Introduction of Jason Barnard and His Expertise in Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels
[00:00:00] Speaker: Hello everybody and welcome to Digital Marketing Europe. I’m not Jason Barnard, but I am super excited to introduce Jason Barnard… Welcome, Jason!
[00:00:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thank you very much. I’m very happy to be here. Unfortunately, the original host couldn’t be here, so I thought I would introduce myself with a silly cartoon voice from my days as a cartoon character as we will see.
[00:00:26] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m Jason Barnard. I’m The Brand SERP Guy. I’m the CEO and founder of Kalicube which is a software company that builds software and serves clients and customers helping them with their digital strategy, their Brand SERPs, and their Knowledge Panels, which is what we are looking at today.
The Importance of Brand SERPs and How to Read Them for Building a Future-Proof Digital Strategy
[00:00:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Reading a Brand SERP to build your future proof digital strategy. Now, Brand SERPs, the search engine results page for a brand are hugely powerful and vastly underestimated, and I’m going to teach you to read them, read your own, to build your bespoke future-proof digital strategy.
[00:01:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Sounds like a big claim. You’ll see at the end it isn’t such a big claim. This is really simple. So I’m The Brand SERP Guy, as you can see here. That’s the result for my name, Jason Barnard. Search it now on your computer, on Google or on Bing, and see what turns up. You’ll see that the result is all about me.
The Power of a Current and Accurate Brand SERP: Why Keeping Your Information Updated Matters
[00:01:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And it’s pretty rich, very, very convincing about me as a digital marketer, but also as we’ll see, a blue dog and a rock musician. John Mueller from Google calls me Mr. Knowledge Panel. The Knowledge Panel up there on the right is the facts about me, as we will see later on. And it shows pretty much all of my career as a blue dog, a yellow koala, and a musical artist through my life to today as The Brand SERP Guy. I’m a digital marketing… whatever that means.
[00:01:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): As you can see from LinkedIn currently living in Paris, that recently changed, so that’s actually now not up to date and I’ve just reminded myself to go and correct that. And that demonstrates how much you need to pay attention to that Brand SERP.
[00:02:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You need to keep it updated. I moved away from Paris. I didn’t update the information on LinkedIn, and Google is now showing the wrong information in my Brand SERP to my audience when they Google my name, which is a huge problem, especially if they want to come and visit me in Paris and I got an email from Kate Tune the other day saying, I’ll come and visit you in Paris.
[00:02:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That might have been what tricked her. And in fact, I’m in the south of France, so we can’t have lunch together. I was a voice actor back in the day doing voices like this. This was Daddy Koala, the father of the yellow koala. And I was the blue dog who had a voice like this. We made a TV series and multiple music albums, and you can see that here on my Brand SERP.
Jason Barnard’s Diverse Career and Expertise in Digital Marketing, Music, Writing, and Podcasting
[00:02:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): My Brand SERP represents not only my current life as a digital mark, but my past life as a blue dog in a cartoon. And I was a punk folk musician. You can see there The Barking Dogs. I played the double bass and I also played the bass, as you can see behind me. That was a 10-year career, four albums, 40,000 albums sold, 660 concerts playing the double bass punk folk style, if you can imagine that.
[00:03:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I have a podcast. It’s a very groovy podcast where I talk to leading digital marketers around the world about the subtopics they know lots about. We’ve got 250 episodes, guests such as Rand Fishkin, Bill Slawski, Koray Gubur, and the less geeky guests such as April Dunford or Scott Duffy for that matter.
[00:03:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m also an author. I wrote The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business, which is basically the whole process and the approach that we have at Kalicube to Brand SERPs using Brand SERPs to help you to leveraging Brand SERPs to improve your digital marketing strategy. I also write for leading SEO publications.
[00:04:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And most importantly, I’m the CEO and founder of Kalicube. We have a SaaS, SaaS Platform, we have courses and we obviously have the book. I, in short, am The Brand SERP Guy. Now the approach, we’re getting into the meat potatoes here, the approach is to look at this Brand SERP, that’s Kalicube. So we switch from me to my company.
The Importance of a Positive, Accurate, and Convincing Brand SERP for Your Audience
[00:04:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): On the left-hand side, you can see the result on desktop. Looks pretty impressive. On the right, you can see mobile, looks quite confused, but that’s the nature of mobile. I split that entire serpent into two columns. But you can see the two are very representative of Kalicube, who we are, what we do, and which audience we serve, and it’s positive, accurate, and convincing.
[00:04:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, those are the three things you need: positive, accurate, and convincing to your audience because Google has understood and can represent you correctly because it understands who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve. If you remember those two triples, you’re onto a good thing with Brand SERPs.
The Importance of Google’s Recommendations in Brand SERPs
[00:05:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now I like to talk about the SERP this way. On the left hand side, you have recommendations. It’s Google’s recommendations of which content is going to be most useful and valuable to your audience when they Google your brand name or your personal name. So here you can see it’s recommending my site. It’s recommending Twitter, it’s recommending the academy. It’s recommending LinkedIn and Facebook.
[00:05:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Can you see there immediately it’s recommending where my audience can connect with my company, Kalicube. It’s incredibly important that Google gets that right because then it would be positive, accurate, and convincing, and indeed helpful and valuable to your bottom of funnel audience googling your name. Because the people who google your name are right at the bottom of the funnel just waiting to do business with you as a customer, as a journalist, as an employee potentially, all sorts of people who want to do business with your brand in one way or another are googling your brand name or indeed your personal name.
The Kalicube Process: Educating AI Algorithms Like Children with Kalibot
[00:06:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And on the right hand side, it’s the Knowledge Panel. Those are the facts according to Google. Does Google understand who you are? If it doesn’t understand who you are, you don’t have a Knowledge Panel and today’s world, if you don’t have a Knowledge Panel, you are a huge step behind everybody else.
[00:06:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So the Kalicube process. The Kalicube process is the process of educating the AI algorithms like children. We obviously focus on Google generally speaking because Google is the big player in search at least, and we’ll see later how that might change. And on the left there you can see Kalibot. We’ve just created Kalibot, and it’s the adult that teaches these children.
The Importance of Educating AI Algorithms for Chat-Based Search
[00:06:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And you can leverage the Kalicube process to become Kalibot and educate the children about the facts. The facts on Google are represented by the Knowledge Panel. Same thing on Bing. But we’ve also got ChatGPT on Bing. And as you can see here, that understanding of who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve, is fundamentally important to the future of chat-based search.
[00:07:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So on Bing ChatGPT and on Google Bard and I had access to Bard a couple of days ago. Bard is less good than ChatGPT on Bing in my opinion, but certainly something to keep an eye on because since Google dominates with 90% of the market, even if it’s less good, it’s still going to dominate. So you need to make sure that these machines understand who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve once again.
[00:07:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And you can see here the Kalicube process, Bing understands exactly what the Kalicube process is, and it’s got the information directly from us. Then we can say, how do we implement it and it can explain the Kalicube process to you, and the different resources that we offer?
The Importance of Being an Authority on Yourself in the Era of Answer Engines, Search Engines, and Assistive Engine
[00:08:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And once again, it’s getting the information from us. That might seem obvious. It might seem to you that it’s always going to get the information from you. That’s not true. Try on ChatGPT, Bing, searching your brand name, your products and ask it to explain them to you. Number one, does it get the information from you? The answer is probably no. And if it does get the information from you, is it explaining clearly?
[00:08:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the third question is, is it verbose? Is it writing a lot? I did this test on a lot of different brands, and generally speaking, it will write one, two, maybe three sentences. Here you’ve got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 sentences. It means it’s understood very clearly from my website, who I am, what I do, which audience I serve, and how this process works.
[00:08:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But more importantly, it’s citing me because it trusts me to talk about myself. And becoming an authority on yourself is something that’s fundamentally important to this whole process and process moving forward with answer engines, search engines, and assistive engines as we’ll see in a moment. And the idea of being the authority for yourself is much, much, much less easy than you would initially imagine.
[00:09:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And here we’ve got the benefits. We can see once again that it’s truly explaining whether it’s a search engine on Google, which we see on the left, an answer engine like this one on Bing, and they’re calling it an answer engine or an assistive engine. Discover would be an assistive engine where it’s pushing information, pushing solutions to the user before they’ve even asked for it.
The Power of Bringing Users Down the Funnel Through Search, Answer, and Assistive Engines
[00:09:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So we have three epochs here: search, answer, assistive. And they will all coexist. And the Kalicube process feeds them all. And that this whole talk is about the Kalicube process. It’s not something you need to buy, it’s something you need to do. And here, as you can see, and this is the cherry on the cake, especially for the assistive engines, is we can make and suggest questions that the ChatGPT assistive engine or answer engine can suggest to the user so we can bring them down the funnel.
[00:10:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): We can encourage the machine to bring our audience down the funnel to the buying point simply by conversing with the engine. Now, that might seem, oh bad, I want the people to come to my site. But in fact, if the people trust Bing and Google to answer their questions and solve their problems, which theoretically they do since they’re using the engine, that recommendation is incredibly strong.
[00:10:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It will have informed them through the content that we provided about what it is we offer, how we can help them. And when they get to the bottom, they click, they come to the website, they buy, they’ve been recommended to come and buy from us by Google or by Bing or indeed in the future by Apple.
[00:11:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s hugely powerful. That last click is the valuable click. And if you can bring people down the funnel through the answer engine, the assistive engine, or indeed the search engine, and get that last click and they’re ready to buy because you’ve been recommended by Bing, Google or Apple, you’re winning the game.
Analyzing the Brand SERP: Learning from Algorithms and Educating Google
[00:11:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So how do we do this? We read the Brand SERP and we see what’s wrong and what’s right about the digital marketing strategy. In short, we learn from the algorithms so that we can educate them, and that’s hugely powerful. If you want to know how to educate Google just ask Google.
[00:11:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Starting at the top, number one, my website ranks number one. That should be a given. If it isn’t, either it’s because your name is incredibly ambiguous, in which case you have a huge problem but not insurmountable. We have clients who have managed to rank number one from incredibly ambiguous names.
Maximizing the Top Spot: Improving Your Digital Footprint and Optimizing Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions
[00:12:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The other option is that you haven’t got a well organized site. Your site isn’t clearly the representation of your black brand online. And there you have a digital footprint problem where the signals are not clearly pointing to this website, representing your brand. And that’s the foundation of a misunderstanding on Google’s part or confusion on Google’s part. So you would want to immediately focus here to make sure that Google does understand that that website represents you. If you do have your website in the top spot, think about the meta title and meta description and the content of the page, what is Google showing.
[00:12:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, Amazon had until a year and a half ago, cheap high five books and close or something like that in their meta title. Now it says Smile will pay less. It took them 25 years to figure out that that title of their homepage should be branding and and not sales. If somebody’s searching your name, they know who you are. You should be convincing them that you are indeed the right solution. You should be branding to them.
How to Use Rich Sitelinks to Improve Your Website’s Structure and Content
[00:13:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Next, Rich Sitelinks. If you don’t have them, then your site has a structural problem of some sort. So this is also a mini SEO audit. If you have the Sitelinks and they are relevant, then Google has understood the structure of your site. It understands what your users want and are looking for when they search your name. So here we have About Team Kalicube, Contact the Kalicube Team and the Kalicube process.
[00:13:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So what we’ve managed to do is convince Google that people searching our name either want to visit the homepage or they want to learn about us or they want to learn about the team. So we’ve managed to push the team to the fore, or they might want to contact us, they know who we are, that’s logical. And then they might want to know about the Kalicube process because that’s what we talk about all day long.
[00:13:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Google‘s nailed it. Look at your Rich Sitelinks. Does it represent the content on your website that your audience would naturally want to see? And be very careful if you’re an international brand. Check. Different countries, the results will be very different according to country, even in the same language, and certainly different in each country, depending on the language. Pay attention to that and by improving that as we’ll see you improve your website’s structure and your website content.
Consistency Across Different Sites: Ensuring Your Message is Aligned
[00:14:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Next, go through the sites that you control. You’d be surprised at how, uh, disparate is your message across these different sites, even sites you. . So make sure you are talking about the exact topics in that co correspond to each of these platforms. As you can see, we are pretty consistent and there in the middle, you can see a French version because I’m in France.
Optimizing Your Social Media Presence for Better Brand SERP Results
[00:14:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Next, optimize your social media strategies. If you don’t have Twitter Boxes, but you focus on Twitter in your social media, then your social media Twitter strategy is off whack. It’s a great signal that Google cannot see the engagement that your users have on your Twitter channel. If you’re not focusing on Twitter, there’s no reason to have the Twitter Boxes. There’s also YouTube Boxes, also TikTok Boxes. So whether you have them or not on your Brand SERP, when your audience searches the name, indicates whether or not Google perceives that that channel is important and engaging for your audience.
The Kalicube Process: Optimizing Review Platforms and Understanding Related Searches
[00:15:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So it’s a great way to see where you’re getting it wrong and then obviously manage the review platforms. Getting great reviews is hugely important, seeing which ones rank on your Brand SERP pages 1, 2, 3 are immediate signs of which ones are important to Google about you, and they’re the ones that you should focus on in order to improve Google’s opinion of you, but also improve the users’, your potential audience, opinion of you.
[00:15:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Google is a reflection of where they are hanging out, where they are talking about you, where they are interested in you. And if you go back here as well with Twitter, if you’re focusing on Twitter and you think you’re doing a great job, but the Twitter box is don’t appear, it might be that Google doesn’t perceive that your audience hangs out there, in which case it isn’t useful. So it might actually be the wrong strategy.
[00:16:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That is what the Kalicube process will teach you very simply. And then think about related searches. With Kalicube, we have Kalicube Pro, which is the SaaS Platform. We have Kalicube Academy, which is obviously the academy where you can get the courses. Kalicube Tuesdays, which is my weekly event. Knowledge Graph Explorer, we have a Knowledge Graph Explorer on the Kalicube site. Fundamentals of Brand SERPs is my business.
The Importance of Related Searches in Understanding Your Brand’s Perception on Google SERP
[00:16:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): SERP, meaning we talk a great deal about SERP. Therefore, that’s logical. Knowledge Panel and Wordlift partner with Kalicube in terms of they provide some of the data for the platform.
[00:16:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Those related searches indicate what Google has understood to be the most important aspect of your business. So if they’re wrong or they’re misrepresenting you, or there aren’t any, you have a huge problem, and that’s a problem of your digital ecosystem or your digital footprint. It can also potentially be a problem of the organization of your website. So pay special attention to these because they give you a holistic view of how Google perceives you and what it perceives to be the most important aspects of you.
[00:17:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And you can change that by changing the emphasis of your marketing. So once again, we’ve got a great insight there in terms of which buttons you’re pressing as you spread the word of your brand around the web. And here, importantly, we’ve looked at Twitter, we’ve looked the different messages that you’re pushing out around the web that triggered the related to this search, we’ve talked about review platforms, Twitter, we’ve talked about different platforms outside of your own website, and that’s hugely important.
Optimizing Google’s Recommendations: A Strategy for Improving Your Entire Digital Marketing Approach
[00:17:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Obviously in SEO you focus on your own website, but this process is the entire digital marketing strategy. Google is simply the window into understanding what’s right and what’s wrong, and which buttons to press. So what you will do is improve your entire digital strategy and Google, or better performance on Google is actually, let’s say just a bonus, but in fact it’s a huge bonus, obviously, because the SEO is baked in as we’ll see.
[00:18:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So how does this help? It’s a recommendation strategy. Once we optimize Google’s recommendations, we are improving our digital marketing strategy. We focus first on branding. Define a meaningful brand message, a clear About brand voice, and a strong visual identity, and be consistent over time across every first, second, and third party platform. That’s huge.
[00:18:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Branding is going to be Google’s understanding of who you are. Marketing creates relevant, valuable, and helpful content for your audience, and place it on the platforms where they naturally gather social media, third party sites, and indeed your own sites. That’s how they’ll understand what you do and what you offer.
How to Use Branding, Marketing, and SEO to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy
[00:19:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thirdly, SEO. Take the marketing and the branding that you’ve done and package them for Google using simple, non-geeky SEO techniques. You can use the geeky ones too if you want. It gives you an advantage, but you don’t need them. So the process is all about using branding first, marketing second, and SEO is simply packaging.
[00:19:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): This content that you are creating for your audience anyway packaging it for Google and for Bing, indeed. So what you do is you influence what Google’s showing on that left hand side and that influence that you exert on it by changing your digital marketing strategy through branding, marketing, and SEO will help you to grow across the board.
Managing the Knowledge Panel: Why Consistency and Corroboration Matter
[00:19:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now the facts. The facts on the right hand side, the Knowledge Panel, and here’s how we manage a Knowledge Panel. We identify the Entity Home. That’s where the entity lives online. That should be on your site and own site. This is where Google and Bing and Apple and Amazon indeed all look for information about the Entity from the entity.
[00:20:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And surprisingly, they’re looking for your version of the facts. They’re looking for your version of the facts because once they’ve got the versions from you, they can go around the web and double check what you’re saying. So you want consistent corroboration all across the web. You need everything that you say on the Entity Home to be repeated somewhere on an authoritative, relevant, trustworthy source preferably multiple times.
[00:20:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And you need it to be consistent across every source, your own websites, your own social media channels, and also third party. Now, the third party corroboration is obviously the most powerful, so you would need a PR campaign, and once again, that’s simply improving your digital marketing.
Creating an Infinite Self-Confirming Loop to Optimize Entity Home and Corroborative Sources
[00:20:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then you need to sign post. You need to create an infinite self confirming loop by linking from the Entity Home to the corroboration, from the corroboration, back to the Entity Home. These AI algorithms are children and they learn by repetition. They go from the Entity Home to the corroborative source. They see the same information. They come back to the Entity Home. They reread the information. They go back to another corroborative source. They come back to the Entity Home and so on and so forth.
[00:21:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Not every corroborative source needs to repeat all the information, but by accumulation of corroboration, we might say it will understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve. As I said, that is the foundation of everything you will be doing, whichever platform we’re looking at. So take control. Don’t just think that these machines will figure it out, they won’t. Or they will, and they’ll get it wrong, or they will and they won’t be confident.
Taking Control: Ensuring Accuracy and Confidence in Information Presented by Search Engines
[00:21:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You need to take control. You need to make sure that they get it right, they get all the information that you want them to and that they’re incredibly confident in that information. And the demonstration of that was the Bing Chat I showed earlier on that shows they have the information, they’re confident in the information, and the information is extensive.
[00:22:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Okay, so Google is happy. Where’s my digital strategy? When you improve Google’s recommendations, you’ve improve your digital strategy. As I said, that is great site structure and it shows that Google understands what’s important to my audience on my website. My website is well-written, well-presented, very clear, and well-structured. I’ve improved my Twitter profile, my Twitter strategy engaging more with my users, getting more traction from that Twitter profile, which sends users to my website and also encourages them to search my brand name.
The Importance of Improving Your Online Reputation Across Different Platforms
[00:22:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I’ve improved the world’s opinion of me through these amazing reviews that we have got on these different platforms, including down there at the bottom, a review of the Kalicube process platform for agencies by Koray Gubur a great friend, an incredibly smart person. If you don’t know who he is, find out who he is because he’s the smartest SEO I have ever met by a long chalk.
[00:23:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): When you’ve improved Google’s understandings about the facts about you, then you’ve educated every big tech player. And you have improved their understanding. And you can see here Kalicube Knowledge Panel on Google on the left, Kalicube Knowledge Panel in the middle from Bing, and the Kalicube results in Siri on Apple.
[00:23:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So don’t ignore Apple, although they don’t have a visible search engine, they do have a vast number of iPhones, iPads and Macs in the world, and they are building a search engine behind the scenes that will, I believe, become perhaps not as significant a player as Google today at 90%, but certainly much more significant than we’re used to.
The Search Wars: Microsoft Bing vs Google and the Emergence of Apple’s Search Engine
[00:24:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So in what way is that future proof? The search wars have began again. ChatGPT on Bing has reignited the search wars. It’s suddenly front page news on every newspaper. Everybody’s talking about it. And it’s important to remember that Microsoft Bing have got nothing to lose. They’ve got such a small market share.
[00:24:26] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The market share they have is profitable for them, so any wins they get are welcome and pure profit, and every percentage point of the world’s search market is worth $1 Billion a year. So there’s a lot for Microsoft to win and a lot for Google to lose. Add to that, if Apple bring in their search engine in the next couple of years, that could be taking a few percentage points away from Google.
[00:24:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Google is suddenly looking like they’re struggling, especially when you consider search engines, answer engines and assistive engines. Siri will be an answer and an assistive engine. Bing has already moved into answer engines. Google is still stuck in search engines. So, I would argue the search was are about to begin.
[00:25:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): We don’t know who will win, but right now, Microsoft Bing launched ChatGPT February 7, 2023, and within a couple of days Google stock value lost $1 Billion in one single day. That’s absolutely huge. But let’s have a look back. For those who remember the search wars from the end of the [Northies].
[00:25:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): In three short years, Microsoft MSN lost 30% and Google doubled. I’m not saying that’s going to happen again, but something similar is about to happen. There will be a shift in dominance. That was year one of the search engine was 2006 and that is 2009. And you can see there has been a shift of 130 percentage points won and lost 130%.
[00:26:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If we talk $1 Billion per percentage point, $130 Billion, Google moved from 18% to 37.59%, doubled. Microsoft lost 30%. That’s absolutely huge. So imagine if that happens again, even to a smaller extent, that’s going to change the search landscape, but also the answer landscape and the assistive landscape. And Siri is assistive. Amazon is assistive. Google has Google Home. Who’s winning that war? That’s another question.
How the Kalicube Process Helps Build a Future-Proof Strategy for Your Brand SERP
[00:26:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So the Kalicube process basically builds this future-proof strategy in year one if you focus on owning page one of your Brand SERP, including the Knowledge Panel on the right hand side. You will own your brand narrative. You will position your brand, and these engines will understand who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve.
Establishing a Factual Understanding Foundation: The Key to Building Topical Authority
[00:27:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And from that factual understanding foundation where they can accurately represent your brand to your audience when they’re searching for you or when they’re searching around you, you can start to build years two and three to dominate your niche on Google search and indeed on Bing without phase one with the understanding you can’t do this because phase one is the platform that empowers you to become the recognized authority in your industry. If they’ve understood who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve, they’ve understood your niche, and you can build your topical dominance, your Topical Authority on that understanding.
[00:27:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Without that understanding, you cannot build the Topical Authority. You cannot even build E-E-A-T because if Google or Bing or another engine is to apply credibility signals, experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness, they need to understand who they’re applying it to or they cannot apply it fully.
Working on E-E-A-T and Topical Authority Beyond Year Three
[00:28:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So in order to get your E-E-A-T, your topical dominance, your Topical Authority, you need them to understand who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve, which is working on your Brand SERP in year one. Years two and three, you dominate your niche. Years four plus, you future-proof your digital strategy from the risks that posed by ChatGPT on Bing, Apple Search, Google Discover, answer engines, Google Discover obviously being an assistive engine.
The Importance of Brand SERP in the Kalicube Process: Short, Mid, and Long-Term Digital Strategy
[00:28:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The full implementation of the Kalicube process is your assurance against these threats. Short, mid, long-term, your Brand SERP is vital to your digital marketing strategy. I think people, most people don’t even think about it short-term, but for me it’s the foundation of everything you’re doing short, mid, or long-term. Those recommendations on the left rail, those facts on the right rail, whether you focus on Google, whether you focus on Bing, whether you focus on Apple, doesn’t matter.
[00:29:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s going to be a similar idea of recommendations, search engine, facts, answer engine, assistive engine. I focus on Google because ironically, Google is the hardest to teach about the facts on the right hand side and for the recommendations. It’s pretty easy to teach, but is more difficult to teach, so Bing can be a better source of information for the recommendation side where you might be going wrong.
The Kalicube Pro SaaS Platform: Streamlining Digital Marketing with a Future-Proof Strategy
[00:29:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s up to you whether you use Google or Bing. At Kalicube, we really don’t care who wins the search and recommendation engine wars because with the Kalicube process, our clients and our agencies’ clients will see growth whoever wins. As you can see with Bing, we’re already winning and it’s only been out a month. With Google Bard, I’ve done similar experiments. We’re already winning.
[00:29:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): These machines understand who we are. They understand what our message is. They understand our brand, they understand what we offer, they understand how we offer it, and they understand to whom we have a relevant offer. And the Kalicube Pro SaaS Platform helps agencies build this process into their digital services that they’re giving to their clients.
[00:30:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s absolutely huge. It streamlines the process. It makes the process of digital marketing simple and easy. The strategy, as you’ve seen, is incredibly simple to lay out, and you’re not making guesses. You are using the algorithms output to understand what you need to do to help the algorithms. And when you help the algorithms, you’re actually helping yourself by building a healthier, wider, more effective digital marketing strategy across the board.
Leveraging the Power of Search Engines to Enhance Digital Strategy
[00:30:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If you think about Google and Bing, what they’re doing is they’re looking over our shoulders all the time. They’re constantly crawling the web. They’re constantly watching me. They’re constantly watching you. They’re constantly watching Kalicube. They’re constantly watching your audience. So who better to recommend what you need to do as a business to make your audience your potential client. Happier, better-served with what they need from you.
[00:31:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So using the Brand SERP is an insight into your digital ecosystem first. Secondly, a critique of your digital strategy. And thirdly, a move, a way to look and move forwards into the world of assistive engines and answer engines whilst maintaining your domination of the search engines.
Learn More About the Kalicube Process Through the Book, Courses, and SaaS Platform
[00:31:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So if you want to learn more and dig deeper into the Kalicube process, you can get inspiration from the book, which is behind me and on screen. It’s a quick read. Marie Haynes said she read it in a weekend. Marie Haynes, super-duper smart SEO. Read it in a weekend. Said, wish I’d read it five years ago. So if somebody like Marie Haynes thinks the book was helpful, you probably will too.
[00:31:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If you want to do DIY the Brand SERP courses, 12 hours of courses where I teach all of this stuff about Brand SERPs, Knowledge Panels. So you can do it. And if you’re an agency, please do talk to us about the Brand SERP SaaS Platform, which also helps to build Knowledge Panels and helps to build this, oh wait, sorry, rather it maps out. This future-proof digital marketing strategy for search engines, answer engines and assistive engines. Thank you very much.
