate Google, you need to understand its three Knowledge Algorithms. We start with the Extraction Algorithm. I actually asked Bard, what are the three Knowledge Algorithms? Once again, a term that I created, nobody else is talking about this, and it can spit that out. So, I’ve educated my Google child very well. So, we’ve got Extraction, Knowledge Vault, Knowledge Panel. 

[00:33:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The Extraction Algorithm. The Extraction Algorithm annotates the information Googlebot inserts into the Web Index. It loves structured data, HTML tables, heading, Semantic HTML5, for example. When structure isn’t in place, it intends to create structured data from mostly unstructured online content. 

[00:34:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, how many of you are really keen on structured data? Right. Anybody who didn’t put their hand up, start learning, but it isn’t as complicated as you think it is. Some of it is very simple. Structured data, there I mentioned HTML5. HTML5 is Semantic HTML, which actually just means using your headings correctly in your articles, creating HTML tables, emphasising the right words, italicising the right words, using citation HTML in the correct manner. That’s the simple level.

Other Relevant Structured Data: Semantic HTML5 and Schema Markup 

[00:34:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then you move down to HTML5 in terms of structure, which I’ll show you in a moment. And then the geeky stuff is Schema. And I think what a lot of us do is we start right off thinking, oh, I’ve got to do Schema Markup. You don’t. A well-structured HTML5 page is more powerful than Schema Markup, because Schema Markup simply backs up what the machine should already have understood from your content. It’s not a thing in and of itself. It’s supporting evidence. 

[00:35:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Schema Markup is Google’s native language, and it’s a translation of the content of the page in Google’s native language. So, it’d be like in this situation, if I said all of that now in Italian. It’s not going to happen, but it would be much better, wouldn’t it? Because you would be more sure that you’ve understood. 

[00:35:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You’re all great at English. I’m not criticising anybody’s level of English. My level of Italian is [speaks in Italian]. That was from playing in the street. 10 years playing in the street, you learn to say, a CD costs only 50 francs, although it would’ve been 50 lira at the time. I can’t remember what it was now. Anyway, sorry, back to the story.

The Structure of Your Webpages and Their Presentation of Information Is More Important Than Schema Markup 

[00:36:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thinking about your webpages in terms of their structure and how you are presenting the information is phenomenally important, more important than the Schema Markup. Only start with Schema Markup when you sorted out your HTML.

[00:36:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Fabrice Canel, who’s the principal program manager at Bing, is probably not a friend, but certainly a chum. And we chat from time to time, and he’s explained to me how Bingbot works. He is Mr. Bingbot. He builds Bingbot. And one of the things he said is Semantic HTML5 is hugely important to the bot. Not because he said it should be important to the bot, but because it’s structured, because the bot is looking for structure.

[00:37:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And especially with WordPress, if you use WordPress, 30% of the web is WordPress. If you use WordPress, you have an advantage because of that. That doesn’t mean to say you should use WordPress, but it gives you an advantage in structure, already seen, already understood.

The Five Steps in Crawling and Indexing According to Fabrice Canel of Bing

[00:37:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Here’s Fabrice. I should have done this. Now, he talks about five steps in crawling and indexing. Most of us just talk about crawling and indexing. And in terms of the Knowledge Extraction Algorithm, in fact, what it is, it’s a re-explanation of crawling and indexing.

[00:37:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Discover, we don’t really think about that. How does it discover the page? How does it select it? It doesn’t select every page. Some pages drop out of step two. Then it needs to download it. Does it want to download it? Then it needs to process it. It needs to render it to understand what’s in the page. Then it needs to index it. So, if you think about crawling and indexing in those five steps, it makes it much clearer to you what you need to do. 

[00:38:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, discover, how easy is it to find? Whichever page you’re talking about, think about that. Is it easy to find or is it not easy to find? And that involves internal linking, incoming link, inbound links. How likely is it for this machine to end up on that particular page? That’s page rank, the probability that the user will end up on that specific page.

After Discover as the First Step, the Next Three Steps Are Select, Crawl, and Render

[00:38:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Select, is it a good candidate for being in the index? Now, that’s spam. From their perspective, they’re saying, let’s get rid of all the spam. So, they don’t even bother crawling pages they think are spam. In fact, they don’t even visit pages that they think are going to be spam. 

[00:38:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you have to make sure that the inbound links, the anchor text on the inbound links to your pages don’t make it look anything except incredibly legitimate, because that will encourage them to come to it. So, click here, not great, but that’s one of the reasons why. But if you explain what’s on the other side, it goes, oh, I’ll go and look at that, that sounds interesting. 

[00:39:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Crawl, can it be crawled, is it easy to crawl? That’s all the noindex, the robots.txt, but also the site speed, page speed, which isn’t hugely important to these bots. It’s not a huge, huge problem for them, and I wouldn’t focus on that excessively.

[00:39:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Rendering, can it be rendered? Can the page actually be shown to the bot? Can the bot understand the page and get the HTML? Because once it’s downloaded and processed it, rendering is what Fabrice calls processing, it can then index it, which is put it in the index?

Passage-Based Indexing: Breaking Down the Page Into Small Chunks and Putting Them in Small Folders 

[00:39:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And this is the huge one. Does anybody remember passage based indexing conversation from a couple of years ago? Not really. I’m not going to challenge anybody to answer any questions like at school. Google is the child, not you. Passage based indexing, and Gary Illyes from Google explained it by saying, well, instead of just putting the whole page into a chunk in our index, we break the page down into small chunks and put them in what we call or they define as small folders.

[00:40:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s why headings are important, because it will take heading number two with a paragraph after, put it in a little folder, annotate it. I think this is about that. It will take an image, and it’ll put it in another little folder, and it’ll say, I think this is about that. So, it chunks it all down. So, the easier you make it to chunk it down, the easier it is for the machine to divide it into little folders and annotate them.

Schema Markup Would Help in the Annotation of Your Content and Increase the Level of Confidence in Its Annotation

[00:41:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And when it annotates them, it puts a little tag on. This is all fairly, technically, I’m sure they don’t do it like this. But they put a little tag on it and they say, this is about Kalicube, this is about Jason Barnard, this is about MB Summit. And it adds a confident score to it. I’m 50% confident. I’m 70% confident.

[00:41:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s why your Schema Markup can help. If you’ve got no structure in your page, it’s going to be 30% confident. If you’ve got structure in your HTML, it’s going to be 60% confident. If you add Schema Markup to translate for the child, it’s going to be 90% confident. Those are made up numbers, by the way. Please never, ever quote me on that. I’m trying to make the point about the increasing iteration of confidence. So, can it annotate, and to what level of confidence can it annotate every single piece of content on your page?

The Centrepiece Content: Identifying It Is One of the Biggest Problems They Have at Google 

[00:41:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And one thing Gary Illyes said as well is one of the biggest problems that they have at Google is to identify what they call the centrepiece content. The centrepiece content is the part of the content that the page is actually about. And if we look here, that’s Semantic HTML5, using a tool on Kalicube Pro that divides up intersections. Here you’ve got the head there, there you’ve got the main, there you’ve got an aside, there you’ve got a footer. 

[00:42:26] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): We tag in our Schema Markup, and I do apologise for anybody who’s now thinking, oh, I have to do Schema Markup. We tag that this is the centrepiece content, so it can ignore that and that and that. But in fact, if you put a main around your centrepiece content, it comes to the same thing, especially if you’re in WordPress, where main is always. Unless you’re using some horrible, horrible hacky theme, main is always going to be this chunk, and Google knows that’s its centrepiece content. 

[00:42:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, anybody using WordPress or any other kind of platform, don’t use the hacky ones. Check them on here to make sure that it’s divided up like this. And you’ll see immediately with the colour coding, whether it looks logical or not, can you break it down into chunks? 

[00:43:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The aside here is a piece of sales information we’ve added that isn’t necessary for the bot to understand the content of the page. So, it can safely ignore this, pretty much. It just puts it to one side and says, I know what that’s about. But this is the huge chunk here with the headings and the paragraphs after each one.

The Importance of Putting Table of Contents, Headings, Subheadings, and Alt Tags

[00:43:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Table of contents. Who puts tables of contents on their content? The table of content tells the bot, here is the structure of my page, here are the headings, here are the subheadings. And it can skim read that before it even starts looking at the rest of it, but it’s the same for humans. It’s really good for us as humans. And this is the point about the headings. Can you skim read and understand which part of the content is interesting to you? Which of the little folders do you want to look into, as a human being and as a bot?

[00:44:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, that’s HTML5. These are just headings. That’s a little bit more geeky, but it’s not hugely complicated. Any developer can do it. It means just changing a div to become a main or a footer or a nav or an aside. So, it’s just changing a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of your HTML code to structure it for bots. It’s not a huge development. If a developer ever tells you that’s huge development, they’re full of it. Don’t ever accept that. It’s not. It’s changing divs to become Semantic instead of a div. 

[00:44:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then Schema Markup, if you can alt title tags. I didn’t put any images here because I couldn’t think of any. I only had half an hour this morning to do this. Images, alt tags are incredibly important. I interviewed, I’m forgetting everybody’s name today. I’m having a bad day. No, it’s not going to come.

The Interview of Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) With Five Prestigious People in Bing 

[00:45:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): From Bing, I interviewed five people from Bing. Meenaz Merchant, there you go, got it, who’s the multimedia crawling guy, Fabrice Canel, Frederic Dubut, who’s the blue links algorithm guy, Nathan Chalmers, who’s the whole page algorithm, which we’ll look at later, and Ali Alvi, who’s the featured snippet summary guy.

[00:45:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, I interviewed the five people who actually make total sense and put it all together, and you pretty much got the secret sauce, so I was lucky. Or did I take a long haul flight to Seattle to talk to them? Oh, I think it was the latter. And I begged them. I stood outside Microsoft’s office begging.

Some Advice on Clear Copywriting, With Reference to Koray Gubur: Semantic Triples, Context Clouds, and Relationships

[00:45:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And clear copywriting. Who knows Koray Gubur? Yeah. If you want to try Koray Gubur, go for it, but he’s really, really, really geeky. First step is to clearly write using semantic triples. Does anybody know what a semantic triple is? For those who don’t, but do know their grammar, it’s subject, verb, object. Simple as that. I have Jason Barnard works at Kalicube, subject, works at, object. So, it’s two entities, a person and a company, product and a person, person and their relations, and a relationship. 

[00:46:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, clear copywriting just means instead of writing Jason Barnard, lovely guy, red shirt, no hair, glasses, works for the wonderful company sitting in the South of France, 30 miles from Nimes, Kalicube. You’ve got Jason Barnard works for and Kalicube separated by too many words. As a human being, I can’t understand that phrase. A bot will never understand it.

[00:47:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But you can say, the guy with a red shirt, no hair and glasses, Jason Barnard works at Kalicube, which is based in the South of France. So, using semantic triples and keeping them close together is hugely important. That’s your starting point.

After Applying Semantic Triples to Your Sentences, the Next Points are to Use Context Clouds and to Name Entities With Strong Relationships 

[00:47:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Point number two, context clouds. If I say to you, wave. Then I say, sea, beach, towel. You know that I was tricking you. It’s not this one. Context cloud, use the vocabulary that makes sense to create the context that explains what you’re talking about. 

[00:47:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Number three, name entities with close, strong, and long relationships to ensure that there is an understanding of the Knowledge Graph, the mini Knowledge Graph that is in the content.

[00:47:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, in this case, if I said Jason Barnard, Kate Westbrook is my mother, Josie Barnard is my sister, it understands these three entities, and it understands that we’re talking about this Jason Barnard. If I then say South of France, I’m giving it a place, so it knows that South of France is related to me because I live there. If I say Liverpool, I went to Liverpool University, it knows that relationship. So, it’s getting really sure now that I’m talking about this Jason Barnard and not another one.

An Example of Using Context Clouds for Entities Like Wave and Jason Barnard’s Own Name

[00:48:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): There was context clouds in between, context clouds. Now, think about wave. It’s a great example. Because then if you say train station, railway, mother, sad, tears, child, you know that it’s this one. And yeah, entities, relationships, especially time and place. So, if you say Jason Barnard, Manchester, music, it’s not me. It’s another one. He’s got a podcast about music, and he lives in Manchester. If you say Jason Barnard, Liverpool, Brand SERP, it knows immediately it’s me. 

[00:49:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you can name entities, context clouds, semantic triples, and boom, you’ve got this great clear copywriting. You can add fluffy, interesting adjectives and fun stuff for people. It’s fine, but just make sure it’s clear for a machine with those three tips.

You Don’t Need to Dumb Down Your Words; Use the Vocabulary That Suits the Industry You Are In

[00:49:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the other thing is some people say you should write for a 16 year old child. That’s simply not true. Don’t dumb it down. Use the vocabulary that suits the industry. If you are talking about astrophysics, you’re not going to say the fuzzy ball in the sky. You’re going to say whatever the proper name for the sun is, which I’ve got no idea. I shouldn’t have started with that example. 

[00:49:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You use the vocabulary that the industry uses and the level that they’re using. Google has the understanding, so there’s no need to dumb it down. You just need to be topically relevant and use the correct vocabulary or relevant vocabulary, rather. Are there any questions up till there? I’ve done almost an hour, and I haven’t got halfway through it yet.

The Significance of Annotations and Confidence Scores for the Bingbot and Google’s Knowledge Graph

[00:50:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Knowledge understanding, the Knowledge Vault Algorithm, takes information from the index. And really quickly, I’m going to have to speed up a bit. Hang on, we’ll go back, excuse me. 

[00:50:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): When I talked about indexing and annotations, one thing that all of the people at Bing told me was exactly the same thing. Fabrice Canel’s Bingbot indexes and annotates and adds confidence scores. If a piece of content has not been annotated and does not have a decent confidence score, they cannot even pull it out of the index to be considered for ranking. 

[00:50:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Which is why Gary Illyes said, even with MUM, even with these advanced technologies, if you don’t put the word in the content, they can’t find it. And it isn’t because the machine hasn’t necessarily understood it, it’s because it can’t annotate it confidently. So, that annotation is hugely important, and for the Knowledge Graph, even more so. 

[00:51:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And here, as we can see, Kalicube tracks the updates. And since Bing launched Bing Chat here, there have been a lot of updates to the Knowledge Graph. Google is scared, and it’s updating the Knowledge Graph, and it’s getting much bigger, much faster, and much better.

The Knowledge Vault Algorithm and Its Function for Updating Google’s Knowledge Graph

[00:51:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, the Knowledge Vault Algorithm. If you know what the Knowledge Graph is, it’s Google’s machine readable encyclopedia of information. Wikipedia has 50 million articles, I think. The Knowledge Graph is 1,500 billion facts. And probably in the last three months, they’ve increased that to 2,000 billion facts, because they’re freaking out.

[00:51:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The Knowledge Vault Algorithm updates information, adds new relationships, adds new attributes, increases confidence scores, and adds new entities. If you want to know more about that, visit Kalicube.com. There’s lots of articles about it.

Knowledge is the basis of everything in what you’re now doing in SEO.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)

[00:52:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But everyone focused on that, and they forget that it can also disconnect relationship, remove attributes, decrease confidence scores, delete entities. That basically means it can add knowledge and it can remove knowledge. And knowledge is the basis of everything in what you’re now doing in SEO.

The Knowledge Panel: A Mixture of Knowledge and Extracted Summary From the Recommendations

[00:52:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Knowledge representation is the Knowledge Panel. You all know Knowledge Panels. The Knowledge Panel is actually just a summary of the facts of who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve that the machine has understood. And a solid understanding of your company will get you a great Knowledge Panel. 

[00:52:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And as you can see here, some of it comes from the Knowledge Graph and some of it comes from the SERPs. These parts in red come from the Knowledge Graph, the 1,500 billion facts, and the yellow ones come from the SERP. So, it’s a mixture of fact and summary of information it’s showing in the recommendations. So, most people think the Knowledge Panel is pure knowledge. It’s not. It’s a mixture of knowledge and extracted summary from the recommendations.

The First Step in the Three-Step Process of Building a Knowledge Panel: Establishing an Entity Home

[00:53:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, how to build a Knowledge Panel, three step process. Entity Home, another lovely phrase that I invented, coined. The idea is that the entity has a place it lives, and it’s the place that Google looks to for information from the entity about the entity. Google calls that the point of reconciliation. I call it the Entity Home.

[00:53:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): On your Entity Home, excuse me, I’ve forgotten a part, you need to describe clearly who you are and what you do and which audience you serve. And then you need to corroborate that information, because it doesn’t believe you on your own good word, around the web, on multiple independent, authoritative third party sources. We call that accumulation of corroboration. 

[00:54:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): To know what the trusted sources are, you need to look at your industry. Different industries will have different trusted sources. Some trusted sources like Wikipedia are universal. Others like Search Engine Journal would not be a good trusted source for somebody who sells dogs, as an example. We’ve got, in Kalicube Pro, 40,000 trusted sources all saved up over the last eight years.

The Second Step in Building a Knowledge Panel: Creating an Infinite Loop of Self Corroboration

[00:54:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But then you want to create an infinite loop of self corroboration, or is it an infinite self confirming loop of corroboration? I get confused. But the idea is your Entity Home links to these corroborative sources and says to the Google the child, go over there, double check with this trusted source, if it says the same thing as I do. Then from that source, link back to the Entity Home, if possible. And Google just goes backwards and forwards like this. It keeps seeing the same truth over and over and over and over again. It’s a child that learns by pure repetition. 

[00:55:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That means you need to create an Entity Home, which is the About Page on your website, not your homepage. It should be the About Page on your website dedicated to your company or your person, dedicated to one single entity that explains clearly who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve, links out to the corroborative sources. And you go around all of the corroborative sources, and you make sure they say the same thing.

[00:55:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Because if they don’t, the child gets confused. Every time there’s a contradiction or a confusion or a lack of information, the child will have a tiny doubt. And that tiny doubt will build and build and build and build in its brain.

The Last Step in the Three Step Process of Building a Knowledge Panel: Adding Schema Markup

[00:55:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then you can add some Schema Markup. That’s the really geeky part. We actually have, if you look at the top, a Schema Markup generator on Kalicube Pro. It doesn’t do all of this. But what I will do at some point in the next few days is add an example, the Kalicube example to that page, so you can copy paste it and look at what we do. But if you look down here, this is the representation. You can’t really see that, I imagine. 

[00:56:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, I imagine you’ll get the slides after this and the video, from what I understand. I might be wrong. I’ll give you the slides. Just reach out to me. I’ll send you the slides. The slides aren’t secret, as we now know.

Using Your About Page as the Entity Home and Convincing Google to Use Your Own Description From Your Own Website 

[00:56:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s an About Page, which is my Entity Home. And it’s about the corporation, Kalicube, with person, Jason Barnard is an employee. It’s got a contact point, it’s got an audience, PR agencies, it’s got brand management as a topic, branding agencies are an audience. And as you can see here, all I’m doing is describing who the company is, who’s involved in the company, which audience we serve. And that information is on the page, and this simply confirms it, translates it into Google’s native language.

[00:56:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the idea is that Google uses your own description from your own website in your Knowledge Panel. When you’ve got that, you’ve nailed it. 1% of company Knowledge Panels cite the brand’s own site. It’s really difficult to do, but Google will do it. If Google trusts you enough and you’ve convinced it that what you’re saying on your website is true, it will cite you. But obviously, everybody else has to agree with you. You can’t just expect it to believe you on your own good word.

[00:57:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s knowledge. Does anyone want to shout out something or throw something at me, a present, a gift? No. We’re going to focus on the recommendations. Now, that first half or three quarters or two thirds was knowledge, and that’s the really geeky stuff. So, I’m trying to give a little pause while it all sinks in. 

[00:57:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): As I said, I’ll share the slides with you, and the slides will help you to remember all of the stuff I said. And as far as I know, this is being recorded properly, and you guys get a copy of that recording. So, you can watch it at half speed or double speed or watch it multiple times depending on your learning techniques.

Jason Barnard’s Concept of Darwinism in Search: Survival of the Fittest

[00:58:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Darwinism in Search. Now, it’s going to get complicated again. That didn’t last long, did it? Darwin, everyone knows Darwin and how that works. Basically, you choose, Google is choosing and Bing is choosing the best in market. And anything that’s not best in market gets buried. And what I did here was ask Bing what it is, and you’ll get these slides, and it’s a very good explanation. And it’s taken it from searchenginejournal.com two articles that I wrote. And it’s summarised them beautifully, so I won’t need to explain a great deal of it right now.

[00:59:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’ll explain it quite quickly. It actually suggested the question, and this is an interesting point, you can feed it suggested questions. And the suggested question was, who coined the term Darwinism in Search? And I’ve been writing that on my own website, on our website, saying, I coined the term, I coined the term, I coined the term. And Bing now understands that that’s a relevant question, even though nobody ever asks it. But I’ve managed to get it to suggest that as a question. Then people say, oh, I wonder who did coin it, so I get a bit of fame and perhaps, fortune there.

Mainly, Darwinism in Search Is Based on the Idea That the Blue Link Algorithm Competes With the Other Vertical Algorithms

[00:59:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then it suggested, how can I apply Darwinism in Search for my SEO strategy? Once again, that’s a pretty good summary. And once again, I’ll share the slides with you, but this is the quick explanation. Now, Darwinism in Search is based on the idea that the blue link algorithm, have I got to speed up? Oh, you’re just interested, how lovely. Wave at me when I’ve got to stop or go like that. Where was I?

[01:00:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The blue link algorithm, it’s the foundation of everything, and it is not going to go away whatever happens. Why? Because the entire system of both Bing and Google is built on the blue link algorithm. The blue link algorithm is the old one that we all know, where it ranks the top 10 results. What the system does, and we won’t worry about exactly how it ranks it, but it pulls out the top 10, let’s say.

[01:00:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then the news algorithm proposes its top 10. The video algorithm proposes its top 10. The books algorithm proposes its top 10. The images algorithm proposes its top 10. And they all provide a score, which is based on all of the different factors that are mysterious and difficult and problematic and terrible. And if you read one of these articles from Search Engine Journal, it actually tells you not what the factors are, but what the groups of factors are, from Gary Illyes, not from me.

If You Can Provide More Value Than the Top Blue Links, You Will Get a Place on the SERP 

[01:01:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It looks at those scores. And if any of those verticals, video, news, images, can offer a better score than the blue link, it gets a place on the SERP. It’s a bidding system. I provide more value than the top blue link. If I can provide more value than the top blue link, I get a place. That’s why it’s Darwinism, survival of the fittest. 

[01:01:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, it’s a question of if you want to get into universal search, you have to decide, can I create a piece of content that’s going to be more valuable to the user in the search intent that they have than the blue link. The blue link is always your baseline. Beat the blue link. New game, beat the blue link, just invented that.

According to Nathan Chalmers, Bing’s Whole Page Algorithm Can Veto Any Great Content, So It’s Anti-Darwinistic

[01:02:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But there is a caveat. Nathan Chalmers runs the whole page algorithm. Gary Illyes called it the Magic Mixer. I prefer Nathan Chalmers by quite a long chalk. Nathan Chalmers says, we have a page, the whole page algorithm, and we get these bids, and they’re all very good, and we love them, love their little hearts. Aren’t they delightful? But the SERP is a product. It’s our product. And we need to make sure the product serves the company, as well as the user. 

[01:02:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, the whole page algorithm, the Darwinism is all of this and says, well, the video might have got a better score, but we don’t want it. And it vetoes the video, if it doesn’t want the video. And it vetoes the video based on multiple things. One of which is that they believe it is not helpful or valuable to the user, even though it has a very high score. Another of which is it doesn’t represent Bing results in the way they want. Another of which is ad revenue. 

[01:03:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, the whole page algorithm, ironically, at Bing is called Darwin, but it’s actually anti-Darwinistic. And Nathan Chalmers, when I interviewed him, was laughing a lot because he says, your idea of Darwinism is great, but the irony of this is the algorithm is called Darwin, and it’s anti-Darwinistic. So, you need to remember that even if you create that great content that beats the blue link, it can be vetoed by the whole page algorithm. And if you create a piece of content that isn’t good enough to beat the blue link, it can be promoted by the whole page algorithm.

[01:03:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The most extreme example I’ve seen of this is the search result for Microsoft using startpage.com, which uses Google, but doesn’t use the whole page algorithm. On Google, Microsoft gets videos, it gets news boxes, it gets all sorts of stuff, and all of the results are Microsoft themselves. On start page, only one of the results is Microsoft. The whole page algorithm has truly, truly gone to town, and it’s wiped the entire result out to replace it with other stuff that it thinks is more useful.

The Brand SERP is an amazing insight into exactly what it thinks your audience is looking for.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)

[01:04:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s the power of a Brand SERP, especially in Brand SERPs. Because it’s working on your audience and not on the value of the content in and of itself, the Brand SERP is an amazing insight into exactly what it thinks your audience is looking for, because a lot of it is vetoes and promotions.

Kalicube’s Concept of Understanding, Credibility, and Deliverability 

[01:04:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And at Kalicube, we talk about understanding, credibility, and deliverability. It needs to understand who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve. Then it judges your credibility. Then it sees if you’ve got the content that’s deliverable and useful to your audience. So, if you don’t have the content, you’re not in the race. If you’re not credible, you’ll lose to your competition. If it doesn’t understand who you are and what you do, it’s not going to present you because it doesn’t know who you are. 

[01:05:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It doesn’t know who you are, so it can’t figure out if it trusts you. So, it won’t present your content, not as drastic as that. But if you think about it like that and you start to think, oh no, this is a disaster, it wakes you up really quickly, and it gets you some great results pretty quickly. Well, if two years is pretty quickly, but I think it is, given the current circumstances.

The Huge Question of Where to Start and What to Focus On

[01:05:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Huge question then is where to start and what to focus on, which I’ve written twice. That shows that I was tired this morning and I didn’t have enough coffee. There you go. Start with annotation. Make sure the machine can annotate. So, we’ve seen this screen before. 

[01:05:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Empathy for the devil. Have empathy for Google and Bing. They really struggle with this stuff. They really struggle with analysing and annotating. Discoverability, selecting, crawling, rendering, relatively simple. Dividing the page into chunks, annotating it, and adding confidence scores or being confident about the annotation it’s done, hugely difficult. Give them a hand. Fabrice Canel says, help us, we’ll reward you. 

[01:06:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh yeah, and by the way, Google doesn’t share much. But you talk to Bing, they share everything. They’ve got nothing to lose. It’s great. I’ve done seven or eight interviews with them, and they just share everything. It’s great. I’ve just skipped a step. No, I haven’t.

Kalicube Is Creating Lots of Content About Annotation Because They Realise Its Importance and the Confusion It Brings 

[01:06:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, that first thing is make sure they can annotate. And I’ve explained that, and there’s loads of articles online. You can look on Kalicube.com. We do quite a lot of content on that. We’re creating more, because we realise how important it is and how confusing a lot of this geeky stuff is. We’ve got Leanne Summers, who you saw earlier on, who’s now working with us, who keeps writing me and saying, we need to do a second version of this article that everybody can understand, because I tend to philosophise and get geeky.

[01:07:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, at Kalicube, we’re moving towards this idea of let’s make this accessible to everybody. Because there’s no reason that you can’t use HTML5, there’s no reason you can’t use content tables, and there’s no reason you can’t do this.

Making Sure You Have Rich Sitelinks and Your Homepage Is Ranking Number One

[01:07:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, Rich Sitelinks, these are the Rich Sitelinks. That’s my homepage. That’s the Kalicube query. The homepage ranks number one, easy peasy, no problem at all. But then those Rich Sitelinks, if you don’t have them, then you have a site structure problem. If they’re the wrong ones, it doesn’t understand your site or your audience or both. If the information in them is not accurate, concerning the pages, then the pages don’t have enough content to make it understand what it is that you have there.

[01:07:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, look at these Rich Sitelinks. That’s the first thing you should do. Make sure you have the homepage ranking number one, and that you have the Rich Sitelinks, and that those Rich Sitelinks are the ones that you want for your users, for your audience, so that they can easily access the part of the site they need. The idea of the Rich Sitelinks is to give easy access to deeper parts of your site. So, About Page, login, Google’s trusted sources, that’s something people keep looking for. We’re interested in it at Kalicube.

[01:08:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And with Yoast, we worked with Yoast on their Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panel. And they used to know index, the login page, for security reasons, until I explained to them that the login page needs to be present here, because it’s highly useful to your audience, obviously, and to hackers, but that’s a different problem.

Social Media: Looking at Your Competition and Seeing Within Your Industry What Is Ranking 

[01:08:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then social media, these are the four social media channels we’ve chosen to focus on. We don’t do anything else. We just do those four. How do we do that? We look at our Brand SERP. We see what’s ranking. We work on what’s ranking first. Then we look at our competition. We see what within our industry is ranking in terms of social media, and we focused on that second. We now have four social media channels, and we do them in exactly this order.

Writing great content, dealing with social media, all of this builds a Brand SERP, builds your audience, builds understanding, builds credibility, and improves deliverability. All of which helps search engines, answer engines, and assistive engines.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) 

[01:09:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And social media strategists, there are a lot of them around. And they have a huge, huge job, like content writers. And that’s the thing is people are saying, oh, there’s going to be no work for SEOs. Writing great content, dealing with social media, all of this builds a Brand SERP, builds your audience, builds understanding, builds credibility, and improves deliverability. All of which helps search engines, answer engines, and assistive engines. And you can quote me on that.

Reviews: Collecting It Is Slow and Difficult, But You Need It to Look Good for Your Clients 

[01:09:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Reviews, sounds obvious, but most companies don’t even bother. Same thing. Look at your own Brand SERP. Look at pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Which ones are ranking? Which ones are important? Then look at your competition. Focus on several. Now, we’ve got Clutch right down here, one review. We’re not focusing on Clutch, but I’ll take a good review if it’s there. We’re focusing on Trustpilot, Software Advice, GetApp, Holistic SEO. Koray Gubur, a friend of mine, wrote a 25,000 word article review about Kalicube Pro. 25,000 words is a book, and it’s very positive. And Capterra, Clutch. 

[01:10:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, we actively collect reviews, and it’s hugely frustrating. Collecting reviews is so slow, so difficult, really difficult. Keep at it. We suddenly start looking very good. We only started two months ago. It’s not 500 reviews, but it’s still pretty good and it looks fine. And they all rank on our Brand SERP in one way or another. Here’s Yoast.

FAQ Section: The Questions You Need to Answer and How You Should Present Them

[01:10:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Next in your list of things to do, FAQ section. Start with these questions and People Also Ask. At the top, we’ve got the brand specific questions. You start with those. You put them in a category of brand specific questions, bottom of funnel, post funnel, i.e., clients and close prospects. Then you keep clicking on them, and they will expand. 

[01:11:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And we end up with these more generic questions, which will teach you your topicality questions. And you put them in a separate silo. So, you’ve got FAQ brand, FAQ topic. And you answer as many questions as you can. One question and answer per page. Only write as much as is needed to answer the question. No more, no less. 

[01:11:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you don’t try and write 500 words for can I use Yoast for free? Yes. Full stop. Maybe not quite that, but answer the question. You can expand a little bit, but don’t go overboard. Who wants to read a whole long article about what Yoast is, how it functions, how it’s useful for users? For then at the end, for it to say yes.

Answering Additional Related Questions and Expanding Based on the Questions Your Audience Is Asking 

[01:11:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Think about yourself on your mobile phone, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and scrolling. Answer the question at the top. You can expand on it. Don’t go overboard. It’s a waste of time. And then provide additional related questions underneath, so people can keep investigating your site. Don’t do the accordion system. It’s rubbish for people. It’s rubbish for search engines. 

[01:12:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And here, these are entity statements in the Knowledge Panel. This is questions. These are just pseudo questions presented as fact. If your client has these, you need to answer these ones too. Then you need to expand on that by figuring out what questions your audience are asking, your audience, bottom of funnel, post funnel, who know your brand name, and then build out from there.

Thumbnails and the Advisable Number of Characters for Your Description

[01:12:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): YouTube thumbnails, incredibly important, especially when you look at your Brand SERP and you see these rubbish thumbnails that don’t look like each other. This is mine. I thought I’ll go for green with the red shirt and some fun cartoon characters. And within a couple of weeks, I got it. That’s because I’ve got a video strategy, Google knows that I’ve got a video strategy, and it knows that my audience are interested in my videos. 

[01:12:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Here’s the pro tip. If you ever look at Yoast’s title that says, oh, you’re in the red stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. That’s about 60-70 characters. 166 characters, we’ve got in, 27 words. On mobile, you stop at 60, you look like a fool. You just need to make sure the main message is in the first 60-70 characters, and the rest of it can be your description of whatever you want. And on mobile, it will show up to 166 characters. I’ve never done better than that, but I’ve stopped testing. And I think more than 166 is just getting silly.

Meta Description: It Needs to Summarise the Contents of Your Page Because Google Uses It for Double Checking

[01:13:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The description, the meta description, some people now think, well, I don’t need to fill that in. You do, even if Google doesn’t always use it. Let’s say it uses it 30-40% of the time. It doesn’t matter. Martin Splitt from Google said, we actually use the meta description to double check our understanding of the summarisation of the page.

[01:13:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, your meta description needs to summarise the page because they use it as a double check, like Schema Markup. It’s your representation of what it thinks it’s already understood in a simplified, quick format that reassures the machine. Now, think of the child again. You’re reassuring it, and that’s huge. For those of you who have children, reassurance, making them feel safe, making them feel confident, making them want to shout this information out in the playground is a huge, huge part of parenting. 

[01:14:26] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That was the practical part about what you need to do. That’s your strategy. And as you can see, although there’s some technical elements in there, which is why people need companies like us and you to help them through it, at the end of two years, none of that is complicated. Once you’ve understood it, you just ran and ran and ran and ran and ran.

Quality Rater Guidelines: Factual Understanding of Your Website and Who Is Responsible for the Website 

[01:14:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Quality rater guidelines changed in December. And they’ve changed the term website in many, many places to this, who, and they don’t mention a website. That’s factual understanding they’re talking about. They’re saying to the quality raters, do you understand which company, business, individual, organisation, government agency is responsible for the website? The website is second now, not first. It used to be first. 

[01:15:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): What individual, company, business, organsiation, government agency created the content? So, it’s analysing. Do the people who are checking this understand who’s created the content by association or by extension? That’s what Google are doing with their algorithms.

Understanding Versus Guessing: Analyse Your Brand SERP or Your Client’s Brand SERP Using Google’s NLP

[01:15:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Understanding versus guessing, we’ve got 10 minutes, understanding versus guessing. You’ve seen this before, so I’m not going to show you anything you haven’t seen before. But you can see here that the blue links in the analysis of our Brand SERP shows these entities. And it’s showing that it understands that we are specialising in brand. It shows that we know WordLift, that we work with WordLift, that Kalicube is a company, Kalicube Pro is a SaaS platform. 

[01:16:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Analyse your Brand SERP or your client’s Brand SERP with Google’s NLP, and see how many of those blue links pop up, see how well it’s categorised you, who you are and what you do and which audience you serve, basically, once again. 

[01:16:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And in Kalicube Pro, it’s an agency platform. So, if you’re not an agency, it’s not going to be helpful to you. All of these are tools. I’m basically showing you the tools that we’ve developed for Kalicube Pro, because I’ve built Kalicube Pro to serve my clients. And it’s been a huge loss maker for eight years, because nobody else wanted to use it except me, but I’ve had a lot of fun.

The Concept of E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness 

[01:16:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, at what level is E-E-A-T measured by Google? Content, author, and publisher. So, whatever signals you have for E-E-A-T, and it doesn’t matter what they are. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. I call it just credibility. Those four make you credible as a solution. So, that’s why we talk about understanding, credibility, and deliverability. 

[01:17:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It will judge experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness at a content and author and a publisher level. If it understands who the publisher is explicitly, it understands who the author is explicitly, then it can apply any and all signals fully. If it is having to guess, and if we go back here, all the gray ones, it’s guessing. 

[01:17:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Once again, the confidence of the child is lacking. It isn’t going to apply all of its algorithmic confidence and enthusiasm to the ones that it’s guessing at. But it will apply the algorithmic E-E-A-T signals, whatever they might be, enthusiastically and confidently if it explicitly understands who the author is, who the publisher is, and what the content is about.

The Three Reasons Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Shares His Knowledge for Free

[01:18:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And for this, once again, go to Kalicube.com. We’ve got two articles on E-E-A-T and entity. Once you get into it, there’s gazillions of articles. And I try to share everything. Before we get to the results part, and we’ll move on to the results part, I share a lot for two reasons, or probably three. Because I’ve got to think of a third reason while I’m talking about the first two, because everything in three’s. Otherwise, you won’t remember.

[01:18:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I share everything, because if you ask me a question and I know the answer, I’m like a five year old child. I can’t stop myself telling you what the answer is. I love sharing what I know. I’m a kid, which is probably why I understand Google a little bit in that way. 

[01:18:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Number two is because this is all so simple. I can’t keep it a secret. The three step process to a Knowledge Panel is so simple. Once I’ve explained it, you can all go and do it on your own. You don’t need me. All I can do is build a platform, Kalicube Pro, that helps you do it more efficiently, more effectively, and more easily. So, that’s my aim.

Besides Wanting to Share Everything and Simplicity of Knowledge, Jason Barnard Provides Free Information Because Everybody Needs It

[01:19:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The third reason, and I did think of it while I was talking about the first two reasons, everybody needs this. Let’s say there are 700 million companies in the world. There are 8 billion people in the world of whom 3 billion care about their online identity. 4 billion, more or less, potential clients. I really don’t think any of us need to worry about clients. So, I can afford to teach people and let them move on. I can afford to share this with you, let you do the same. Because there are so many clients, so many people who need this, they just don’t know it yet. 

[01:19:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I’m on a mission to educate everybody that this is the solution, this is what you need. At which point, we all have more clients than we can deal with. So, I can share it as much as I want. You can teach as many people as you want. They can go off and do it on their own. We get another client. Who cares? There are 4 billion others waiting behind them.

Entities, Helpful Content, and Related Searches: All Based on Understanding, Credibility, and Deliverability

[01:20:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, entities, topical, helpful content. This is a really nice little summary. These are the focuses, the foci, the entities with the Knowledge Panels, topical, Knowledge Panel, Entity Home, Knowledge Graph Explorer, WordLift, Fundamentals of Brand SERP, Kalicube. Google understands our products on the left and our topicality on the right, including one partner.

[01:20:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Related searches are huge insights into how much Google has understood about your topicality, and then the helpful content that you need to develop, which is the strategy I gave you in the middle. By analysing a Brand SERP, analysing the Brand SERPs of your competition, you can see exactly where you need to focus. You can make helpful content that Google can deliver to the subset of its users, who are your audience.

[01:20:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): All based on understanding, credibility, deliverability. It’s up to you to communicate that understanding, to convince of your credibility, and to create content that is deliverable for Google to the subset of its users, who are your audience. Deliverable doesn’t just mean page speed. It means, is the content fit for purpose? Is it best in class? Are you a credible solution? Does it understand who you are, in order to understand that you are a credible solution for its audience?

Kalicube Will Release Content With Sara Moccand-Sayegh Aimed at Content Writers, SEOs, Business Leaders, and Digital Marketers

[01:21:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And there’s a white paper coming out on this, which is for content writers first. Then we’re going to do a second one aimed at SEOs, a third one aimed at business leaders, and a fourth one aimed at digital marketers. So, if you’re in any of those four groups, come to Kalicube.com. Four white papers, a lady called Sara, who’s writing them all. She’s brilliant. Sara Moccand-Sayegh, she’s writing them with me, and they’re going to be absolutely awesome. We’ve just finished the first one, 6,000 words, and explains to you this concept from the perspective of a content writer creator.

[01:22:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): We divided it into four personas. This is a super idea we had last week. We realised that it was getting too long. It was about 12,000 words. We split it into bits and taken all the techy bits out for the content creators, added them back for the SEOs, removed a bit of the content for the SEOs and so on and so forth. So, four white papers, which is basically one split into four bits.

Kalicube’s Clients, Generative AI on Google, Bing Chat, and the Kalicube Process 

[01:22:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Kalicube clients. This is what I wanted to show you right at the end. The level of understanding is what you can expect. And with Bing Chat and generative AI on Google, this is fundamental, because generative AI is recommendations and summaries mixed with fact. So, it’s saying, at the top, in both of these, here’s a summary of the facts, including our recommendations. And that’s exactly what I’ve just been talking about for the last hour and a half.

[01:23:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And here is just some numbers to show you. This is the Kalicube Process on Kalicube. That’s one of those things that sends the world into a backward spiral. It’s like searching for Google on Google. We’ve tripled the number of impressions and we’ve almost quadrupled the number of clicks in one year.

After Buying the Kalicube.com Domain, Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Started His Company With a Team of 10 People 

[01:23:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I bought Kalicube.com two years ago, started the Kalicube Process as soon as I bought the domain on myself, having all of us, I think, worked harder on our clients than we do on ourselves. I’ve got a small team of 10 people. Everybody has a role. Everybody has a responsibility. Everybody looks after part of the Kalicube Process.

[01:24:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And this is the result after a year. And this is general search, nothing to do with brand. Our brand searches have improved. Our click-through rates improved. And what you see with branded search is the more you work on this, the more brand searches you get. The higher the click-through rate, becomes because more people know about you from all of the different actions you’ve been making across the entire internet with a digital strategy, which includes videos, social media, reviews, all the other platforms you’re placing content on.

[01:24:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, it becomes a digital marketing strategy. People are more aware of you, so they search your name more. But also, searches on your brand name move from informational to navigational.

Aiming for a Higher Click-Through Rate for Your Website by Increasing Your Brand Awareness and Optimising Your Brand SERP

[01:24:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Kalicube, we’re currently at about 30% click-through rate. So, it’s still majority research information, because people don’t really know who we are. But last year, it was 25%. Now, it’s 30, and we’ve doubled the number of searches. So, we’ve actually got 50% more clicks to our website from interested clients. And we’re going to do a case study on that with Sara, because she likes numbers and so do I, for that matter. 

[01:25:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I was going to say something else. Oh yeah, right, at the other end of the spectrum is Facebook. Their click-through rate on their Brand SERP for their website is 90%, huge brand awareness. People just want to navigate to the site. So, as a brand, you want to look at the branded searches on Search Console. And whatever your percentage is today, you want to move it as near to 90% as you can.

[01:25:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Generally speaking, for a medium size company, more than 60% is never going to be possible. For a company that’s incredibly well known is in its niche, 80% is possible. 90% like Facebook, if anybody ever does it, please do come and tell me because I’d be really interested in how. But that idea of I’m not very well known, 30%, I’m very well known in my niche, 60%, I’m leading my niche, 80%, I’m king of the world, 90% is a pretty good benchmark for you to aim for.

More About the Kalicube Process, Generative AI in Search, and Knowledge Panels

[01:26:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And just to bring this back to this, that branded search is one thing, but that drives all the rest of this because of the way you’re working on it. With that Kalicube Process, using understanding, deliverability, and credibility and using an entire strategy based on what it is your audience is actually interested in, from analysis of what Google’s showing you it’s interested in.

[01:26:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Sorry, run out of time. Generative AI in search. If we go back here, we don’t have it. Tomorrow, that was another thing I thought of on the bus. Looking at Google IO, there’s a screenshot, and I’ve taken the screenshot. It’s going to be such fun for Kalicube. We are in exactly the right place. 

[01:27:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Look at this Knowledge Panel. It’s a summary of what we need to know about John H. Watson. Generative AI in search is going to be coming from there. And Kalicube specialises in Knowledge Panels, woo-hoo. So, the Kalicube Process, optimise your brand from the Brand SERP outwards, you are the best in your market, show it across search, take control of your brand narrative online, and dominate the competition.

The Conclusion of Jason Barnard’s Presentation About the Kalicube Process   

[01:27:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I actually wanted to look at yours, but I think we don’t have time. So, just to conclude really quickly, from my perspective, that was the Kalicube Process. I used Kalicube as an example because I’d never done it on myself before, as it were. I’ve done it for clients. The results have really just come through. So, this is a breakthrough moment. 

[01:28:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I took the courage, when I didn’t have any money two years ago, to employ a team to apply the Kalicube Process that I could not do and you cannot do on your own. And the results have been stunning. And this is the first time I’ve shared the results of what we’ve actually done. 

[01:28:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, the idea at the end was that people shout out brand names, and we go through the Brand SERP, and we start analysing what it is they can do. But it’s 11:32, and it’s too late. And I’ve just not shut up, have I, for one and a half hours? Hands up, who thought that was interesting? That was a loaded question. Hands up, who’s really bored? Hands up, who wishes I would shut up? Thank you very much.