This podcast I had Jason Barnard back again and this time I was picking his brain on the knowledge panel, someone who has spoken about this for a number of years and has tried and tested everything when it comes to knowledge panels it was good to get Jason back on and discuss what’s new and how this whole Knowlege panel can be triggered.
[00:00:00] Craig Campbell: This show is sponsored by ODYS Global. Make sure that you do sign up and get a free $100 bonus by checking out ODYS Global’s aged domains or done for you affiliate websites.
Presenting Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) as a Specialist on Knowledge Panels
[00:00:18] Craig Campbell: So, welcome to you to this podcast where I’m joined by Jason Barnard. And I think, Jason, this is also the third time you’ve been on my podcast, I believe.
[00:00:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Really?
[00:00:28] Craig Campbell: Yeah.
[00:00:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): All right. We entertain each other a lot, apparently.
[00:00:34] Craig Campbell: Yeah. So, we’ve got Mr. Knowledge Panel himself on here. And just quite a fun story that I want to share with you guys before we go in and get Jason on all of this Knowledge Panel stuff is that a few days ago roundabout New Year, John Mueller from Google was asked a question by someone on Knowledge Panels. And John Mueller’s response was check out Mr. Jason Barnard, his videos, and everything else that he does because he is doing it properly.
[00:01:12] Craig Campbell: Now, I’m going to admit something here. Now, obviously, as part of my course, I’ve shown you the mistakes I’ve made and stuff. But one part of the course that I didn’t, I’ve obviously shared Jason’s too previously in the course, but I watched a lot of what Jason was saying and followed a lot of the articles that he has put out there on the Knowledge Panel. So, he is the guy I’ve been following although there was Wikidata and whatnot on there, and I made mistakes with it. I was following Jason’s guidance from afar and made those mistakes. But essentially, Jason’s the one that guided me to the success here with the Knowledge Panel.
[00:01:55] Craig Campbell: And the reason I’d done it was I wanted to try it for myself. I wanted to make mistakes for myself, but it’s amazing to have you here now, Jason, because I could have came to you six or seven months ago and tried to squeeze the information from you, but I found it fun actually making those mistakes. I know that seems quite sick, but it has been fun. And I don’t mind telling people.
[00:02:24] Craig Campbell: By the way, you’ve been going on about Knowledge Panels for a number of years now. You’re well known, as John Mueller has stated, follow Jason for this. You’ve niche down into that area and become a bit of a specialist on it. And having done all my research, I know that you do a lot of testing as well. And I think that’s a key that I want to highlight first and foremost. I’ve seen a lot of your testing, as I said to you previously, that just the things about your daughter and various other people in your family on pages in your website, joining those dots for Google. You’re not just preaching how to get a Knowledge Panel. You’re actually testing stuff. And I know you’ve lost your own Wikipedia at one point as well.
You Don’t Need Wikipedia or Wikidata to Get a Knowledge Panel
[00:03:10] Craig Campbell: So I think the cool, what I want to start off with is do you need Wikipedia and Wikidata to get a Knowledge Panel? You lost your Wikipedia.
[00:03:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): No, you don’t. The really simple answer and I like making the answer really simple was no you don’t. I had one. I lost it because I messed with it too much, which is actually fair enough when you think about it from Wikipedia’s point of view. I am notable enough because I have a career in music. I have a career in cartoons. I did a TV series. So theoretically, I deserve a Wikipedia page, but I messed with it too much. That’s the one thing you really shouldn’t do is mess with your own Wikipedia page. Same goes for Wikidata.
[00:03:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But what was interesting is once I lost it, I could actually rebuild my presence actually reasonably easily without Wikipedia. And the experiments you were talking about, I’ve got some experiments that I’m running without Wikipedia or Wikidata, some with Wikipedia, some with Wikidata. And you can actually trigger Knowledge Panels from all sorts of different sources. Wikipedia and Wikidata are the easiest in the sense that they will most often trigger a Knowledge Panel, but they’re not the easiest in the sense that you have to go through a whole process with the editors who can change and delete.
[00:04:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I was talking on Rand Fishkin, who said he had his Wikipedia page deleted because he asked them to delete it, and they didn’t want to delete it. He had to force them to delete it. And he said that he had it deleted five years ago because it was inaccurate. And I loved the way he said it. He said, if you ask somebody from Wikipedia or a Wikipedia editor what Captain Kirk says in the 4th minute of the 6th episode of the 25th season of Star Trek, they will nail it, and you can believe them a hundred percent. If you ask a Wikipedia editor who founded Moz, they will get it wrong. And that’s a really important point is they don’t know. And they’re saying to you, you can’t mess with your Wikipedia page, but you’re saying, I’m actually the one who knows. So, it’s counterintuitive and counterproductive in many ways.
[00:05:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And Semrush is a great example of a company that had a Wikipedia page for years. 2014 was the first Wikipedia page they got. Their Knowledge Panel did not appear until 2019, at which point Wikipedia deleted the page, but their Knowledge Panel stuck around. So, even with a Wikipedia page you are not guaranteed to get the Knowledge Panel. And that’s also very important. So, it seems to be the easiest solution, but it isn’t because you’ve got that editorial process. The editorial process has just got much harder. So, I would actually advise, unless you’re a TV star in which case you probably already got one, don’t go down that route.
Having Your Wikipedia Page Can Bruise Your Ego But It Doesn’t Matter What Wikipedia Thinks
[00:06:01] Craig Campbell: Yeah. It’s a lot of wasted time and effort as I found which people can see in the previous part of the course. But it was great to know because I think we all want that Wikipedia just for ego.
[00:06:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I think a lot of it’s ego. I know that when mine was deleted, it was actually my ego that took the biggest hit. And it’s difficult to admit. And I think you’re big enough on my podcast to talk about your mistakes, and I’m big enough to say on your podcast. For a couple of days, my ego was severely bruised. And then you say, actually it doesn’t matter that the Wikipedia people don’t think my cartoon was worthy of a Wikipedia page or my group was worthy of Wikipedia. I know it was. I know that.
[00:06:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I met a 23-year old young woman the other day and she said, oh, I know you’re Boowa. You are my childhood. I grew up with you. And you could see in her eyes she was just going, wow, I’ve just met Boowa the blue dog. And from that point of view saying, I have myself and my wife. We had 5 million visits a month on a site for kids. And we had 25 countries showing the TV series. So, who cares what Wikipedia thinks?
Some Experiments of Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) With His Podcasts, TV Series, and Songs
[00:07:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Sorry, I’m going into my ego now, which wasn’t the subject, but that now brings me nicely onto the experiments you mentioned earlier on. I actually counted them the other day. I said to somebody, oh, I’ve got 50. And then I thought about it. I said, actually, I’ve got 300. In truth, I’ve got 500 ongoing experiments that I’m actually working on to figure out exactly how all this works. Some of them are tiny experiments. A lot of them are annex or connects, I don’t know which one it is, to the central experiment.
[00:07:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): For example, the podcast has 150 guests. So I’m experimenting on them. The TV series has 52 episodes, 52 songs. It has 9 characters. The songs were all in French and in English. There are multiple recordings. So, it quickly expands. And each one of these things is an entity. And everything I do on the central, in the case of the Boowa and Kwala, it’s a blue dog and his family and the yellow koala and her family, everything I do on any element of that, because all the dots are joined, because it’s all interconnected, affects all the other ones. It’s this had a domino effect.
The experiments have been sometimes successful, sometimes failures, but always learning experiences.
jason barnard (the brand serp guy)
[00:08:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And so, when I talk about Knowledge Panels and my experience with Knowledge Panels, I do this every morning and I wake up and I look at Knowledge Panels and I go, what I call Knowledge Graph, Knowledge Panel hopping. And I just click on the links to see how things are connected together and to check that everything’s still there or things that have grown or things that have disappeared. And over time, it builds up in your brain and it maps out in your brain. I think in my brain, I now have this map of this entire thing. And the experiments have been sometimes successful, sometimes failures, but always learning experiences.
How Long Does It Take to Trigger a Knowledge Panel?
[00:08:59] Craig Campbell: I think that’s a massive thing is just taking something from it and learning from it and obviously helping others with it as well, which you will be doing, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But for people watching this, Jason, they’re going to be thinking Craig’s done it wrong. Craig took six months to the get some, it will probably nine months to get something that should probably take between three and six months, so whatever. Now, one thing you said in your podcast is I’m an impatient bugger. I was at fault because of impatience. But, from start to finish, when someone is going to follow your guide of getting the Knowledge Panel, how long should it take to get that Knowledge Panel triggered?
[00:09:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I talk in terms of you can actually trigger mini Knowledge Panels that don’t appear in search, but they’re in there somewhere. You just can’t find them. And that’s why I go Knowledge Graph, Knowledge Panel, sorry, hopping is that you can trigger them by clicking. If you search, I think it was WooRank, if you click on the founder of WooRank, it will show you a Knowledge Panel, a tiny little one with just his name.
[00:10:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I call them sprouts. A sprout is a very weak entry in the Knowledge Graph. And you think you’ve won the game, but you haven’t. You’ve only just started. And as you experienced, it teeters on the brink for a while, and then it starts to solidify and it starts to grow. And you should look at it as a plant. It’s a sprout and you should be nurturing it. You should be nurturing it so it can grow little by little. You can’t get a tomato plant however impatient you might be to grow in a week. It needs six months or whatever it might be. I don’t know anything about tomatoes. But Knowledge Panels, three to six months, working at it slowly, surely, and steadily.
In the Process of Getting a Knowledge Panel, the Single Most Important Thing Is to Give Your Entity a Home
[00:10:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the single most important thing is give your entity a home. You need to think about whatever it is you’re talking about as an entity. If it’s a person or a brand or a company or a plugin, it’s an entity, it’s a thing. And it needs one dedicated page that explains what it is, what it does, and who it serves. So if you’re a person, it’s like who I am, what I do, and who my audience might be. If I’m a brand, it’s who you are, what you do, and who your audience is.
[00:11:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And it needs to be factual. Which is why when we were talking about that earlier on, don’t use your homepage. Your homepage is too many different things. It’s a website. It’s a webpage. And then if you add, oh, myself and I saw that you’ve done this, myself, my company. I think it was an event you added as well. I can’t remember. I might be wrong. Google’s trying to make sense of five different things on one single page. A human being can’t do that. And Google isn’t as smart as a human being yet.
[00:11:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, what you need to do is say, okay, the homepage, that one disadvantage is it represents too many different things. So, it gets confusing very quickly for Google. If you have a dedicated page, it represents one thing, one thing only, makes it very clear, makes it very easy for you to explain, to stick on topic, very important, and for Google to actually understand. And the second thing is Google likes factual simple statements. Your audience, who are landing on your homepage, need to be wowed. That’s conflicting. That’s contradictory. You can’t do both. So, if you’re trying to wow your audience and explain to Google multiple different things in both cases, you lost.
[00:12:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Your homepage is, and I think this is something I found when I was writing my own course, it’s never a final destination. It’s a stepping stone to somewhere else. And if you remember that, you know that what you’re trying to do is while people keep them on course and direct into where they want to go. And in Google’s case for the Knowledge Panel, it wants to go to about me, about my company, about my software, about the C-level employee, whoever it might be. One page per entity explaining it clearly, factually, simply. And it’s the home.
[00:13:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And we were talking about it earlier. It’s the crutch that Google uses when information elsewhere on the web goes wrong, when things start to contradict each other. It will come back here and it will look and it will say, okay, yeah, we’re still on track. And if you don’t have that, Google gets lost.
What You Need to Put On Your About Me Page Should Be About Who You Are Today
[00:13:24] Craig Campbell: So, here’s the question. So, I’ve got my About Me page. Now, is there too many things I can put on there? Should it just be factual about me, no events, no nothing, just the information about where I studied, where I worked, and maybe some other things that I’ve done? Or should I also be having events on that page or completely different page?
[00:13:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Two different things there. Number one is it needs to be about who you are today. I made the mistake of saying I was a blue dog, isn’t that great? I was a musician, isn’t that wonderful? And that was at the top of the page because it’s what’s the most interesting about me. Being a boring digital marketer isn’t very interesting for most people.
[00:14:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And what you actually need to do is say, look, here is who I am today, here is who I was yesterday. Click on this link to go and see more about that. And events, here is an event I spoke at that I think is incredibly important, for example, Pubcon. I’ll be speaking at Pubcon. I would put that on my About Me page, but the actual information about my talk at Pubcon would be on an individual page that says the entity that this page is talking about is Jason Barnard’s Talk at Pubcon. And that’s important as well.
[00:14:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): An entity is not necessarily a physical thing. A talk at Pubcon is an entity. And a talk at Pubcon is something that happens at a moment in time and then exists no longer, but it does still exist. Everything we do exists over time and one of Google’s biggest problems. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense is understanding the world at a given moment is already very complicated. Understanding that the world at this moment is not quite the same as the world was 10 minutes ago. It gets phenomenally complicated phenomenally quickly.
Google Maps Has the Best Functioning Knowledge Graph Because It Can Solve Geospatial Queries in Real Time
[00:15:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I was, I’ll let you speak in a minute, but this is actually really interesting because it’s a really good way to think about Knowledge Graphs is Google Maps is the best functioning Knowledge Graph we have as an example. And it can, and this is a quote from a guy who works at Amazon, it’s it can solve geospatial queries it has never seen before in real time, which means it can say this person is in this place at this time. You obviously weren’t in the same place 10 minutes ago. He is looking for a coffee in a coffee shop that has wifi. This coffee shop near him has wifi, offers coffee, and is open at this given moment in time. And I need to warn him it will close in 10 minutes. And that’s a really good example.
[00:16:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And as you’re driving, if you’re using it for driving, it can, I was, I’ll tell you another story. I was with my mate, Hugo, who you know, and we were driving back from a concert. He’s the singer in the band and I’m the double bass player. And we were playing at an SEO conference, playing music instead of doing a conference, which was really good fun. We were trying to drive out of Leon and everyone said, whatever you do, don’t leave now because it’s going to be completely blocked up.
[00:16:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And we put on Google Maps and we went through the most tortuous little route to get through. And what I noticed is the car behind us followed us all the way. All the roads around us were blocked and we kept going, but that’s not a direct route. And what Google was doing was recalculating every single second where things were starting to block up where they were open. It was solving this geospatial query in real time on an ongoing basis second by second by second. So, that blew my mind to start with, but that’s what the Knowledge Graph is trying to do ultimately.
Each Entity Should Have a Page of Their Own and Just Linked Together for Google to Be Able to Handle It
[00:17:13] Craig Campbell: It makes a lot of sense. And I was just curious because one thing that’s killed me is the kind of you hear you saying one thing and then someone else says something that’s slightly different. So, I have actually been told to put the Schema about me, Schema on the homepage and that page, which is obviously incorrect. I’ve also been told to add events that I spoke at on the About Me page and all that stuff. So, again, slightly wrong bits of information there.
[00:17:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. I’ll give you another quick story about it. Jono Alderson from Yoast was saying Google can only handle one entity on a page at a time. And he said that to me about a year ago. So, I set out some of my experiments were to see if that’s true, and yes it is. The Boowa and Kwala family tree, which I’ve now built into Google, if you look up Mummy Koala, it says significant other Daddy Koala. If you look up Grandma Koala, significant other Grandpa Koala, which I think is wonderful, makes me laugh a lot. But when I had them all on one page, it couldn’t do that. When each entity, each of these family members had a page of their own and it was all linked together so you said Grandma Koala is Grandpa Koala’s wife linked to, Google sorted it out literally in two weeks. So, one entity per page, Jono Alderson started off by saying it. I have now proved in this context at least that it is the case.
[00:18:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Phenomenally important, I’m actually working with Yoast on their Knowledge Panels, their Brand SERPs because I actually come from the world of Brand SERPs, what appears when somebody googles your name. It’s your business card. It’s incredibly important. Because a lot of people, when they’re navigating to your site, or if they’re looking you up to find out who you are because they’ve heard about you, you’ve just done a big sell to them face to face, first thing they do is look you up on Google. It needs to be great. That’s where I come from.
[00:19:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But the Knowledge Panel is obviously a very big part of that because it looks impressive. And Yoast by default at the moment will put all this stuff on your homepage. And I’ve talked to Yoast himself. And we’re in a conversation about it, but he said, you’re right, it does represent too many things and it does create confusion. So I’m not saying Yoast are going to change the way that Yoast plugin functions, but I am saying that the people at Yoast themselves are now focusing their own Entity Homes on their About Us pages.
[00:19:47] Craig Campbell: Yeah. No, listen, these are all great solid tips and advice. Now, I want to go back to when you said your Knowledge Panel triggers that might just be your name or whatever and that’s literally a little tiny sprout, if you like, that’s there. Now, that sprout for me might be just like Craig Campbell, blahdy, date of birth, and class set. And obviously, you look at someone like yourself, who, again, in one of the previous videos in this training course, I’ve listed your Knowledge Panel, I’ve listed Aleyda Solis’, and I’ve listed Brian Dean’s, who are all fairly padded out. You’ve got your social media. You’ve got a whole bunch of other stuff on there.
Your Social Media Channels Should Be on Your Entity Home, Schema Markup, and Corroborated Around the Web
[00:20:36] Craig Campbell: Now, obviously, going back to that home or About Me page for your entities, are you listing all your social media and everything else on that about page for that to trigger or are you allowing Google to figure that out themselves?
[00:20:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): No, you have to explicitly tell it. You do it on your Entity Home. You do it in Schema Markup. You also present it on the page. Google says you don’t use Schema Markup to present something additional to Google that isn’t already on the page. There are some exceptions so you can, for example, your date of birth, you don’t actually have to have it written in the page. That’s an exception that you’re allowed to make. But your social media channels, definitely.
[00:21:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But one very common mistake that people make is they think I’ve put it on my entity homepage, my home for my entity. It will now trigger. It won’t trigger because Google needs proof. It needs corroboration. You still need to keep pointing Google to different sources online that confirm what it is you said. You were talking around about Wikidata. You went in and started adding your social media accounts to Wikidata. That’s a really good way to confirm, but the danger of that, if you do it yourself is they delete your Wikidata page, and everything goes out the window. And it’s incredibly counterproductive because you just make things worse. So, Wikidata is another topic I’m sure we’ll talk about in a moment, but Crunchbase you mentioned.
[00:22:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But all of your profiles, one of the biggest jobs is actually just going around all your profiles and making sure, it’s like NAPs in local search, name, address, phone number. You just need to make sure that all that information on your home is what you state as fact. And then you have to go out and prove it. And it’s like a child. You can’t expect a child to believe what you tell them when you tell them it first time. It needs to be repeated by multiple people that they trust. So if I meet a stranger in the street, child meets a stranger in the street and they say something, the child will not believe them. But if their mother says it, then their father says it, then their teacher says it, then the baker says it, and the next door neighbour says it, your grandma says it, that’s building up trust in that information and it will stick.
Google’s Memory Functions Through Corroboration and Attaching Relationships in Its Brain
[00:22:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the other important point to make is how does the brain function? And this is really, really, really quite interesting is I was giving a talk in Prague and the guy before me was Chester international memory man. And I just wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying at all because he kept saying, I gave the memory trick speech at the White House. And he said it literally six times because he was so pleased with himself having done it.
[00:23:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But in fact, what he did was say, I won’t tell the whole story because it’s quite long. But at the end, he was saying he can remember an entire deck of cards in order and just repeat it to you. And somebody was saying, but if I fill my brain with all of this useless fluff, will I not forget some important things? And he said, well, no, your memory is actually without limit pretty much. And the question isn’t how much can you stuff in there. It’s how many things in there can you attach new things to.
[00:23:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s how we learn, that’s how children learn is if I tell you something completely out of context, for example, the tempo of 92, you’ll have forgotten that in three seconds. If I say tempo of 92 in Bob Dylan’s song Blowing in the Wind, you might be able to attach that to your wedding night because you were listening to Blowing in the Wind with your wife on your wedding night. That gives you something to hook it onto.
[00:24:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, if I tell you a new piece of information, if there’s something already in your brain that you can hook it onto, you will probably remember it. There is more likelihood. If there are several things in your brain you can hook it onto, you’re much, much more likely to remember it. And that’s where we’re going with Google. It’s saying the two things, one of which is corroboration, and the second is give it information that creates a relationship in its brain between yourself and something it already understands.
[00:24:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, in your case, for example, it already understands me very well. You can identify a relationship between those, which is I’ve been on your podcast three times. You’ve been on my podcast three times. That’s a relationship that’s pretty strong. And that will help Google to identify who you are, believe in who you are, and remember who you are and be confident that it has correctly understood which Craig Campbell you are.
The Amount of Information You Could Give and the Amount of Dots You Could Join Is Infinite
[00:25:10] Craig Campbell: And obviously, I’ve seen that you’ve done adding your podcasts to IMDb and then you’re tagging me or Judith or I think there’s 159 guests or something like that you had. That’s a lot of work. That is a lot and lot of work. And no one’s doing that level of work without that stuff actually working. But when you are corroborating stuff now on my Schema, what I’ve done on my About Me page is show my YouTube, my LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and a few Instagram and a few other bits and bobs.
[00:25:50] Craig Campbell: How much is, and I think I’ve got my IMDb profile on there, how much is too much joining the dots for Google? How much do we actually have to do? Is this thing endless or are we close to doing it well? And from what I’m doing, just out of curiosity, I’m doing like 20% of what I should be or I’m covering all basis now or where I’m at?
[00:26:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The simple but not necessarily particularly helpful answer is there is no limit to how many dots you can join, but the most important thing is to join the dots solidly and consistently. So, it’s much better to do 20% of what you could do really, really, really, really well, really consistently and make sure that everything corresponds all the way down the line than do 50% and get it wrong, because 50% with misjoined dots is just throwing confused messages at Google. So, I would say relatively little but incredibly well done. I just said 20%, in fact, I’d never given a percent before.
[00:26:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the reason is actually infinite the amount of information you could potentially give and the amount of dots you could potentially join. From what I said earlier on about Google Maps, over time, every single minute of my life, there’s a new relationship that’s been developed pretty much. And you’ve got what you’ve got to do and that’s what Kalicube helps you to do.
[00:27:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): When you use Kalicube Pro, the tool that I’m building, is that it will identify which are the strongest points, which are the dots you really need to join, so you join them in the right order. And if you do that over a period of time, Google will get the idea. But once again, you can’t force the tomato plant to grow in a week when a tomato plant takes three months or six months to grow. So, just stuffing, that would be an example, stuffing lots of manure on top of your tomato plant doesn’t make it grow any faster. You’re probably going to drown the poor wee thing.
Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) on Being Successful in Managing His Personal Brand SERP and Knowledge Panel
[00:28:00] Craig Campbell: Yeah. That was just out of curiosity, but that brings us nicely onto the two. So, obviously I’ve done a lot of mistakes. You’ve done a lot of mistakes which is just part of the process, but you are bringing out this guide, if you want to call it a guide of things to do, and the best place is to be on. Is there a cost to that first and foremost?
[00:28:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yes, of course there is. Basically, I’ve wasted, I’ve been doing this for seven years. I actually triggered my first Knowledge Panel seven years ago. So, I’ve been looking after my Brand SERP, what appears when you google my personal name. It’s only me. That’s all you see. There are 250 Jason Barnards in the world including a footballer, a hockey player, a doctor, a dentist, and a podcaster in the UK. None of them get a look in because Google’s so confident it’s understood who I am. I appear to be the only Jason Barnard in the world.
[00:29:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the Knowledge Panel I’ve been working on for seven years, which is why it’s so full. And Aleyda Solis, absolute credit to her, she’s been out and about doing loads and loads and loads of things. And she’s been joining the dots, not as carefully as I have. But when I talked to her about it, I thought it was just she was incredibly everywhere all the time, as you were saying, lots of press. But in fact, she was paying a lot of attention to making it, building it very, very carefully. And as you know, Aleyda Solis has been doing the rounds as it were for five years or so. It didn’t happen overnight. It happened over five or six years of doing this stuff, going to these conferences, linking herself to these things that Google was already understanding.
How the Kalicube Tool Works, the Service It Offers, and What It Will Cost You
[00:29:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But Kalicube actually goes further than what you were just saying. It takes your specific case and pulls up your specific existing profiles, existing pages, existing articles, existing content that you can point to and tells you exactly which ones you should be doing in what order and where you should be putting them. It creates the Schema Markup for you, so you can put it on your About Me page without actually having to know how to write the code. You’ve copy paste it.
[00:30:10] Craig Campbell: That is a board and it’s still ready.
[00:30:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s brilliant. And one really interesting thing, sorry, and if you’re using WordPress, you don’t need to even insert it in the header or the footer. You can just stick it in a Gutenberg block as HTML and it works absolutely fine. I’ve been doing that for ages. So, it actually creates this code you stick in your home, in your Entity Home that points to all this stuff. And it allows you to build up this corroboration and to point out the corroboration in the right order for yourself, because what I do is ping Google and ask Google, what do you know about this person? What do you know about this brand? And it sends it back in the order, obviously in the order of ranking.
[00:30:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then I just show it to you and say, here you go, this is what Google thinks is important. This is what Google has already understood. Now, just build your home, put your signpost in place, point it all out to Google, which you have to do yourself, but Kalicube will tell you where to put the stuff, what code you need to insert, gives you the code.
[00:31:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the cost of that is actually what I’ve discovered is that it’s something you need to do over a period of time, but it’s just a big chunk of task. So you pay once to get the big chunk of tasks. If you know how to do them, fine, you go ahead and do it because you’re an SEO like yourself. You would just need the big chunk of tasks. If you don’t know what you’re doing, I have lessons, courses that you can purchase which explain exactly how to go through each of these processes, your meta titles, your profile pages, updating Schema Markup, how it works, and so on and so forth. So, basically, we walk you through it but the actual task system is a one off fee, which you would then come back and renew after three months with a new set of tasks to keep building, but you wouldn’t need to buy a set of tasks every single month.
The Postponement of the Kalicube Tool for Jason to Make Sure It Works Perfectly
[00:31:57] Craig Campbell: Yeah. No, that makes a lot of, listen, I’m actually really angry with myself now after just going through all of this stuff that I’ve gone and done, you’re releasing something like that is saying that is rather frustrating, but…
[00:32:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m really sorry. Yeah. The thing I actually did some pre-sales of the Knowledge Graph system and people have been complaining that I haven’t released it. I was going to release it in December and I didn’t. And I’ve had a couple of complaints. And the explanation for that is actually really simple. I don’t want to release it until I’m absolutely sure that it works.
[00:32:34] Craig Campbell: Yeah.
[00:32:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And so, the person who did complain, in fact, it was two people who complained. I just wrote back and said it will be released within the next month. And it will be released and it will work whereas a month ago, I wouldn’t have been a hundred percent convinced. It probably would’ve worked, but I don’t want to short sell people.
[00:32:55] Craig Campbell: Yeah.
[00:32:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And so, basically, it’s saying, be a little bit patient. A couple of weeks here or there isn’t going to make any difference to anybody because anyway, it’s going to take you three months to get this done at least three months, three to six months perhaps, more depending on who you are, how much, and that’s it. It can take longer if you’ve got very little PR, very little presence online. It can take a lot longer. So, I think the important thing from my point perspective is that I understand exactly what you need to do and that the Kalicube tool knows which questions to ask Google, which is what it’s doing, in order to provide you with the steps that Google will react most favourably to.
Jason’s Test on Himself Increased His Confidence Score in His Industry From 64% to 94%
[00:33:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I’ll give you one last example, which is actually really interesting that I discovered this morning is in order to understand what category a business is in or a person, I take the Brand SERP and I pin Google’s NLP, natural language processing. And I say, what category is this and what entities do you recognise? And it pulls it back and it says, Jason Barnard business services, hang on, it’s business services, I can’t remember what else. It’s pretty, pretty accurate, but it’s Google’s own classification system using my Brand SERP. And a year ago, it said 64% confident that Jason Barnard is in business services.
[00:34:16] Craig Campbell: Yeah.
[00:34:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I updated every single thing on my about myself a month ago as the test. This is the final test before I finish writing the Knowledge Panel course to see what happened. Number one, my Knowledge Graph API score, the confidence Google has just shot up. Number two is that that confidence score in which industry I am in has gone from 64% to 94%, 94% confident. Google is 94% confident that its own results about me put me in the correct category. That means that Google has understood me, that my Brand SERP represents me as I should be represented.
Craig Campbell’s Confidence Score Considering His Name in the SEO Industry
[00:35:01] Craig Campbell: Yeah. Now, out of curiosity and you might not have the answer but for me, what is my score likely to be right now? Is it 10, 15?
[00:35:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I actually looked you up.
[00:35:15] Craig Campbell: What you would’ve, so what, just hit me with it, just give me a blow.
[00:35:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, if you look in America, you don’t get a look in. So, it’s the confidence score in that is actually 84% that he’s a country Western singer, but 84% isn’t that high. If he worked on it, would be 95%, but he obviously doesn’t. And in the UK, you’ve got the comedian who lives in Devon. And interestingly enough, a year ago, I’ve been tracking you for a long time. A year ago, you didn’t get any place on the SERP at all and now you do.
[00:35:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So in fact, what you’re now doing because your name is so common, because you’re sharing your SERP with other people, it thinks that the Brand SERP for Craig Campbell represents a comedian more than it represents you. But Craig Campbell SEO, interestingly enough, actually puts you over 80%. So, all of this work that you think was throwing well at the wall was complete waste of time might not have triggered your Knowledge Panel, but it’s made your Brand SERP in the specifics of Craig Campbell SEO much, much, much clearer.
[00:36:26] Craig Campbell: Yeah. No, that’s good to hear. And it’s good to hear some kind of figure, so I’ve done something right which is saying…
[00:36:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s one of the things with Kalicube that I’m trying to roll out with this is giving numbers. You have improved by, in my case 64 to 94%. That’s 50% improvement over a year. It wouldn’t take that.
Looking at Google’s Categorisation by Georegion and by Its Own SERP
[00:36:49] Craig Campbell: Exactly. And I think it’s these little metrics that just keep people going with it as well. Because one of the things you’ve said, when it’s a bloody tedious task and that’s something I was a hundred percent join you with, it’s not been the funnest thing to do. But if I had figures saying that you’re heading in the right direction, I’m a persistent guy anyway, so I wasn’t, I’m not letting it go until I take that country Western singer off the map as well. That’s just in the nature of me, but I think, I might never do that, but that’s the…
[00:37:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): There are multiple figures we can look at. One is the confidence that Google has in its categorisation of what it puts onto your Brand SERP or your personal Brand SERP especially in your local region, because don’t forget this varies enormously according to geolocation. Different people in different brands have different importance in different areas. Some brands are global obviously, some aren’t. So, we need to track it by georegion. And we need to measure how confident Google is in its own categorisation of its own SERP, its own search engine results page about you, how confident the API, the Google Knowledge Graph API is that it has understood who you are and what you do which I also provide in Kalicube. That’s just tracking the Knowledge Graph API.
[00:38:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): My current score is well over 800. 800 is a very good score. Somebody like Semrush would be 1,200. A company like WordLift is about 600 and growing. But these are all numbers you can push upwards. So you’ve got, and sorry, adding on to that is the number of elements that you’ve got in your Knowledge Panel.
[00:38:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You were saying earlier on that you’d only got your name and your date of birth. That’s already pretty good. Just the name is the start. And it will trigger a little Knowledge Panel, a sprout, as I said, your tomato plant sprout. Then it adds your date of birth, then it adds where you were born, then it adds your school, then it adds your brother, then it adds your sister, then it adds your mother, then whatever it might be. And it builds up bit by bit. So, I’m actually also counting the number of elements that it is citing, which is also very encouraging.
[00:39:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I think you’re very right and you’ve given me a very good lesson there is Kalicube as a tool needs to provide a) benchmarks to know what you’re aiming for and b) a measurement of how you are progressing that, as you say, when I saw Mommy Koala significant other Daddy Koala, I felt so good. And the next day, I spent all day just pushing things into the Knowledge Graph because I got over enthusiastic because it encouraged me.
[00:39:41] Craig Campbell: Yeah. And that’s all acknowledgement.
Jason’s Use of the Knowledge Graph to Try to Get Himself Next to John Lennon as Alumni of Their University
[00:39:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And you need to progress. And one of the things with the Knowledge Graph is for example, between me starting to push into the Knowledge Graph the fact that I went to Liverpool John Moores University and I’m trying to get myself next to John Lennon as alumni of Liverpool John Moores University. It’s one of my experiments, and I started three months ago. I’m not there yet, but I do have measurement systems in place where I can see that I’m creeping slowly closer. And I think that’s really, really important. And obviously, being next to John Lennon in an image carousel is pure ego, but why not?
[00:40:29] Craig Campbell: Seem for a guy like you who’s into music, I’m sure probably being up next to a hero or what having content or so, why the hell not? If you can play with the system, it’s good to do little things like that and have a bit of fun and a better.
[00:40:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It is a bit of fun and it also indicates that Google has understood that I went to a University in Liverpool and I have a degree, which makes me more expert and authoritative than I was before it had understood that. It’s a funny trick to be next to John Lennon, but it’s actually a very useful EAT bonus for me. And it comes back to what you were saying is all of this is also building links. It’s building EAT. It’s building understanding.
[00:41:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I like to say SEO is only about three things. It’s about all Google wants to do is understand who you are, what you do, who your audience is, be convinced that you’re a credible solution for its users to offer as a solution to their user’s problems and to know that you can deliver the goods. So it’s understanding, credibility, deliverability. That’s what you need to give to Google.
[00:41:35] Craig Campbell: And on that note, I think you’ve delivered a whole lot of expert knowledge on the Knowledge Panel but you know when…
[00:41:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Sorry. I meant that was a genius segue that you just did. Brilliant.
When Is the Kalicube Tool by Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Coming Out and How Much Will It Cost?
[00:41:49] Craig Campbell: When are you hoping that this tool is coming out? I know you said you’re going be working on it over the weekend, but when realistically is people going to be able to buy up this information?
[00:42:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m going to have, next week I’ll have the beta version going. And what I will now do is I will create a form where you can sign up to be informed when it’s actually released to the public. And I would expect the full release to be in February at some point. So, it won’t be a very long wait. Everything’s in place except the public facing interface.
[00:42:35] Craig Campbell: Yeah. No, that’s good to hear. And roughly, what is this going to cost someone if they want to buy up the, for me, if I was just buying up the block of information or whatever you want to call it?
[00:42:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The task list.
[00:42:49] Craig Campbell: Yeah.
[00:42:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m not a hundred percent sure about the pricing yet, but I think it will probably be 960 euros. And you will get for that, the task list plus the scoring system plus I would actually, especially at the beginning, spend time helping the person, give them half an hour of my time, actually just going through it step by step to explain it. Obviously, that I can’t do for everything once it starts to scale, but what I’m expecting to happen is that the system will explain itself. And that it will be self explanatory.
[00:43:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And for those who are into SEO, I’m sure if I just gave you the task list, you would go away and you would do it in a breeze because you know you’re SEO. And people who don’t know SEO, as I said, I’m going to have courses where you can purchase the course and learn the specific SEO. All this is is simple SEO techniques applied in a systematic, coherent, and intelligent manner. So, the interesting thing about it is if you don’t know about SEO, you can actually learn SEO both from the course that you are giving away here and from doing your own Brand SERP and your Knowledge Panel and from my courses behind that.
[00:44:00] Craig Campbell: Yeah. So, guys, do check that out. Obviously, if you want to dominate your Brand SERP as Jason has said many times, it really is tough. It really as though, you’ve said it and people are probably like, I can’t, he keeps saying this business, your online presence is your business card, but it’s true. It really is. And yeah, I want to thank you for coming on and sharing out. You shared a lot of golden nuggets there, certainly has helped me, and I’m sure it’ll help everyone in the course. I will have links below this when your stuff does go live and just get people on you to buy it, but thank you very much for taking the time to share all of that hard experience and testing and sharing it with us there for the last 40 odd minutes.
[00:44:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thank you.
[00:44:53] Craig Campbell: So appreciate that always, Jason.
[00:44:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, no, it’s absolute pleasure. And the nice thing about this is I can share this because I know that the Kalicube tool will bring sufficient value in and of itself to be worth the money that I’m going to be asking people and that I can actually explain the whole thing because Kalicube is just a tool to help you move forward with something you’ve already understood how to do.
[00:45:16] Craig Campbell: Yeah, exactly. So get on it, guys.
