How To Create A Google Knowledge Panel as a Writer | Interview Jason Barnard, The Brand SERP Guy
If there is one thing that smart writers have that ordinary writers don’t, it’s a magnetic business card on Google – a Google Knowledge Panel. If you google “Kristina God” you’ll find my Google Knowledge Panel. Google knows I’m a writer, marketing expert and entrepreneur.
Search is getting more and more important for writers who want to build a personal brand, want to be seen online and market themselves.
In my interview, I talk with Jason Barnard, the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) Guy and CEO of Kalicube. Barnard has more than ten years of experience with Google Knowledge Panels.
We talk about how to get, create and claim a Google Knowledge Panel as a writer.
We’ll also discuss the future of Google for writers and what writer can do to set themselves up for success online.
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🙋Connect with @JasonMartinBarnard the Brand SERP guy, CEO @Kalicube
Personal website Jason Barnard: https://jasonbarnard.com/
Website Kalicube: https://kalicube.com/
YouTube channel Kalicube: / kalicube
Podcast Branded Search (and Beyond): https://jasonbarnard.com/digital-mark…
Jason Barnard Shares Insights on Building Authority with a Google Knowledge Panel
[00:00:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If you don’t have a Knowledge Panel, you look like a nobody. So it’s a really good way to push yourself up the career ladder, as it were, to be recognized as a leader in your field.
[00:00:10] Kristina God: Google is on a mission to understand the whole world. If there is one thing that smart writers have that ordinary writers don’t, that takes their online credibility through the roof while making them an authority, it’s a magnetic business card on Google. A Google Knowledge Panel. A few days back, I Googled myself and holy cow, there it was, a Knowledge Panel about Kristina God, the writer. I want you to experience amazing Google results as well, results that prove you are the real deal in your niche. Jason Barnard is the Search Engine Results Page Guy.
[00:00:47] Kristina God: He knows how Google takes and how to create a Knowledge Panel. In our interview, he’ll be sharing insider secrets from ten years of experience on how you can masterfully create one, even if it’s tricky. We’ll talk about the future of Google, how to make yourself notable, become an authority in your field, and gain credibility. So, Jason, I hope all is well.
[00:01:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Everything is fine. Thank you very much, Kristina.
What Makes a Google Knowledge Panel So Valuable?
[00:01:12] Kristina God: So, Jason, I thank you so, so much. Maybe you’ve heard already the funny story that I shared a post on Medium about my own Google Knowledge Panel, and a person from your team replied and congratulated me. What makes a Google Knowledge Panel so valuable, Jason?
[00:01:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): A Google Knowledge Panel is primarily valuable to us as human beings because it shows our authority and our credibility within our field. When somebody searches your name and they see a Google Knowledge Panel, the person will tend to think, well, that person is authoritative and credible. So we at Kalicube say your Google Knowledge Panel is your business card. So in the world of Zoom and Covid, people, when they’re on the call, will look you up on Google. If you look great with a Knowledge Panel, then you look authoritative and credible. If you don’t have a Knowledge Panel, you look like a nobody. So it’s a really good way to push yourself up the career ladder, as it were. Push yourself to be recognized as a leader in your field.
[00:02:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): In a geeky term, there’s a lot more behind it because Google uses Knowledge Panels as knowledge, as the name suggests. And the more it understands about you, the better it can map you to the people who are using Google who need your services.
The Difference Between This Knowledge Panel and a Knowledge Graph
[00:02:32] Kristina God: What’s the difference between this Knowledge Panel and a Knowledge Graph?
[00:02:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The Knowledge Panel is the visual representation of Google’s Knowledge Graph. And Google’s Knowledge Graph is like Wikipedia, but massively times bigger. It’s a machine-readable encyclopedia. It’s the encyclopedia that Google uses to understand the world when it’s trying to create the best search results possible. So if you’re in the Knowledge Graph, Google understands who you are, what you do, which audience you serve, and it can create better results for you, but also put you in the results where you’re gonna be most relevant to the subset of its users who are your audience. So if we come back a step to the Wikipedia equivalency, it’s a machine-readable Wikipedia. Wikipedia is about 6 million articles. The Knowledge Graph contains 50 billion articles.
[00:03:27] Kristina God: That’s huge. Yeah.
[00:03:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And 1,500 billion facts. So it’s humongously big and it’s getting bigger at a rate of about 10% a year, but actually, depending on the year, it tripled in size last year because last year was a big year. Google is on a mission to understand the entire world, which is a huge challenge for it. When it understands something in the Knowledge Graph, in its machine-readable encyclopedia, in its brain, in its memory, if you like, then it can represent that person, that company, that podcast, that music group, the music album, the film, the movie star, on the search engine results page in the form of a Knowledge Graph, which is Google’s statement of the facts that it has understood.
Jason Barnard’s Expertise in Building Knowledge Panels and Educating Google
[00:04:14] Kristina God: Could you tell us a bit more about your expertise and who you are, Jason?
[00:04:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, my name is Jason Barnard. I founded Kalicube K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E in 2015 to specialize in building Knowledge Panels, building understanding in Google’s brain. And my revelation was that Google is actually a child, thirsty for knowledge who wants to understand the whole world. And our responsibility is to educate the child. And if we educate the child, the child will understand. It will add us to its Knowledge Graph, and when it adds it to its Knowledge Graph, it can then create a Knowledge Panel for us. So it’s kind of easy and difficult at the same time to create a Knowledge Panel. The process is very simple, but the maintenance of it and the human effort it takes to educate Google is actually quite a lot.
Understanding Google’s Knowledge Graph and its Algorithms
[00:05:05] Kristina God: Could you, Jason, tell us a bit more about how this algorithm works and whether we need to track the updates similar to Google’s core update or the Helpful Content Update, then?
[00:05:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, well, first with the updates, yes, it’s good to track them, because then, you know if something has changed, whether it’s your fault or there’s been an algorithm update. However, the Knowledge Graph updates do not correspond to core updates such as the Helpful Content Update. It’s two very separate things because it’s two very different machines and Kalicube is the only company in the world who is tracking Knowledge Graph updates. We have eight years of data about it. We know exactly when it updates. You can expect a huge update every July and every December and sometimes in March. And in fact, in January this year, it’s been another huge month. So if you want to know about Knowledge Graph updates, you have to come to Kalicube.
[00:05:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E once again. And what’s been really interesting is, because I am the only person who’s been doing this. I’m the person who understands exactly how Google thinks. And how Google thinks is how we can then learn to teach it. And you talked about the three knowledge algorithms. People don’t talk about the knowledge algorithms. They talk about the core updates and the core algorithms and the blue link algorithms and maybe even the video algorithms, if they’re getting adventurous. But the knowledge algorithms are really special, and they’re fundamental to the future.
[00:06:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If you think about Generative AI in search, Machines making, learning for themselves, this is what it’s all about. So the future of search and the future indeed, on all of these platforms, Apple, Facebook, Bing, Microsoft, Google, is all about how do we educate these smart machines? Because they’re gonna get smarter and smarter and smarter, and we need to educate them starting today. And we educate them by understanding the knowledge algorithms, how they function, and then what we need to do. So you can actually forget about the knowledge algorithms, because I’ve figured it all out, and I can just tell you what to do. So we’ll start with the knowledge algorithms. I’ll explain a really quick overview, and then I can tell you exactly what you need to do.
[00:07:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You have the knowledge extraction algorithm. There are three, by the way. Number one, the knowledge extraction algorithm. And that’s the algorithm that extracts information from web pages and then puts it into a storage space in a manner that’s well organized for the next algorithm, which is the Knowledge Vault algorithm. And the Knowledge Vault algorithm goes into the information that the knowledge extraction algorithm has found and put away in little drawers, in little filing cabinets for it. And it reads through and tries to understand what the facts are, not which is the best content, which it should put at the top of the rankings, top of the search engine results. It’s trying to figure out what are the facts in all of this information that the knowledge extraction algorithm has provided for me. If it decides it’s found a fact, it puts the fact in the Knowledge Graph, and it becomes part of the machine-readable encyclopedia.
[00:08:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Google’s memory, Google’s brain. Then the Knowledge Panel algorithm comes along and it looks in the Knowledge Graph and it says, which of this information is useful for me to show to the user who searched somebody’s name or a company name or a topic. So if somebody searches Jason Barnard, it looks in the Knowledge Graph and it says, well, I can see these facts about Jason Barnard. The person is obviously looking for the specific Jason Barnard that I can see in the Knowledge Graph. I will show a Knowledge Panel and then it fills the Knowledge Panel with the information that the Knowledge Graph has established to be fact from the information that the knowledge extraction algorithm has provided it. So there’s a three-step process in order to get to that Knowledge Panel.
The Importance of Owning Your Entity Home
[00:08:48] Kristina God: Why do you think, Jason, that Google thinks that my home, that my entity is YouTube?
[00:08:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. We’ve kind of moved forward to the next step, which is how do we educate it? And in fact, you’re right, you need what we call an entity home. It’s a place that the knowledge extraction algorithm, the knowledge graph algorithm and the Knowledge Panel algorithm all recognize as the place that you live online. And what they’ve understood with you is that you live on YouTube. That’s not good because YouTube doesn’t belong to you. And if it does, you wouldn’t be talking to me because you’d be super rich. You need them all to understand that the entity home, the place that you live online, where you represent yourself in the way you want to be represented and you can explain to them and educate them, is your own personal website. So mine is jasonbarnard.com Kalicube is kalicube.com.
[00:09:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You need a personal website that you own because what you will then do is start to explain to the extraction algorithm, the Knowledge Vault algorithm and the Knowledge Panel algorithm exactly who you are, what you do, who you serve, why you’re credible and which things you’ve done online. At that point, you can start to control what they understand. Key here is to make sure that you own the place that they think you live.
[00:10:05] Kristina God: Quick heads up, in the show notes below, you can find free resources and other goodies.
[00:10:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You need to control your personal brand, especially in a world of AI. These machines are getting smarter and smarter. Right now, they’re pretty simplistic and they learn by repetition. In five years time, they will be able to infer information, at which point, they’ll be learning to learn and learning things about us that we haven’t necessarily told them. At which point, if you don’t have control of the basic facts, you’re in big trouble. You need to grasp today, now the control, so that when these machines get really smart, in the days of, let’s say, singularity, when they’re smarter than we are, that you have some level of self determination. And that’s what we are looking to do in the longer term, is say we can give you individually, people, self determination, and we share free resources on our website because we believe this is a hugely valuable, helpful, and incredibly important skill set for everybody to have. And then obviously, 8 billion people on earth, we can’t serve all of them.
[00:11:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Out of those 8 billion, some people are going to realize that we will do it faster, we will do it quicker, and we will do it better than they would, and then they will come to us as clients so we can afford to share the information. It’s completely free. And we believe that we’re helping the world by sharing this information, being completely open about it. And I can actually explain to you the process in less than a minute. As long as the machines are simplistic children learning by rote, learning by repetition. You take your entity home, which is one page on your website, the page about, so about me. You explain who you are, what you do, which audience you serve, and why you’re credible as clearly as you possibly can, preferably in the third person, not the first person. You then take that description, or parts of the description or an adaptation of that description, and you place it on every single source that you mentioned earlier on the social media profiles, your Medium profile, an article about you, your YouTube channel, profile pages on Muck Rack, all of these places. And you repeat the same information to the extent it’s useful to the audience on that platform, then you link from the entity home to the platform, and you link from the platform back to the entity home.
[00:12:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then what happens is Google sees your entity home, understands, goes out to the first source, sees the same thing, understands, comes back through the link that you put there, sees the same information, goes to the next source, sees the same information, comes back, and so on and so forth. And in an infinite loop of self corroboration, the machine will understand by pure repetition, and it will understand that the hub you mentioned is that about page on your own website. So you need to be clear about who you are, what you do, which audience you serve, why you’re credible. You need to be consistent about what you say across all the platforms. As you rightly said, for PR, that’s super important. But you need also to be present on the relevant platforms, because if you’re on irrelevant platforms, Google gets confused and you’re wasting your efforts standing where an audience is looking when the audience isn’t interested. Because if everything is relevant, then you’re standing where your audience is looking with the solution they’re looking for, which is perfect business, perfect branding, perfect personal branding.
[00:13:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the consistency is what you say. People need to see this consistency down the funnel as they’re coming towards interacting with you. And you need to be clear because we need to understand. So clear, consistent, relevant corroboration works for Google, but it works for people too. You’re a fool if you don’t do it. I’m sorry. If anybody is not doing it, I’ve just called you a fool.
Irrelevant Platforms for a Writer’s Presence
[00:13:37] Kristina God: What would be an irrelevant platform then for me as a writer?
[00:13:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right, well, those are all brilliant. And it doesn’t mean you can’t be on different platforms with different formats like YouTube. It doesn’t change who you fundamentally are. But what you want to be aware of if you got onto an ice hockey website, that doesn’t make sense for Google because it would then think, well, that’s probably somebody else with the same name, so it will duplicate you. So from your perspective, it’s, what do I truly do? Where can I actually maintain a presence where my audience will actually be looking for me, where I’m relevant? And I don’t want to create profiles or presence on places where I’m irrelevant. And that goes for Google, but it goes for people too. Why would somebody who’s a fan of ice hockey want to see you? No offense, they might. But ice hockey was my example.
[00:14:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Somebody who’s interested in ice hockey isn’t interested in you unless you play or talk about ice hockey in a relevant, helpful manner. And that doesn’t mean to say you can’t be an ice hockey player in your spare time and a writer full time. It just means if, for example, you did play ice hockey, it’s not a bad thing to be on the ice hockey website saying, this is my profile, I play ice hockey on the weekends. But you need to be very clear on that website that that’s what you do at the weekend. And make sure that you don’t put too much information online about the ice hockey because Google will get confused about which is the primary person. So what you could then do is rather than link from the ice hockey page back to the entity home, you could link to a specific page that’s just about your weekend hobby of ice hockey on your own website once again. And that splits the information, says it’s the same person because it’s the same website, but it’s two different aspects, two different facets of that person. And that’s key.
How Does Google See Your Multifaceted Roles and Expertise Online?
[00:15:28] Kristina God: I’m a mom and I’m a marketing expert and a writer, and I tell moms how to write online and to market themselves. And I think this is somehow telling Google how I want to be associated with different platforms and topics. And all those topics come together with this core that I’m an expert in marketing and a writer.
[00:15:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. No, 100%. And you’ve picked on writer, which is the perfect thing to pick on because Google is explicitly looking for people who write because it wants to identify who’s written the content for two reasons. It wants to know whether or not the content is written by somebody authoritative, credible, trustworthy, expert and experienced. And secondly, it wants to make sure it’s not AI. So Google is explicitly looking for people who write. So you’ve talked about writing about marketing and that’s exactly what it wants, is I’m looking for a writer with an expertise. If I can get that, then I can identify whether or not this content is credible for my audience, for the users of Google. That’s a huge thing.
[00:16:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s also gonna be looking for YouTube creators on a specific topic. It’s gonna be looking for podcasters on a specific topic. So you have. That multifacetedness actually makes sense in and of itself, so you don’t need to worry about it. The multifacetedness that becomes a problem is if you’re an ice hockey player as well. And you’d mentioned my songs, so we use that as an example. I was a musician, I played a double bass. I sing, I write songs, I write lyrics.
[00:16:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I have been a screenwriter, I’ve been a cartoon character, I’ve been a voice actor, I’ve been a digital marketer. I’ve been a business owner, I’m an entrepreneur. That gets really complicated really, really quickly for Google. And the trick there is that I’ve got, let’s say, ten different facets that are all very different and I want it to focus on entrepreneur. So I said, I’m an entrepreneur and all of these other things are true and you can present them, but you need to focus on me as an entrepreneur because that’s what I want to be perceived to be, because that’s where I need to be credible to drive my business. And we recently changed me from a musician to a writer. That was a year ago. Then we changed me from a writer to an entrepreneur so we can change Google’s perception of the classification it has for you.
[00:17:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I realized very quickly that musicians obviously doesn’t help drive my business forward. It doesn’t drive people’s belief and trust in me as a business owner, as a marketer, as somebody who can provide the personal branding services that we do provide. A writer is slightly better, but an entrepreneur is the best because that gives me an umbrella for all of the things that I do in business. And that makes sense. But it doesn’t mean to say the blue dog from the cartoon I made or the music group from my youth have disappeared. They still get shown. They just don’t dominate.
Building Your Brand as a Writer and Marketer?
[00:18:17] Kristina God: I’m an online writer and marketing expert. If you want to be read and seen online, join my newsletter on Substack. I’ll be connecting you with a tribe of incredible writers who will support, uplift and enlighten you.
[00:18:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I think in your case, you’d rather be a marketer because that’s what you are. But it doesn’t actually matter. If Google thinks you’re a writer who writes about marketing, that’s absolutely fine, at least for the next two years, Google’s focusing on finding content creators.
[00:18:44] Kristina God: Yeah, I see.
[00:18:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Being a videographer or a podcast or a writer allows you to then have a specialist topic. I’m sorry, I interrupted.
Google’s Evolution in Recognizing Multiple Subtitles
[00:18:53] Kristina God: No, no. And could I be both, Jason?
[00:18:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s a brilliant question. Up until July last year, that wasn’t possible. Or it’s very rarely possible. It was only possible if it was so and so’s husband or so and so’s wife and a writer. Then in July last year, Google started to put multiple subtitles together. But it tends to be in the arts and sciences and it tends to be things like writer and musician. So it tends to be more towards the arts and tends to be focused on creation. So, yes, and that will become more and more common.
[00:19:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And so I would imagine in the future I will be able to be, hopefully entrepreneur and double bass player. But that’s probably not the best thing I want to be. I would rather be entrepreneur and marketer or personal brand expert.
Craft Effective Social Media Bios and About Sections
[00:19:43] Kristina God: If we want to go one step back again, when we talked about the bios and the about, every social media site wants us to add to our profiles. Of course we want to be repetitive there, and your tips are to be repetitive, relevant, factual and hierarchical. Could you elaborate on this a bit?
[00:20:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. The first thing is, don’t start with your birth. Start with the latest things and work backwards. Google takes whatever is at the top of the page, should be the most important, the most recent, even if you state dates and so people too, so it makes sense. Use semantic triples. A semantic triple is subject verb object. Jason Barnard is an entrepreneur. So the more you use those and you keep them close together, the better the machine will understand.
[00:20:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So I would rather say Jason Barnard is an entrepreneur who lives in the south of France and has a wonderful house and a cat, rather than Jason, who lives in the south of France and has a cat, is an entrepreneur because it separates the subject and the object too much. So we can still stay creative and we can still be attractive in our writing. But just make sure those semantic triples stay together because that is how Google understands subject verb object as explicit and close together as possible. Then, when you spread it out across the web, you can simply repeat the same thing on every single website, which is fine, Google likes that. Or you can take chunks of what you’ve written and put them on different websites where they’re most appropriate. So, for example, my bio is written, me as an entrepreneur, me as a writer, me as a podcaster, me as a cartoon blue dog, me as a musician. So when I’m on a music site, I’ll put the musician at the top and then say, oh, by the way, he’s an entrepreneur. Which means that the person visiting the website about music will see me as a musician, which is what they’re looking for.
[00:21:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Google will see that piece of information on that website that makes sense and then it will see. But Jason Barnard is also an entrepreneur. It will see the links and it will realize it’s the same person and that the entrepreneur is what dominates. So the key is to repeat the thing you do most that you want to focus on as much as possible, everywhere.
How to Get a Knowledge Panel and Trigger Its Display
[00:21:52] Kristina God: How can we get an actual Knowledge Panel then? Is it all about writing our bio and abouts and our website? Or is there anything more to trigger Google to show us online?
[00:22:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Well, in order to get Google to put you in the Knowledge Graph, its machine-readable encyclopedia, all you need to do is what I’ve explained the entity home with the links out corroboration, clear, consistent, relevant corroboration. Bob’s your uncle, job done. And you will get a place in the Knowledge Graph. As long as you are truly consistent, truly clear, and everything is truly relevant, absolutely no problem. Whether or not the Knowledge Panel then appears when somebody searches your name is a different question. Whether the Knowledge Panel algorithm decides that you’re worthy, interesting enough to be shown, and that comes down to probability in truth.
[00:22:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): How probable is it that the person searching is searching for you? And that depends on geo region notability and confidence. So to get the Knowledge Panel to trigger, you need to make yourself notable in your niche or in your geo region, and that’s PR. So we’re then looking at from what we do at Kalicube for our clients, is the first thing we do is clean up the digital ecosystem that amplifies their authority and increases the probability that they will get the Knowledge Panel once we’ve got them in the Knowledge Graph. Then what we do is, what you just mentioned actually early on in your previous job, is we have an algorithm at Kalicube that we run through all of the peer’s equivalent people, and we figure out exactly where those people are standing, to be standing where their audience is looking, and then we can give you advice about exactly where you need to place yourself, where you need that PR. So what you were doing was mostly guesswork, I would imagine. We’re doing algorithmically by asking Google, where are all these people standing cumulatively? What’s the templated Persona for Google of this particular peer group? And then we can say, these are the prioritized places you need to be standing. Reach out to them, get that PR.
[00:23:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And when you get the PR, make sure that the people publishing, whether it’s you or a third party, is packaging the content for Google. Because when they put it online, they put it out there. The people see it. That’s brilliant. We want to make sure that Google can see it, understand it, digest it. The knowledge extraction algorithm can do its job, pass the information to the knowledge brass algorithm, build its confidence in you and your credibility and your authority, which would then increase the probability that the Knowledge Panel would trigger on your name. And as you can see, we’re back through those three steps.
The Importance of Strategy and Intentionality in Audience Targeting
[00:24:30] Kristina God: It’s not about like, doing some stuff online and then hoping for people to come to us. You have to be strategic about this from day one. And even if you haven’t been, you now definitely have to start. Okay?
[00:24:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So you’re saying you need to be strategic, you need to be intentional. And as you said, think about your audience. But what we have at Kalicube and why our work is so powerful is because we have algorithms that work through the billion data points we have in our database, all taken from Google. So we take Google’s data and we store it, and then we rework it to figure out the intentional strategic places you need to stand. No guesswork. We know where you need to stand to be where your audience is looking, because Google tells us where you need to stand to be where your audience is looking. It’s really simple and incredibly powerful.
Identifying Key Platforms and Media Outlets for Your Audience
[00:25:20] Kristina God: Does this mean where people are searching us? Does this mean socials? Or does this mean, for instance, media outlets?
[00:25:26] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, it actually does both. It shows you which social media platforms you need to focus on. So we’ll give you the one, two, three of the social media. It might be Twitter, Facebook, then Instagram. It might be LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. It could be YouTube, Twitter, Instagram. It depends on the peer group. So you can then focus your energies on the right social media platforms that make sense to your audience through the eyes of Google.
[00:25:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And Google knows pretty much everything, so there isn’t any debating whether it’s right or not. And then for the media outlets, we had an American footballer who wanted to get some news. The PR company came to us. So we put 100 American footballers into our system, and in about an hour, it just gave us a list of the platforms that are currently talking about American football and that Google is paying attention to. And that meant that the PR company needed to reach out to five companies to get two articles. And they said that usually they have to reach out to at least twelve. So it saves a huge amount of time. And we know that we’re focusing in the right places because we know these platforms are talking about that particular topic at that particular moment.
[00:26:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And we know that Google is paying attention to them, which means people are paying attention to them, too. So you’ve got the media outlets on board, you’ve got Google on board, and you’ve got your audience on board. You can do all of this for free. You can look at your competitors, you can look at your peers and you can see where they’re appearing. But the thing that we can do is do it algorithmically, at scale, so we can look at 100 competitors, 100 peers, whereas you’ll be able to look at four or five, but looking at four or five is probably gonna get it more or less right anyway. So you can do it for free. I’m not bullying anybody to work with us. This is free and it’s easy.
[00:27:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You just need to ask Google.
Should You Claim Your Knowledge Panel?
[00:27:06] Kristina God: If you have your Knowledge Panel, then should I claim this Knowledge Panel, then? And what should I do then, if I have it?
[00:27:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Well, you should claim it so that nobody else claims it. Claiming it doesn’t actually change anything. You can’t control it. If you ask for changes, you get put to the front of the priority queue. So if you say, well, the date of birth is wrong, you can ask for a change in the date of birth and a human being will look at it. And because you own the Knowledge Panel, you will be put to the front of the queue. That’s the only real advantage.
[00:27:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But claim it because somebody else might claim it. And then if you end up having to try to claim it, back off somebody, that’s gonna be really complicated and you want to avoid that.
Maximizing Substack as a Singular Focus or Broader Strategy
[00:27:47] Kristina God: So Substack is again, like a publishing platform. It’s not a newsletter service provider anymore. You can’t really compare this with ConvertKit or Mailchimp or whatever. This is truly special and I love it. And what many people recommend is Substack is everything you need. You don’t need more than Substack. Do you think this is fine to go with one entity or with one platform?
[00:28:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, I think if you just want to focus on Substack and you don’t want to do LinkedIn and Twitter and YouTube and so on, that’s absolutely fine. There are a couple of people at Kalicube who have created Knowledge Panels for themselves with just two social media platforms and their reference on Kalicube. So volume isn’t the important thing. What is important is relevancy and consistency and clarity. So less is more. If you’re incredibly clear, consistent and relevant, you’re fine. I would suggest though, that if you’re on Substack and you’re on website, that’s not enough. You would need something like Crunchbase in addition.
[00:28:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So you would need to find some additional resources, maybe Muck Rack, because you’re a writer, that would make sense, that doesn’t need maintenance. So let’s say five or six to really nail down the corroboration around the web, but avoid things that you need to maintain. If you really want to just focus on Substack and then just build out Substack, because if you become famous enough, famous enough on Substack, that’s enough. You don’t need to be famous on 15 platforms.
Leveraging AI Recommendations for Content Growth and Visibility
[00:29:11] Kristina God: And what you can do there on Substack, for instance, is that you can click on a toggle and then you say, I don’t want AI to crawl my content. And this is the same you can do if you have a WordPress site, for instance. Is this something you recommend?
[00:29:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, I mean, Google is increasingly just an AI engine, recommendation engine, as you said. So you’re shooting yourself in the foot in the sense that you’re excluding yourself from a game that you really should be playing, unless you’re absolutely sure that you can do everything on Substack that you need. Substack are using AI, so they’ll be using AI in it. The question then is, do you want to give your information to the machines that can then digest it and create their own things from it, which are then not cited to you? I would say yes. As long as the machines understand who you are, they will recommend you at some point in the customer journey. So even if they take your content, repurpose it and recreate it, if somebody asks them, who is the expert in this field and you’re the name that pops into its head, you get recommended by the machine. There’s a huge win there. And I’ll give you an example, is we got a client at the end of last year through ChatGPT.
[00:30:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The client was on ChatGPT. He said, who can build me a Knowledge Panel? ChatGPT replied, Kalicube.
[00:30:26] Kristina God: I think this is the future, isn’t it?
[00:30:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I think it is, and it’s exactly that. These machines are going to be answering their users’ questions. And don’t forget the people using these machines, Google, Bing, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, they are the users of that platform. So Google users belong to Google. You’re asking Google to recommend you. Google decides when and how it recommends you. Your best bet is to say, well, it will figure out how to answer these questions whether I help it or not.
[00:30:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): My ideal position is to be the recommended answer when Google gets the user to what they call the perfect click. And the perfect click is the click that gets the user to the place where they want to convert. So what Google will do is guide the user down the funnel, answering questions, creating a dialogue, get the user to the point at which they’ve decided what they want. They click on the link, the perfect click at the end of the funnel. They come to your website. You just need to have something to actually offer them where you can monetize it.
Building Authority Beyond Google
[00:31:30] Kristina God: You are the only expert. And whatever I Googled in regard to the topic we’re talking about today, I could only find you. So this is perfect. And again, then other opportunities could come your way.
[00:31:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, I’m going to tell you, there’s two things there. Number one, I live in France, but I actually serve the world, Kalicube serves everybody in the world. So living in France is just because it’s sunny and we get nice wine and cheese and food. But the other point, as you say, is it’s not all about Google. We use Google to understand what we need to do to clean up our funnels, to clean up our digital ecosystem. Kalicube gets 80% of its business from not Google. What actually generally happens is people see us around the web in different places. When we’re presenting, people tell me, oh, I keep seeing the red shirt.
[00:32:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The red shirt is really cool because people recognize it and they see it very easily. Then what they do is they double check on Google. They search around the topic and they say, oh, the red shirt keeps appearing, Jason Barnard keeps appearing, Kalicube keeps appearing. So what we’ve done is got Google to represent us the way we want every time somebody searches around this topic. But that’s simply confirmation that we are the authority, the trusted, credible, expert, experience source that people think we are from the rest of our digital ecosystem. So it’s actually very traditional marketing, backed up by Google’s recommendation of Kalicube and Jason Barnard.
Why Visual Identity Matters in Personal Branding?
[00:32:52] Kristina God: Would you then recommend to have like one brand color and then stick to it?
[00:32:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’d use the red shirt for historical reasons from my musical career. It’s worked really well for me. I would think that every time you appear, if you’re wearing the same clothes, people will recognize you instantly at a glance. Because if I change my shirt, people don’t necessarily recognize me. But I don’t say that’s the best strategy for everybody. There might be something else. Somebody I met once was wearing green glasses, so he wears anything he wants and he just has these green, very visible green glasses. That works too.
[00:33:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The visual aspect is something that people underestimate. I mean, an image tells more than a thousand words, or whatever the phrase is. We’re very visual creatures. Bing and Google are quite visual creatures too. Bing and Google are now audio creatures. So text, visual, audio and video is obviously included in audio and, sorry, visual and sometimes text, if you put it on the screen. We need to make sure we’re feeding all three to the machines and to our audience. So unless you’re purely a writer, just text isn’t gonna hack it for the next 15 20 years.
[00:34:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But even if you’re just doing that, some kind of visual identity is going to be necessary. And how you handle that is up to you, I would say be on screen, be visible, have great photos, be on videos, talk about what you’re doing, because humans need to see us in order to trust us.
Building Confidence in Knowledge Extraction and Knowledge Panels
[00:34:31] Kristina God: Do you think we should go with video, written words and audio then?
[00:34:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, I mean, you can consider that a video is also audio. Google will analyze it and especially as YouTube generates subtitles, captions. But be very careful, it gets the captions wrong. So it’s a really good idea to go and correct them manually. And I’ll give you a quick example. My name Jason Barnard. J-A-S-O-N B-A-R-N-A-R-D. Some people say it, it sounds like B-E-R-N-A-R-D. Bernard, and Google confuses me with Jason Bernard.
[00:35:05] Kristina God: I see.
[00:35:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And part of that at least, is because of the way people say my name. So we have to go into every single video that people create with me, or I create with Kalicube and correct the YouTube transcripts. So we don’t just correct my name, we correct the whole lot. And YouTube tags the captions as being human corrected. So Google, when it reads them, will understand that we’ve explicitly gone in and made sure that it does actually represent what’s being said and therefore is more confident. So if we come back to one last huge point, we were talking about Knowledge Panels and Knowledge Graph and the knowledge extraction algorithm. Understanding is one thing. The knowledge extraction algorithm gets the facts.
[00:35:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Sorry. The knowledge extraction algorithm gets the information. The Knowledge Vault algorithm establishes the facts. And the Knowledge Panel algorithm assesses whether or not the notability and authority is there for it to show. But all three need confidence. If you can get the knowledge extraction algorithm to extract and store the information with confidence, it will note down on each piece of information. I am super confident this is what this information is.
[00:36:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The Knowledge Vault algorithm will have a better appreciation of the confidence of the information. It will therefore judge it more positively. The Knowledge Vault algorithm, the Knowledge Graph, sorry, algorithm will then say, this is a fact, and I’m 20% confident, I’m 40% confident, which will increase the probability that the Knowledge Panel algorithm will then select you. And the Knowledge Panel algorithm relies a great deal, once again, on confidence. So there’s understanding. Great. Brilliant. Let’s say your first step is 20% confidence in that understanding, and then your job over time is build the confidence up to 80%, 90%.
Establishing a Strong Online Presence with the Knowledge Panel and Its Influence
[00:36:57] Kristina God: Your panel is much bigger than mine, so you have the bigger real estate on the Internet. How did you do this? Is this all from your website, then? From your content app?
[00:37:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. What we call Knowledge Panel cards, which are the square things with a YouTube video, a Twitter box, an information box saying my age is all about the confidence in the understanding, the confidence in the understanding that this video is indeed me, that this Twitter feed is indeed mine, that this date of birth is indeed correct. So the Knowledge Panel cards, the rich Knowledge Panel that you mentioned, which is the future, this is where we’re going. Google’s becoming a multimedia representation of us. We need to make sure that Google has the knowledge, the understanding, and that it’s super, ultra confident. And in me, it’s very, very confident, because I’ve been doing this for ten years.
The Future of Google Knowledge Panels and AI Content Recognition
[00:37:45] Kristina God: Do you also think when we’re talking about the future, Jason, that the Google Knowledge Panel will getting more and more important, similar to the rich results we already see when we’re, for instance, Googling whatever?
[00:37:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. I mean, in a few years, it’s the only thing that will matter because everything will be fact checked. When Google figures out properly how to fact check everything, the Knowledge Panel is gonna be the only thing that matters. Because what’s gonna happen is that the Knowledge Panel will evolve into this all encompassing multimedia representation of the person. And the facts behind that Knowledge Panel are going to be what drives, whether or not Google shows it, whether or not Google’s showing you at your true value. And that’s the thing as well. Does it show you for what you truly are worth? And if you can organize yourself, if somebody else has more credibility than you, but you organize yours better than they do, in effect, you have the same credibility as they do. So you can actually beat the game simply by organizing yourself correctly.
[00:38:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Sorry, no, I was going to talk about using AI to create content, videos, articles, whatever. Google is simply gonna ignore it so you can use it for your users. That’s fine. If they like it, great. But Google is gonna end up ignoring it, because Google can do that better than you can. They’ve got the best engineers in the world. They’ve got the most data in the world. Of course they’re going to do it better than we can.
[00:39:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And number two is Google can recognize what I call the thumbprint of your style. Be it video, images, text, audio, doesn’t matter. It can fingerprint you, so it can recognize whether or not you wrote it. The complex word for it is author vectors. They can recognize an author at a glance from the content that they’ve written, if they’ve understood the author. So if I write an article, it will see that it’s me, because it’s understood me. And it can see that this is me and this is my author vector, my thumbprint. Great.
[00:39:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If Jean Marie, who’s the person on my team who contacted you, writes an article and puts my name on it, it will realize that there’s a problem. It will get confused. And if I write using AI, the thumbprint is completely different again. And you know, you can bet your bottom dollar Google has the algorithms, the engineers, and the capacity to recognize AI content when it sees it.
The Impact of AI on Credibility and Content Creation in the Digital Age
[00:40:12] Kristina God: Do you also think that when we use AI, for instance, that this can somehow have negative impacts on our credibility online, then that Google knows that, for instance, I used already AI for creating a video or so, and then Google says, oh, ok, she’s using AI.
[00:40:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yes, exactly. I mean, if you do it consistently over time, Google’s going to start ignoring you because it can do that itself. So as human beings, the value we can bring to the market, to the World Wide Web, is the original content we create. And that’s a huge point, is AI isn’t creative. AI can take what exists and repurpose it. It’s a repurposing system. So it’s constantly looking for people who are saying something new and different. And that’s the thing that people can do to retain our control over these machines, even when singularity happens to some extent.
[00:41:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That creativity, that individual thumbprint, is something that machines maybe will get one day. But in the foreseeable future, let’s not worry about it. Let’s focus on creating great content for our audience that we write and create ourselves, that feeds the algorithms to then ensure that we become the single most authoritative source in our field, that the search engines trust, and that recommend us to the subset of their users who are our audience when that audience needs us.
Navigating the Google Knowledge Panel and Building Your Online Presence
[00:41:41] Kristina God: Perfect. Jason, I think this is the final. Thank you so, so much, Jason, for taking the time to come in here with me and chat a bit about the future of Google and the Google Knowledge Panel. How to get it, how to claim it, and yeah, for you, if you want to check Jason out, then do it. You will find his Google Knowledge Panel pretty easily if you Google him. So, Jason, thank you very much.
[00:42:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thank you so much, Kristina, that was delightful.
[00:42:07] Kristina God: So what are you waiting for? Make yourself notable. I’ll help you along the way. So make sure to subscribe to my channel and like this video so more people like you can see it to your Google and branding success.
