Thumbnail: Knowledge Panels for Noobs - the Q&A That Answers the Important Questions to Get You Started

Another super interesting Q&A session with Jason Barnard – The Brand SERP Guy – is coming. Don’t miss this one!

Jason has triggered well over A THOUSAND Knowledge Panels and his company (Kalicube), has data on 40,000 Knowledge Panels going back 5 years. He is the “Google Whisperer” – he knows how to get and keep, a Knowledge Panel for people, companies, events, products, and any other Entity.

This Q&A will focus on the easy-to-implement practical tips, techniques, and strategies you need to trigger a Knowledge Panel (if you don’t have one) or enrich it (if you do).

This is a unique opportunity to get straight answers to your questions about getting, managing, and enriching Knowledge Panels for any entity type. So come along to the live event to ask your noobie questions and get a clear, helpful answer from Jason… he assures me that, because the world of Knowledge Panel management is new, there are no stupid questions, only questions people are afraid to ask for risk of looking foolish.

Welcoming Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) to the Show, Who Sang as an Introduction

[00:00:00] Olga Zarr: Hello everyone. Yeah, we are finally live. We have scheduled this meeting, this event I think more than a month ago, so we have been all waiting for it. Hi everyone. My name is Olga. This is Jason. Jason, how are you doing? 

[00:00:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m absolutely fine. As soon as it goes live on StreamYard, I wanted to say, hello everybody and welcome, and then sing, a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Olga Zarr. 

[00:00:32] Olga Zarr: I love it. I would sing if I could, but I don’t think I am talented in any way in this respect, so I won’t even try.

Olga Zarr’s Journey as a Runner for 15 Years and Her Experiences on Running in Kenya

[00:00:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But you’re a great runner.

[00:00:43] Olga Zarr: Yeah. That’s great compared to myself. I’m not that great if I compare myself to some more serious runners, but yeah. This year I’m planning on focusing on running more and seeing how fast I can go. 

[00:01:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So far, you’ve been to Kenya and you’ve run 500,000 kilometers already. 

[00:01:07] Olga Zarr: In my entire running career, I think I ran about 50k. That’s more or less what I have ran, but it is 15 years. In Kenya, I was able to run only 220 kilometers, something of that sort. But Kenya is at a high altitude, like 2,500 meters above the sea level, so running is different there. And there are a lot of rolling hills, so it is even more difficult. But yeah, I am fresh when it comes to my mind and my body, fresh because I’ve been there almost three weeks. That’s why I haven’t had any live events, any newsletters, but I am catching up right now.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) on Currently Studying and Working in the Oxford University Library 

[00:01:54] Olga Zarr: And where are you, Jason?

[00:01:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh, I’m in Oxford University Library. This is the library. When I come to Oxford, I study here and I work here and it makes me feel intelligent. 

[00:02:07] Olga Zarr: Because you are. This is like the perfect place to be when it comes to having a Q&A session, having a live event. I cannot imagine a better one. 

[00:02:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It is, yeah. It’s an absolute honour to be allowed to use the libraries. And as I was saying to you earlier, having always been an anti-Oxford University snob in some ways, I now realise that there is something special here. And I definitely, definitely work better and I feel smarter. It might not be true, but I feel smarter.

First Question for the Topic of This Episode: What Is a Knowledge Panel? 

[00:02:41] Olga Zarr: That’s awesome. So, everyone, this is the event during which you can ask questions for Jason Barnard. If you are a noob, that’s the event for you. You can ask any questions. There are no stupid questions. You can ask anything. If you don’t ask Jason anything, I will simply use that time for me because I have a ton of questions for Jason and, yeah. 

[00:03:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): First question is, what is a Knowledge Panel? And a Knowledge Panel is the information box on the right hand side of a Google result when you search for a person or a company’s name or a book or a film. And they are built from Google’s understanding of knowledge. 

[00:03:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, it’s basically built upon Google’s equivalent of Wikipedia. Wikipedia contains 50 million articles. Google’s Knowledge Graph contains 1,500 billion facts. So, it’s a hugely massive encyclopedia that’s machine readable, and Google uses it to build the Knowledge Panels.

How Does Google Take Information and Write It Into the Knowledge Panels? 

[00:03:49] Olga Zarr: Okay. This is going to be a new question. How does Google take that information? Does AI write this information into Knowledge Panels? This is AI routine I think.

[00:04:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It uses machine learning to understand the world. It uses a basic understanding of the entity, the person, the company, the music album, the film. It has a basic understanding of who they are. And then it gathers information that it feels is factually correct from around the web and populates the Knowledge Panel with that information from around the web. But it’s all machine learning now.

What Is the Difference Between a Knowledge Graph and a Knowledge Panel?

[00:04:33] Olga Zarr: Okay. And another very often question, what’s the difference between a Knowledge Graph and a Knowledge Panel? I had to ask this one. 

[00:04:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The Knowledge Graph or any Knowledge Graph is a collection of factual information about entities and relationships between them and also attributes of those entities. It sounds complicated, but an entity is simply a person, a company, a place, a road, a book, a film, a thing that we can identify. The relationships between those entities is I am Jason Barnard. I am the CEO and founder of Kalicube. Kalicube is an entity. Jason Barnard is an entity. Founder and CEO is the relationship between the two of us.

[00:05:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m Jason Barnard. I’m 5’10”. That’s an attribute 5’10”. I’m 56 years old, an attribute. So, a Knowledge Graph is simply a collection of information that Google, in this case, that Google understands to be factually correct entities, attributes, about those entities and relationships between them. And if you look at Wikipedia, when you click on the links between the different articles, that’s a relationship between them.

Looking at Knowledge Graphs Like Wikipedia’s Collection of Information and Its Difference With Knowledge Panels

[00:05:48] Olga Zarr: Okay, okay. 

[00:05:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you can look at it that way and just look at Wikipedia and think that’s like a Knowledge Graph. It’s not quite a Knowledge Graph, but that’s the idea. And Google has that, but it’s literally hundreds of thousands of times bigger. 

[00:06:03] Olga Zarr: Okay, okay. Yeah. That’s a very nice explanation. Thank you. So, I will ask another question. How do I generate a Knowledge Panel? Another very often asked the question, how do I get a Knowledge Panel?

A Knowledge Panel is a representation of Google’s understanding of the entity.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)

[00:06:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh, right. I forgot to answer the second part of the first question, which is the difference between Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Panel. A Knowledge Panel is a representation of Google’s understanding of the entity, really simply put. So, Google’s representation of what it believes to be fact about Jason Barnard, the entity, or Kalicube, the entity, or Olga Zarr, the entity.

Getting a Knowledge Panel: Make Sure Google Understands Who You Are, What You Do, and Which Audience You Serve 

[00:06:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then the question of how do you get a Knowledge Panel. A lot of people think they come from Wikipedia. But if you think about what I just said, the Knowledge Graph is hundreds of thousands of times bigger. So, not all Knowledge Panels come from Wikipedia. In fact, the majority of Knowledge Panels don’t come from Wikipedia. Are you just saying hi to yourself there? 

[00:07:07] Olga Zarr: Yeah. I think I was saying hi to people who said hi, to myself as well, to you. 

[00:07:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Brilliant. Yeah. So, to get a Knowledge Panel, all you need to do is make sure that Google understands who you are, what you do, and potentially which audience you serve. The idea that you need to be notable to get a Knowledge Panel is a mistaken idea. Google just wants to understand. 

[00:07:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So if I can educate Google, if I can convince Google about the fact about myself, I can have a Knowledge Panel purely by being understood by Google. Then the question is, does Google show the Knowledge Panel? Then you can start talking about notability.

The Role of Using Schema Markup in Getting a Knowledge Panel

[00:07:52] Olga Zarr: Okay, okay. And let’s say, do I need to know Schema? Do I need to put Schema on my site to get a Knowledge Panel or can I go without Schema?

[00:08:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You can use Schema and it’s a good idea to use Schema, because Schema is a way to represent the information that you’re communicating to Google in a format that it can natively understand. So, we could call it Google’s native language. So, you would want to use Schema if you can. 

[00:08:26] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you look at Schema Markup, it’s actually entities with relationships and attributes. So, it’s exactly the same as a Knowledge Graph. You can build your own internal Knowledge Graph using Schema Markup. And that’s what tools like WordLift do. They take your website, and they will build an internal Knowledge Graph of your website using Schema Markup.

Can You Rely on Tools Like Rank Math, Yoast, and WordLift in Generating Schema Markup? 

[00:08:48] Olga Zarr: Okay. And if I don’t know Schema too much, can I rely on tools like, for example, Rank Math or other plugins that they can do it for me? Because Jason has been helping me with my name change, and he’s officially helping me get the Knowledge Panel for my new name. 

[00:09:12] Olga Zarr: And this is maybe a little bit, I would say, shameful, but I have never checked Schema on my own website. I just put some fields here and there in the theme in Rank Math. And I never actually checked that if this is correct, if this is too many entities or some duplication. And the first thing Jason noticed is that there is a huge mess regarding Schema on my site. Then he helped me clean this up. So, how much can I rely on such tools if I don’t know Schema too much?

When Using Multiple Plugins, There Is a Tendency to Have Fragmented Chunks of Schema Markup 

[00:09:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I like tools like Rank Math and Yoast and WordLift and Schema App and InLinks, all of which generate Schema Markup. One of the problems I see a great deal of is multiple plugins generating their own little chunk of Schema Markup. And then you end up with multiple pieces of Schema Markup all in the same page that potentially contradict each other, certainly overload and fragment the information. 

[00:10:20] Olga Zarr: Yeah.

[00:10:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you end up with lots of fragmented little bits. And what then happens is Google goes in. The machine sees these different bits. It can’t put them all together because they’re contradictory, fragmented, not necessarily being very clear. If you are going to use Google’s native language, breaking it up into little chunks just makes it really complicated. 

[00:10:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The idea of Schema is it’s one chunk that just says everything that’s in the page. So, the problem with these plugins isn’t so much what they generate, but the fact that people install multiple plugins that then contradict and fragment the information.

The Problem With Schema Bloat and the Importance of Making Sure About the Information You’re Saying

[00:10:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the other problem is Schema bloat, which is too much Schema. And you are better off going with simple Schema that explains simple things and then building up little by little than having too much Schema and thinking, if I just throw as much Schema as I possibly can at Google, it will understand. It doesn’t. Once it gets to the limit where it says, this is too confusing, there’s too much, it just ignores it. So, you might as well not have put any. 

[00:11:26] Olga Zarr: Yeah. And I think there is even a manual penalty for Schema manipulation or Schema spamming if you overdo. 

[00:11:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, sure. I’ve never been in that situation. I tend to be very careful, and I build little by little. What we do with Kalicube Pro, which is a SaaS platform for agencies to manage your entity in Google, I would call it Google’s brain, including Schema Markup but also corroboration. We’re about to come to that question. We start off with what we know Google is looking for, and then we build it up little by little. And we build it up as we are sure about the information. 

[00:12:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you think about Schema, and this is crucial, when you add Schema to your web page, you are explicitly saying to Google, I have checked this information and it is correct, and I am providing it to you specifically in your native language because it’s very important and I’m absolutely sure that it’s true. So if you just click on a button in Rank Math, Yoast, WordLift, Schema App, whichever application you’re using to do this, and you don’t check it, you are throwing a real curve ball at Google. So, you really need to check what it is you’re saying.

Like Other SEOs, Olga Zarr and Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Work Hard for Their Clients But They Forget to Look at Their Own Sites 

[00:12:46] Olga Zarr: Yeah. So, in the case of my site, the thing was that I had some Schema generated by the theme and I had Schema generated by Rank Math. And when I do an SEO audit, of course, I always check that for my clients, but somehow I forgot to check it for myself, so yeah. 

[00:13:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Aren’t we all the same though, Olga? We work so hard for our clients, and we pay attention. We tell them off when they don’t do what we are asking. And then we look at our own sites and we go, oh dear, I didn’t actually pay attention.

What Aspects Should You Focus On to Get Google to Understand You? 

[00:13:17] Olga Zarr: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, so I think we have a question. What do you do to get Google to understand you? Yeah. This is a very good question. 

[00:13:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. I was actually reading the quality rater guidelines earlier on and looking at how it’s changed. And one of the things they talk about is the idea of first party, second party, and third party corroborative sources. They don’t put it quite like this. This is how we explain it at Kalicube. 

[00:13:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): First party is my own sites. Second party is sites that I control the information on, but I do not own, for example, my Twitter profile or my LinkedIn profile. And third party sites are those that I don’t control, which would be Forbes, it would be the Guardian. Crunchbase is technically a third party site.

Providing Information on a First Party Site and Corroborating Information on Second Party and Third Party Sites

[00:14:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And in order to get Google to understand you, you need to provide your version on a first party site, your own, which we call the Entity Home. You then need to get corroborative information on second party sites that you partially control. It needs to say the same thing. When I say corroboration, I mean it needs to say the same facts in the same format produced and reflected in the same way. 

[00:14:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then in the quality rater guidelines, they say, then you need third party. Without third party corroboration, we do not believe. Obviously, that’s the quality raters. It’s not the Knowledge Graph, but the quality raters are training the Knowledge Graph. So, the quality raters are paid to point the finger to the Knowledge Graph when it gets it wrong, when it gets it right.

[00:15:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you have corrective information, corrective data going in, and also confirmatory data, whatever that would be called. So, the machine is learning from what the quality raters are pushing into it. So, what Google is telling the quality raters doesn’t affect any individual entity or any individual result, but it does affect the way the machine moves forwards and learns.

The Importance of an Infinite Cycle of Corroboration, Schema Markup, and Links

[00:15:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you need first, second, and third party corroborative sources that all say the same thing. And then you need to join the dots for Google. So, you take your Entity Home, which is the first party corroborative source, and you link to all the second party and third party sources that say the same thing. And hopefully, they then link back to the Entity Home. That creates an infinite cycle of self corroboration. Google loves it. That’s how Google learns. 

[00:16:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And you were talking about not knowing Schema. If you know Schema, you use sameAs or subjectOf to point to all these different sources. If you don’t know Schema, you don’t want to use Schema, you just link to them using a normal hyperlink and then you link back. It’s exactly the same. The only difference is with Schema, you would expect or we have known or we have seen rather at Kalicube that the results are slightly faster.

Kalicube Pro Offers a Free Schema Markup Generator and the Company Also Helps Olga Zarr Trigger Her Knowledge Panel 

[00:16:26] Olga Zarr: Okay, okay. Yeah. Thanks for explaining. 

[00:16:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh, there’s a free Schema Markup generator for people and for companies on the kalicube.pro website.

[00:16:37] Olga Zarr: Oh, okay. Yeah. I will put that in the description.

[00:16:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s free. 

[00:16:43] Olga Zarr: Yeah, sure. And so, when I was starting a collaboration with Jason regarding my name change, I got the list of things I need to take care of. And I think this was a huge time saver for me because the Kalicube team just provided me with the things I need to update, the things that maybe if I have the capacity to change, I want to change. And I know I’m a little bit behind some of the things because of the vacation, but I am going to start working on that hopefully tomorrow. 

[00:17:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Brilliant.

How Long Until You Can Expect to Finally Trigger and See a Knowledge Panel on Your Brand SERP?

[00:17:19] Olga Zarr: But let’s say we started working on my Knowledge Panel about a month ago, I think. And still, when I type my new name, I don’t see a Knowledge Panel. When can I expect this to happen? 

[00:17:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s a great question. And I’ve been pondering this question and thinking about it and working on it for the last 10 years. I’ve generated well over a thousand Knowledge Panels. And every change, triggering a Knowledge Panel, updating a Knowledge Panel, enriching a Knowledge Panel, when you do it algorithmically, which is by the system of Entity Home plus corroboration plus infinite loop of self corroboration, expect iterations of 3 months. 

[00:18:00] Olga Zarr: Okay. 

[00:18:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s not a fixed rule. Obviously, these are algorithms. Things can be different. Sometimes it’s a week, sometimes it’s 4 months, sometimes it’s 5 months. But if you go into this with the expectation that if I do my work properly, if I make all the corroboration match, I can expect a 3 month iteration each time I try to change something. 

[00:18:22] Olga Zarr: Okay, okay. So, we will do a live in 2 months and we’ll see where I’m at. 

[00:18:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Brilliant.

What Is Jason Barnard’s Approach to Create Content for the Next 6 Months in the Process of Getting a Knowledge Panel? 

[00:18:30] Olga Zarr: Yeah. Okay. Hi, Picasso. We have another question. What is your approach to create content for the next 6 months? 

[00:18:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh, I like that question because this is something we’re working on very, very hard at Kalicube. One of which is we work a lot on Koray Gubur’s advice. I absolutely love Koray. He’s super intelligent, and he really knows what he’s talking about. And if you’re going to listen to one person in this space today, I would listen to him about how to write content. 

[00:19:03] Olga Zarr: And you.

[00:19:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. But for writing content, I now listen to Koray. And he provided a list of 40 things that we need to look out for in terms of content creation and web page creation. And I narrowed it down to 17 that I feel are really, really important.

The Concept of Micro Semantics, Creating a Context Cloud, and Having a Writing Style 

[00:19:20] Olga Zarr: Oh, can you name some?

[00:19:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I can’t remember the 17 now off the top of my head. But one of them is micro semantics, which is speaking about the very detailed things around a particular topic. That’s going to be the huge difference between AI generated text and human generated text because AI doesn’t do that. So, our human input there is going to be incredibly important. 

[00:19:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The way we phrase things is incredibly important. We need to remember that as human beings, we aren’t perfect and we do vary, but we have a style. If you look at ChatGPT, which is probably the basis of that question, is it’s boring, it’s incomplete, and it’s incredibly standardised, and it repeats itself incessantly. So, from that perspective, it’s great for throwing up ideas, as it were, but it’s very bad in terms of personality, in terms of bringing new information to the table. 

[00:20:30] Olga Zarr: Yeah, yeah. 

[00:20:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And indeed, micro semantics, creating a context cloud, having a style, and Google is now starting to recognise style. And we’re going to do an experiment soon by releasing articles by other people at Kalicube and see if mine naturally ranked better than theirs. Not because theirs are less well written, but because they have less E-A-T, which is another huge question.

Looking at How a Machine Writes and Training a Machine to Recognise Spam

[00:20:57] Olga Zarr: Yeah. I just wanted to say that all of the articles on my website, except for one, have been written by me. And I wrote one, the last one with ChatGPT. I wrote it about a month ago. And I am wondering what happens, but I see that it is already starting to rank. Because the article is about what is an SEO audit, very long one. And the last time I checked, it was on page, I think, 4 or 5. At least with this one, Google doesn’t seem to see the difference that this one wasn’t written by me. But of course, this is no real experiment. I just created an article. 

[00:21:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I think there are a couple of really important things. One of which is a machine will write in a way that another machine will understand. Therefore, you immediately have an advantage. But Google is moving towards the idea of saying, we’re going to promote the idea of individuals. And that’s why they say experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And so, it’s going to be another of these cat and mouse games, where Google is going to be training the machine to spot this stuff.

Letting Spam Through Is Part of the Machine Learning Process to Recognise Spam

[00:22:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And one thing John Mueller mentioned to me a few years ago is, why did so much link spam get through for so long? And part of the explanation is if they don’t let the spam through, they can’t teach the machine what spam looks like. If they let the spam through, they train the machine to see what it looks like, and then it can catch new spam it’s never seen before using machine learning. So, they need the spam that we’re throwing at them in order to train the machine to then throw it out. So, people are now spamming and they’re probably with a few. 

[00:22:48] Olga Zarr: Yeah. Like crazy. 

[00:22:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’ll probably be a good trick to play for maybe a year, but that’s the other thing. With link spam, it was still manually written algorithms. Machine learning is a completely different game. They can let a bit of spam in, and they can then train the machine to learn to spot spam. And it will get better and better and better at an accelerating rate.

Predicting the Future: Will SEOs Lose Their Jobs Because of ChatGPT or Get a New Skill Using It? 

[00:23:13] Olga Zarr: Yeah. And I think this is like a similar question. Let’s predict the future considering ChatGPT. Are we going to be out of our jobs soon and SEOs? What do you think? Or will we simply have to get a new skill using ChatGPT, using the prompts, knowing how to operate ChatGPT? What are your thoughts on that? 

[00:23:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I think sensible SEOs will use ChatGPT to generate an initial draft. And what I found is that I look at the initial draft, and I think that’s really good, wow, brilliant. And then I start rewriting it. And I think, it’s missed this point and it’s misunderstood at that part. This part doesn’t read in a very friendly manner. And I end up rewriting the entire thing. 

[00:24:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, it makes my process faster, puts me at a level higher than I would otherwise have been, because it’s much easier to look at something and say, that’s rubbish, and rewrite it than it is to write it in the first place. So, I think what it’s doing is putting me at level one and then I can push it up to level three, rather than me coming in straight and doing level two. So, my writing and my production is better and it’s faster. And that’s how you should use ChatGPT, in my opinion.

[00:24:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you do use it for generating text and publish it as is, you can expect to be caught out in the relatively near future. And that exponential improvement of machine learning means that you won’t have the huge timeframe we had with link spam, which was years and years and years and years. This isn’t going to be that long. It’s going to be much quicker. So, be careful is my only piece of advice.

Other Things Google Is Focusing On: Measuring Momentum and Sitewide Signals for E-A-T, Notability, and Content

[00:24:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The other thing that Google is doing, which Koray talks about, is measuring momentum. So if you are publishing once every week, and then all of a sudden you find ChatGPT and you publish 50 articles in a week, the momentum is changed. And then you put yourself in a situation where you need to publish 50 articles every single week. So, you put yourself in a situation that you need to maintain that momentum. Because as soon as the momentum is lost, Koray has done an experiment with this, the rankings drop.

[00:25:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the other point is that Google is now talking about sitewide signals for this kind of thing, for E-A-T, notably, and also author wide signals for E-A-T, but also for the content itself. So, you can’t now just rely on one article ranking. You need to look at the entire work, the entire body of work, if you want to talk about it in an authorship manner. What is your body of work? That body of work can be on your website, it can be elsewhere, but Google is now looking at me, Jason Barnard, and my entire body of work, wherever it might be hosted. And that’s huge.

In Addition to Generating Ideas, What Are Some Other Applications of ChatGPT for SEOs? 

[00:26:12] Olga Zarr: Yeah. And what do you think are some other applications of ChatGPT for SEOs, in addition to generating ideas? Which I think it is really a great tool for that. And maybe writing some emails, some small pieces of text tweets. What do you think else can we SEOs do with that? What about writing Schema with ChatGPT? 

[00:26:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. With structured stuff like Schema, it does a very, very, very good job. At Kalicube, with WordLift in fact, we’re working in partnership with WordLift on a lot of different topics, but one of them is trying to figure out how we can get it to write factual descriptions of entities. We need entity descriptions because that’s part of the way you’re going to get the Knowledge Panel. 

[00:26:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): People underestimate the value and the importance of the description you give to Google, the word description rather than just the Schema Markup. How do I describe myself? “Jason Barnard is the founder and CEO of Kalicube” is an incredibly clear statement that I need to include in my description. But if you use ChatGPT and say, who is Jason Barnard, write a description, or who is even Bill Gates, who it knows about, it will just make lots of stuff up.

Taking Risks With Information, Training a Machine Learning Model, and Some of the Offers of Kalicube 

[00:27:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you limit it and you say, okay, you can put a scale from one to 10 of no risk to lots of risk. If you put it at lots of risk, it will start saying, at one point it was saying, Jason Barnard has founded several multi million pound companies, which is not true. He works with Gary Illyes at Google, which is not true.

[00:27:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And it just makes stuff up. It was quite fun. And then if you put it at one, it doesn’t have very much to say at all because it’s very limited in the facts that it has. So, what we’re going to do with WordLift is train a machine learning model, a GPT-3 model, not ChatGPT, but GPT-3 and train it to write entity descriptions.

[00:28:10] Olga Zarr: Wow. Yeah. That’s awesome, really awesome.

The Kalicube process for a Knowledge Panel is incredibly simple. The application of it requires perseverance, accuracy, and attention to detail.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)

[00:28:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And it’s going to be part of the Kalicube Pro SaaS platform offer. Kalicube Pro is a SaaS platform for agencies. And we want to get agencies on board to actually go through the process we described to Olesia earlier on about how to get a Knowledge Panel, because it’s actually very simple in the process. The Kalicube process for a Knowledge Panel is incredibly simple. The application of it requires perseverance, accuracy, and attention to detail.

The Multi-Step Process of Changing Information or Rebranding in a Knowledge Panel and Its Uncertain Timeframe

[00:28:44] Olga Zarr: Yeah. I think a few years ago, from what I remember 5 years ago or so, it was almost impossible to get a Knowledge Panel for a normal person, from what I remember. And I remember reading the article on, I think, Search Engine Journal when you wrote exactly how to get a Knowledge Panel, how to generate a Knowledge Panel. There was such an article somewhere written by you, and I think I followed some of those steps initially. And after, I don’t know, 2 years later, you noticed that I have a sprout. 

[00:29:19] Olga Zarr: So, it is all thanks to you, but I didn’t do much with it. So, it’s only thanks to you that the Knowledge Panel I had with my previous name started to look okay, because you told me that I should change. Because I had the description of me on some website from which it was pulling the data, and I didn’t put my surname. It was just saying, Olga is blah, blah, blah. And when I edit my surname, it was taken to the Knowledge Panel on the next day or something like that. So, tiny details, but yeah.

The Key to Rebranding: Changing Information Everywhere and Doing It All at the Same Time 

[00:29:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. It’s lots of tiny details, and thinking about the context of where the content is, what Google is going to do with it, does it understand it, making sure your surname is there. And with the rebranding, as it were, with changing your name, it really is a question of going around and changing it absolutely everywhere. Change it everywhere. Do it all at the same time. 

[00:30:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): What we’ve seen is if you spend 3 months changing all this information, you’re going to wait a year for Google to update something. But if you do it all within a couple of days, it will go around the whole web, it will recrawl everything. It will say, well, actually it’s all confirmed all at the same time. So, you’re not creating confusion.

Using Kalicube Pro, You Can Follow the List It Gives You and Change Every Reference Across the Web All at the Same Time

[00:30:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And it will tend to change much more quickly, which is why Kalicube Pro is so powerful is that we give you the list in 10 minutes. And it takes you an afternoon. If you sit down for an afternoon, you can change every reference to you on the web. And then you change it all at the same time, and Google will then flip its switch and move to the next step. And then you can potentially do it in 2 to 3 weeks rather than the 3 months or the 6 months that I was talking about earlier.

[00:31:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Not always. Once again, you can’t actually give a timeframe because you don’t know how long it takes Google to crawl, to digest, and then to understand and be confident in that understanding. So, it’s a multi-step process and we should never forget that.

Some Advice From Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) to Reclaim or Compete for a Knowledge Panel

[00:31:17] Olga Zarr: Okay, okay. So, thanks. So, here we have another question. Do you have advice for how to reclaim or compete for a Knowledge Panel? 

[00:31:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’s a great question. Example, a music artist has a new album that is the same name as your website. Ambiguity is a huge problem, but it’s a huge problem for human beings as well. So, it’s not just Google who has a problem with ambiguity. Multiple people with the same name is a problem. 

[00:31:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Calling your company Yellow Door is a problem, because Yellow Door is a yellow door. It’s also a cafe, it’s also a jewelry shop, and a flower shop, and heaven knows what other things it is. And that ambiguity creates an enormous problem. And if we take the example of a music artist and the website or the company or the brand, you need to make sure that Google understands your website. Then you need to make sure it understands the difference between your website and the music album. 

[00:32:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you educate, number one, then you disambiguate, then you dominate. So, it’s a really simple three step process in this exact case. You educate, you disambiguate, then you dominate. Then you’ll get your Knowledge Panel on the Brand SERP when somebody searches your company name or your website name.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) on Helping Ukraine in Its War Against Russia by Supporting a Ukraine Drone School

[00:32:42] Olga Zarr: Okay, okay. Thanks for explaining. So, maybe now it’s time for you to tell us more about the course you have. 

[00:32:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Really quickly before that, I’m just going to share my screen really quickly because I was talking to a friend from Ukraine, who mentioned this to me and I really wanted to share it. Can you see my screen? 

[00:33:05] Olga Zarr: Yeah. I think it’s shown. 

[00:33:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s a Ukraine Drone School, uadroneschool.com. Please, please, please go and donate. They’ve got a patreon system, and they’re training Ukrainian soldiers to use drones. And that’s obviously hugely important. I signed up. I’m a patreon of them now. Please go along uadroneschool.com. Hugely, hugely valuable bunch of people helping Ukraine in the war against Russia. Then the course, unless you want to mention something, say something to add to that. 

[00:33:47] Olga Zarr: Yeah. I just wanted to say, yes, please donate to that cause. I’m also going to share that on my other channels. So, yeah, I’m all supporting that. 

[00:33:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, no, it’s absolutely huge. It’s a guy called Eugene, who’s the business lawyer that we work with at Kalicube, who’s in Kyiv right now. And he’s the person who tells me who to donate to. He told me to donate to Good Bread, who are making bread in Ukraine, day in, day out. The people who contributed to help them, they just bought a generator so they can continue to make bread, even with the electricity outages. And the next one is Drone School.

Kalicube’s Knowledge Panel Course: Triggering and Managing Knowledge Panels 

[00:34:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, back to the topic, Kalicube, triggering and managing Knowledge Panels. Here’s the course. We are releasing it next week. Katrina is boss of releasing this, and we’ve got gazillions of lessons. I can’t remember how many now, 21 lessons. It’s over 5 hours of video. We’re just finishing it up now. And you can do everything from educating Google to getting a Knowledge Panel in three steps.

[00:35:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Your Entity Home, lots of advice about that. How to write the entity description. One thing, don’t use ChatGPT because it will make it all up. You can use it to structure it definitely, but you need to write it properly. You need to make sure it’s factually correct or you are creating a huge problem.

[00:35:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s important. If you provide factual information to Google, you educate it and you convince it that that information is true, and it turns out not to be true, you are in huge difficulty. Trying to reeducate Google once it’s understood a fact is really, really, really difficult. So when you do this, do it right the first time.

When You Get Your One Shot to Provide Information for Your Knowledge Panel, Get It Right the First Time

[00:35:50] Olga Zarr: Okay. 

[00:35:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, I’ve made the mistake. I communicated something, information that then changed. Long, long story, and I won’t go into the details, but it has taken me 2 years to correct one piece of information. But it should only have taken me 3 months. And the reason it’s taken me 2 years is simply because Google was so convinced by the initial piece of information that when I said, actually, that’s not true, it’s something else, it completely freaked out. And now it won’t believe me anymore. 

[00:36:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, be really, really, really careful. It really is one shot. You have one shot, get it right. When you get it right, you have set for life. But if you get it wrong, you’ve created a huge problem that’s going to take up a lot of your time, a lot of resources, and it’s really painful and damaging, in fact, to your online brand. 

[00:36:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): A Knowledge Panel represents Google’s stamp of approval on your topical authority or authority as your company. So, from Google’s perspective, it’s saying, here is a company or here is a person, I’ve understood who they are, and they are an authority because they have dominated this.

More About the Contents of the Knowledge Panel Course, Which Involves Doing It in a Non-Geeky Way or a Geeky Way

[00:37:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you want to have that stamp of approval from Google when somebody googles your brand name and indeed have that stamp of authority for Google’s algorithms, because it’s looking at that for E-A-T, you need to have a Knowledge Panel. And if you get it wrong, as I said, you’re creating a huge problem. And the problem goes way beyond just the Knowledge Panel. It goes into every algorithm Google has. 

[00:37:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, as we go through here, we can join the dots in the non-geeky way. So, that’s just using links. Then you can do it with Schema Markup, the geeky way. I explained how the Knowledge Graph works, the 6 different verticals in the Knowledge Graph, which is hugely interesting. Because if you want a Knowledge Panel, you need to aim at the right Knowledge Graph vertical. And if you know which vertical to aim at, you can almost certainly get a Knowledge Panel in 2 or 3 months. 

[00:38:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): How to claim it and when you shouldn’t, how to change information, how it builds the Knowledge Panel, this one here, the 3 Google Knowledge Algorithms. That’s hugely interesting. How it extracts data for the Knowledge Panel and the Knowledge Graph, how to get into Google’s Knowledge Vault, which is the Main Knowledge Graph. There you go. This is the one for Olesia from earlier on. How to get it to trigger, that’s dominant, becoming the dominant entity. So if you want to trigger, you need to become the dominant entity. And that’s hugely important.

The Course Contains Videos, Slides, Description of the Lessons, Additional Resources, and Quizzes

[00:38:39] Olga Zarr: Okay. I just wanted to ask, how does each lesson look like? So, there is a video, some exercises, if you can share something. 

[00:38:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): There you go. You can’t hear that, but that’s me talking away. Hang on. I’ll show you a different one because we’re actually doing the slides for that one right now. If I go back here and we go to this one here, let’s try that one. There you go. It’s got lots of slides. It’s got visual help alongside me talking with screenshots that are incredibly clear. 

[00:39:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s Mary-Ann, Allyssa, and Faith who’ve been doing the slides. They’re absolutely awesome. Some delightful little tricks like that. We’re having fun with it. We show you what you learn. We’ve got a description. And then Jean Marie, who manages the content on the Kalicube websites and finds resources, has added additional resources, both from Kalicube but also from other sources so that you can learn more. And we’re putting online some quizzes as well in the next week or so.

[00:39:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, it’s a huge course. I wrote the course. And when I was writing it, I was trying to figure out what I knew, what I thought I knew. And sometimes I sat and I thought, I think I know that but I’m not sure. So, I research it. And I ended up creating about 30% of the course are things that I didn’t know beforehand, that I learned while I was making it, which is really, really cool. I would buy the course from myself, even though I wrote it.

When Will Kalicube’s Knowledge Panel Course Be Available and What Do You Need to Do to Enroll? 

[00:40:30] Olga Zarr: Yeah. To be honest, I’m in a similar situation because I started creating the course for an SEO audit. I planned on launching it, I think, initially October, November. But when I started planning it, planning the lessons, I realised that I have to update my knowledge on that. I have to add this. I have to learn that. And I think now realistically the course will be around April or May, and I will be so much wiser when it launches. Okay. But regarding your course, how do I get it? What do I need to do? 

[00:41:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m just going to add to that is it’s astonishing. I didn’t expect to learn so much from creating a course about a topic that I actually thought I knew really well. I do know it very well, but I now know it even better. And what we’re going to do as well is over the next year, I’m going to keep updating it as I learn stuff. And it will really encourage me to research and understand and learn as we work with clients, because we have a done-for-you service that Allyssa does. 

[00:41:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, we learn when we’re doing this work for other people, we learn from our own experiments, and we also learn from the agencies who come along and say, well, I’ve got a particular problem with the client. Then we help our agencies who are using the Kalicube Pro SaaS platform to better serve their clients. And that teaches us too. And if you want the course, you can go to the kalicube.com website. You can actually download a free 17-step checklist. Hang on. I’ll show you that. Because we created that for, can you show my screen? 

[00:42:15] Olga Zarr: Yeah, sure.

You Can Get a Free Knowledge Panel Checklist and Then Enroll at Kalicube’s Website for the Knowledge Panel Course

[00:42:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Can you see that? 

[00:42:20] Olga Zarr: Yeah. 

[00:42:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You can get the free Knowledge Panel checklist, and you can download that. And it’s absolutely free. You download it, and it gives you the 17-step process to getting a Knowledge Panel. And that will work for a lot of people. And then if you go back here, you come to kalicube.com. I’ve got to figure out where it is now. It should have been in here. Intermediate courses, it’s there. 

[00:42:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And you go to solutions.kalicube.com and all solutions. Actually, it’s the academy and then here. Very, very badly organised, we’re going to have to say that. There you go. And you can enroll. So, it’s solutions.kalicube.com. And you can find it there. And we’re going to have to create an easier path to get to here, which is actually the course itself.

[00:43:14] Olga Zarr: Sure. But it’ll be available next week, right? 

[00:43:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, 25th of January. 

[00:43:21] Olga Zarr: Okay. So, yeah, 5 days from now. Okay.

The Immense Variation of Knowledge Panels Across Different Countries

[00:43:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And seeing as I’m now sharing my screen, I’m going to show you something that you didn’t ask this question, but I’m going to ask a question. Do Knowledge Panels vary across different countries or are they all the same across all the different countries?

[00:43:42] Olga Zarr: I would say they differ. 

[00:43:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And this is how much. There you go. This is the visual we use in Kalicube Pro. And you can see here New York, Vancouver, Melbourne, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Anchorage, Manila, Cape Town, San Francisco, Fort Worth. And you can see from these here that they vary immensely. 

[00:44:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): For example, all of these have got Entity Homes. These don’t. They’ve all got descriptions. This one has got a subtitle. Some of the others don’t. Some of these have got 5 attributes. This has only got 3. This has got People Also Search For. This has got filter pills. This one doesn’t. So, you can see they vary enormously. And then here you can actually see how much they vary across the different countries.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Is Tracking 70,000 Entities of Which Only Half of Them Have Knowledge Panels

[00:44:29] Olga Zarr: So, from what I remember, you have data on more than 40,000 Knowledge Panels. 

[00:44:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. We’ve got 70,000 entities that we’re tracking, but only about half of them have got Knowledge Panels. So, yes, you’re right, about 40,000. But here, it’s interesting. You see the description comes from Google Books. And if I go to Turkey, I created a Turkish version, and it’s getting the description from my own website. In Germany, the same thing. In Italy, the same thing. In French, it’s Wikipedia. There’s a Wikipedia page about me in French. 

[00:45:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you can see that the description comes from different sources. And then here you can see the attributes. The attributes here are all the same. In France, we still got them. But then in Italy, we don’t. In Germany, we don’t. They’ve got social channels. In Italy, it doesn’t.

[00:45:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s incredibly varied. And you’ve got to keep, especially if you’re an international brand or you’re a famous person around the world, which I’m not, you need to keep track of every single country and language variation that’s important to your company or to yourself as a person.

Major Companies Should Consider and Manage the Variations of Their Knowledge Panels Across Different Countries 

[00:45:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And people don’t do that. Major companies don’t do it. We get many companies coming to us and saying, well, I’m just looking in America. And then I show them around the world, and they’re stunned on how much it differs and how much management they need to actually do to make sure that that information is accurate around the world.

[00:46:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And one interesting example is the customer care number. The customer care number will be different in the UK to the US, if Google has understood it. But if it hasn’t understood it, it might give the wrong customer care number in the UK, also social channels. 

[00:46:17] Olga Zarr: Okay. 

[00:46:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If I think, what are they called, a Swedish clothing company, H&M. I think H&M has different social media channels per country, and they need to make sure that Google understands which of the right ones for which country. So, it can put the right social media channels in the right Knowledge Panel, in the right country, in the right language. Hugely complicated. And of course, we can do that, easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Some SEO Strategies From Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) 

[00:46:53] Olga Zarr: Okay. I think we have another question. Picasso asks, I know how to work on SEO task, but I don’t know how to create SEO strategies. Any thoughts? 

[00:47:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh, easy peasy lemon squeezy, yet again. Creating an SEO strategy is something that I think tends to be seen as pretty complicated. But if you look at your Brand SERP, if you search for your brand name and you look at the result, you can immediately see where your priorities lie. So, you can look, first of all, at your homepage. You can look at the sitelinks. You can look at what Google is showing off your site. 

[00:47:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If it’s not showing Rich Sitelinks for a company, then your website is badly organised. And the first thing you need to do is reorganise your website and clarify for Google, because it wants to show Rich Sitelinks, which are the bluelinks with the little snippets underneath your homepage when you search for your company name. If it’s not doing that, you need to reorganise your website or you need to make it clearer for Google, put maybe a site map, perhaps some Schema Markup to make it much more clear for Google.

Working on Your LinkedIn Profile for Informational Purposes and Investing on Your Video Strategy for Your Brand SERP 

[00:48:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If you then go further down, you’d be looking at, for example, LinkedIn. You can look at your LinkedIn profile and say, well, I need to explain that around LinkedIn, number one, for informational purposes. But the second one is if Google is ranking LinkedIn, it sees LinkedIn as important for your audience and your business. So, working on LinkedIn would be a good strategy.

What Google shows on your Brand SERP is what it thinks is interesting, helpful, and valuable for your audience.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)

[00:48:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then if you think I’m investing a lot in video for my SEO, but you don’t have Video Boxes on your Brand SERP, then you need to work on what you’re doing with your videos. Why aren’t they ranking? Why aren’t they appearing? Because what Google shows on your Brand SERP is what it thinks is interesting, helpful, and valuable for your audience. 

[00:48:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you need to make sure that if you are investing in video and you don’t have Video Boxes on your Brand SERP, figure out what you’re doing wrong. Are you not using Schema Markup? Are you not putting it in a page that’s understandable to Google? Are you not actually getting any engagement for it?

Answering Questions About and Around Your Brand and Building an FAQ Question, Which Is Part of Kalicube’s Brand SERP Course 

[00:49:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then the other one, and if we come back to SEO pure, is look at the People Also Search For. No, sorry, People Also Ask. I got confused.

[00:49:17] Olga Zarr: Yeah. People Also Ask. 

[00:49:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Start answering those questions. Those are the questions around your brand and about your brand that Google sees as important. So, you answer those questions, you start there, and you build an FAQ section. I wrote an article a few years ago for Semrush and did a video where I explained how to do that. It’s also in the Brand SERP courses.

[00:49:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you can actually just start building an FAQ, answering the questions that your users, your audience are actually interested in, and build an SEO strategy from there. And that’s what we’re doing at Kalicube. And we’ve multiplied by 6 the SEO traffic we’ve got this year. 

[00:49:58] Olga Zarr: Oh, nice. Congratulations. 

[00:50:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Really simply. And that’s all we’ve been doing, and all of this is explained. We were talking about the Knowledge Panel course earlier on. We have a whole series of Brand SERP courses, and they explain all of this. And if you don’t want to think what’s my strategy, work on your Brand SERP, build from there, and you will build an SEO and even indeed a digital marketing strategy from the Brand SERP outwards. And it’s what we’re doing at Kalicube, and it’s hugely powerful.

Preventing Conflict When Using Different Tools for Generating Schema Markup 

[00:50:29] Olga Zarr: Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Another question. 

[00:50:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Sorry, I’m a bit over enthusiastic. 

[00:50:35] Olga Zarr: Yeah, me too. That’s okay. So, you hinted at this earlier. But if you use Yoast and utilise a WordPress theme Schema, you can put your socials under user profile for sameAs Schema and a tool like WordLift. How do you prevent that conflict? Just use one tool? There are such limited customisations with Yoast if you’re not a developer. What is the best for a lay person? 

[00:51:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. It’s a really interesting question. This is the problem of lots of different Schema Markup injections. And we’ve had a problem with this at Kalicube, so I did an experiment, as usual. And we had Yoast and WordLift, and that created enormous confusion for Google. 

[00:51:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, I removed the Schema Markup from Yoast. And that actually just involves creating a functions file in your child theme. And there’s a little function you put in that, that basically stops Yoast spitting out the Schema Markup. And then I just used WordLift, but I used Yoast for the rest of my SEO.

Kalicube’s Issue With Using Yoast as a Schema Markup Generator for Kalicube Tuesdays  

[00:51:50] Olga Zarr: Yeah. And in the case of my site, there was a similar conflict. We just turned off the setting in my theme and just left Rank Math Schema alone, if I remember correctly. 

[00:52:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, generally speaking, the best idea is to pick one and just use that. The problem we had with Kalicube, it was quite interesting because Yoast takes the name of the website. So if we’ve got a site called Kalicube Tuesdays, it says the organisation is called Kalicube Tuesdays, which isn’t true. Kalicube Tuesdays isn’t an organisation, it’s an event series. So, I had to actually turn Yoast off, because otherwise it said that. 

[00:52:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And from that perspective, I think it was Olesia who said, Yoast is pretty limited. And I think Yoast is going very much in the direction, since they were brought out by I can’t remember who in America, very much for one click and it’s done, no SEO knowledge needed at all. And from that perspective, don’t expect them at any time soon to give you more control over what you can do with their Schema Markup. If you’re going to get geeky, go with WordLift or Schema App, potentially Rank Math as well. I don’t know much about Rank Math.

More Advice From Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) When Generating Schema Markup Using Tools

[00:53:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): What we’ve done at Kalicube is we only ever inject Schema Markup into the Entity Home. That’s all we’re interested in. We don’t use Schema Markup for anything else. So if you come to Kalicube, what we all do is integrate our Schema Markup into the Schema Markup that you’ve already got on your website. And that’s hugely powerful because I think we’re one of the only tools or platforms who actually pay attention to this.

[00:53:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Don’t make a mess. Don’t have multiple chunks. Don’t fragment. Don’t create duplicates. We integrate and merge our Schema Markup into whatever you already have, whether it’s the theme, Yoast, WordLift, Schema App, InLinks, Rank Math. That’s off the top of my head, the Schema providers I can remember.

Just by Installing a Snippet of JavaScript Code, the Kalicube Pro Team Helped Olga Zarr Control Her Schema Markup 

[00:53:58] Olga Zarr: Yeah. So, all I needed to do was paste a piece of JavaScript code on my Entity Home. And it was working. Nothing else was needed. 

[00:54:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then you tell Allyssa from the Kalicube Pro team, it’s done. And then she works her magic in the Kalicube back office. And we can then control it, which is how we work for the done-for-you clients, but also the agencies. The Kalicube Pro interface, once you have that JavaScript snippet installed, we can then control your Schema Markup in real time. 

[00:54:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s hugely powerful because we can keep updating with those corroborative sources we saw earlier on. And then every time you have a new corroborative source, we can add it directly to the Schema without you doing anything through our own interface. Go ahead.

Analysing Entity Descriptions Using Google’s NLP and Discovering New Elements in Schema Markup

[00:54:59] Olga Zarr: That’s powerful. 

[00:55:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It is. That’s very powerful. It goes further than that. Because as we learn how to write better and better entity descriptions, we analyse the entity description using Google’s NLP. Google’s NLP improves over time, so we revisit it every 3 months. We double check that our writing is still understood. And then we tweak it to make it even better understood. So, we can tweak your description very slightly each time to make sure Google is getting increasingly confident in its understanding. 

[00:55:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then the other thing we can do is as we discover new elements in Schema Markup that are hugely powerful for knowledge in Google’s brain, we can add those extra bits of Schema Markup from the Kalicube interface. So, we can move you forwards as we learn how to better educate Google without you needing to do anything.

[00:55:56] Olga Zarr: That’s awesome. That’s really awesome. 

[00:55:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s fun, isn’t it? 

[00:55:59] Olga Zarr: Yeah, it is. 

[00:56:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I built it all with my own little hands.

Kalicube Was Originally Built to Build Knowledge Panels for Brand SERPs, and They’re the Only Company Doing That 

[00:56:03] Olga Zarr: Yeah, little hands, yeah. And you are, I think, the only person on earth who is doing that. 

[00:56:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): As far as I know, Kalicube is the only company doing that. I actually built Kalicube Pro to build Knowledge Panels. It was aimed at building Knowledge Panels of Brand SERPs. I built it in 2015. So, it’s actually 7 years old. 

[00:56:29] Olga Zarr: 7 years, yeah. 

[00:56:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I’ve just been waiting for the world to wake up to Knowledge Panels and Brand SERPs.

[00:56:36] Olga Zarr: And they finally did. 

[00:56:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And so, it isn’t to say I built it 7 years ago and didn’t do anything. I built it 7 years ago, and I’ve been adding to it and building it and improving it. One thing I love about Kalicube Pro, and it really is something I’m incredibly keen on, it’s every time I learn something about Knowledge Panels, I build it into the platform.

Kalicube Pro, as a Platform, Is Basically Jason Barnard’s Brain in an Algorithm and a Database 

[00:56:58] Olga Zarr: That’s awesome. 

[00:56:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, the platform is basically my brain in an algorithm and a database. And every time I can, I will add the functionality or the extra information that I know Google is looking for. So, it’s this living beast, if I may say, of educating Google. It’s Google’s teacher. We communicate with Google through Kalicube Pro, and it really does feel like we’re communicating with Google. And you can see Google from time to time. You can feel it struggling to understand and then suddenly it goes, boom, I’ve got it. And the Knowledge Panel appears. It’s beautiful. 

[00:57:40] Olga Zarr: Yeah. This is incredible. And with the course, you updated your knowledge even more, even though I don’t think it was possible to know more about Knowledge Panels than you did. 

[00:57:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And as I said over the years, and in fact over the years to come, we’ll keep updating. We’re going to keep adding lessons. We’ve already got 3 or 4 ideas for new lessons of things we’ve learned.

Olga Zarr’s Recommended Schema Markup Generator Tool: Rank Math Versus Yoast

[00:58:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): There’s another question. Olga, it’s a question for you and I will ask it. Olga, do you like Rank Math for your Schema needs? I have it on a dormant site, but Yoast on my primary. Considering making a switch. Go ahead. 

[00:58:19] Olga Zarr: Yeah. So, I prefer Rank Math. I used to use Yoast, but then I learned about Rank Math. I switched to Rank Math. And I think, for me, it is a better plugin for my needs. And in the free version, I think you have a lot more possibilities, a lot more customisations. And in the premium version, you can really add a lot of different types of Schema. But even in the free one, you have the basics covered. 

[00:58:54] Olga Zarr: And if you turn other types of Schema from other plugins or your theme, you should have a pretty basic, pretty okay setup. But you have to always validate it using the Schema App to make sure that it’s really doing what it should be doing. But yeah, I recommend Rank Math.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Advises to Double Check Your Schema Markup Using Schema.org Validator 

[00:59:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I think one thing is people often think if I click on the button, it’s all set up. And they don’t double check. Double checking it using, and I would advise using the Schema.org validator, because that validates your Schema Markup.

[00:59:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Whereas the Google tool validates Schema Markup for Rich Elements and Rich Snippets in Google SERPs, which is a distinction that’s really important. Google is only validating whether or not your Schema Markup will provide additional functionality in Google SERPs. And the Schema one validates whether the Schema Markup is valid or not, which are two things.

[00:59:55] Olga Zarr: Yeah. That’s a great point.

[00:59:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And really important, when we’re talking about knowledge and Knowledge Panels, it’s the Schema.org validator that’s important, because Google doesn’t validate anything to do with the Schema that’s going to help with knowledge.

Recommendations From Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) for Noobs Who Want to Have a Knowledge Panel

[01:00:13] Olga Zarr: Yeah. Great point. Okay. So, I have a final question.

[01:00:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The last question. 

[01:00:20] Olga Zarr: So, what types of Schema do you recommend adding for noobs to get a Knowledge Panel, to educate Google more like an organisation, like a web page that are like so many of them. What should I start with? 

[01:00:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): For a Knowledge Panel, you need to think about what entity you’re talking about. And then you need to think, this is an Entity Home. I’ve got to find one page on my website that represents this entity. 

[01:00:47] Olga Zarr: About page probably.

[01:00:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If it’s a company, it’s your About page. If it’s a person, it’s the About page on the person’s website, but it could potentially be the About page of the person on the company’s website. If it’s a music group, for example, I have a web page about my music group on my own personal website. That’s the Entity Home. It’s a page about the music group.

The Entity Home Trick: Identifying the Entity Type for the About Page of Your Entity Before Installing and Merging Structured Data

[01:01:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you can have multiple Entity Homes on one single website, if you’re describing multiple entities on that website. A product could have an Entity Home on a company website, no problem. So, a page about the product on the company website that makes sense as an Entity Home. 

[01:01:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then you need to say, right, this is a web page. More specifically, it’s an About page. So, you would use the About page type, then you would put about, organisation, then the company name and the rest of it, or About page, entity type, then about, person, then the information about the person.

[01:01:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, I would suggest, a lot of these plugins say, this page is a person. That’s not true. It’s a page, a web page, an About page about a person. That’s the Entity Home trick. That’s what we do with Kalicube. And sometimes we have trouble actually installing the code and merging it properly because of the way plugins work, but we always manage it. But we are saying, this is an About page, the subject of this About page is this person, then we describe the person. That’s where you start.

Jason Barnard’s Advice About Duplicated and Wrong Information and Kalicube’s Experience in Solving Them

[01:02:34] Olga Zarr: Okay. So, you just start to just focus on the About page or the Entity. Home. But in those plugins, like Rank Math, you have Schema settings, something like that. And then you have the info. You can, for example, set yourself to be organisation or person. You can put your address, phone number, stuff like that. And a lot of people just put all they know there. 

[01:03:01] Olga Zarr: What do you think about it? Because probably, it will be, I think, replicated on all pages of the site in most cases. What are your thoughts on that? Should we be putting that information there or just leaving it and just focusing on About page? 

[01:03:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It depends how the plugin builds it. Because if it says this web page is about plums and the publisher is this company and the author is this person, that’s absolutely brilliant. But if it says on every single page, this page is an organisation or this page is about an organisation, that’s absolutely terrible and very, very bad news for Google.

[01:03:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You need one dedicated single page that’s about the company, the person, the product. And that’s the Entity Home. And that’s where we focus in Kalicube Pro, so that’s where we stop. In fact, in Kalicube, for all the work we do, that’s where we stop. So, just be really careful about how you fill in all that stuff and make sure that your plugin isn’t pushing this data out onto every single page. Because if you say every page is about you, none of the pages are about you.

A Case of Having Wrong Information in the Knowledge Panel of Kalicube’s Client Named Scott Duffy

[01:04:16] Olga Zarr: Exactly. 

[01:04:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Focus on the About page for Knowledge Panels and you’re winning. And a lot of the time, we end up deactivating that part of plugins for our clients, simply to reduce confusion. We had a client called Scott Duffy. He had exactly this problem. We deactivated all of that. We focused on the About page, sorted it out. 

[01:04:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): He had a terrible Knowledge Panel problem. Somebody else had his Knowledge Panel, and then it had the wrong information, and then it had the wrong books. And we just brought it down to the minimum. We said Google focus here, we sorted it out, and then we expanded the Schema Markup back out again. And we’re all fine. So, sometimes it’s a really good idea to remove everything, simplify, and then build out. And for that, you just need to be patient.

While Trying to Add Social Profiles to Your About Page Using Schema Markup, Is It Okay to Use sameAs? 

[01:05:06] Olga Zarr: Okay. And I think we have the final question. While trying to add social profiles to About page using Schema, is it okay to use sameAs? 

[01:05:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s absolutely perfect. Yeah. It’s exactly what you should do, use sameAs. At Kalicube, we use URL for the Entity Home and sameAs for all of the different profile pages that are about the same entity. You need to be really careful with sameAs, only to include pages that are dedicated to that entity and that are accurate. 

[01:05:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You don’t want to point Google to something that contradicts what you’re saying on the Entity Home. Because if you do that, you are explicitly saying, this information is about this entity. And you are implicitly saying, it’s correct. So, you would only add the sameAs once you’ve corrected the information on that platform.

Is It Okay to Put sameAs on Your Homepage to Your Wikipedia Page? 

[01:06:00] Olga Zarr: Okay. And is it okay if I put sameAs on my homepage to Wikipedia page about SEO? 

[01:06:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): No, because it’s not the same as SEO. It’s a really good point. It’s really conceptually difficult for all of us to understand what an entity is and what we’re representing. Because, for example, your homepage would be about SEO potentially or it would mention SEO. It isn’t SEO in and of itself. 

[01:06:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But if you had a page that defines SEO, then you could add the Wikipedia sameAs, saying this page is the same as that page on Wikipedia, which is SEO. That’s how InLinks works. They say about or mentions. So, theoretically, you are supposed to, I believe with InLinks is have, this page is about one topic. And then it mentions lots of other topics, and those topics are identified using sameAs pointing to the Wikipedia page.

The Function of InLinks, the Aim of WordLift, and the Concept of Cornerstone Entities

[01:07:08] Olga Zarr: Yeah. I have recently interviewed Dixon Jones, and he has been sharing those things as well. The episode will soon be live, so yeah. I think he’ll talk about those points as well. Okay. 

[01:07:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, looks like I understood how InLinks function. For me, and I think that’s really interesting, is InLinks functions on the idea of saying, this page is about a topic, this topic pointing at Wikipedia, and it mentions these other topics pointing at Wikipedia. So, it’s very topic based.

[01:07:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you look at something like WordLift, it’s building a Knowledge Graph within the website itself. And it still references Wikipedia. But the aim of WordLift is to say, I’m going to build an entire Knowledge Graph of the content of this website. And we work with WordLift a great deal because we do what we call the cornerstone entities. 

[01:08:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, the cornerstone entities are the company, the author, the CEO, the founder. And we create a place in Google’s Knowledge Graph for each of those cornerstone entities. And then WordLift builds a Knowledge Graph on top of that. And then we can transpose the entire Knowledge Graph into Google’s Knowledge Graph using the four cornerstone entities we just created with Kalicube. And that makes for a very, very, very powerful Entity SEO strategy.

Final Thoughts From Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) and Olga Zarr 

[01:08:35] Olga Zarr: Wow. Nice. Okay. So, any final thoughts? 

[01:08:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. That was absolutely delightful. Thank you so much, Olga. I love talking about this. And I sometimes, at the end of it, think that I must be so boring. 

[01:08:50] Olga Zarr: No. You’re definitely not boring. And I always learn so much, and I really hope to catch up soon again with some update with what’s going on. 

[01:09:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You could have a chat with my daughter about that. Because when I talk about this, she just walks out of the room. 

[01:09:04] Olga Zarr: Oh, okay, sure. Okay. So, thank you everyone. It was very delightful. And I hope we will catch up maybe next month in February and do another follow up Q&A with Jason. 

[01:09:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Brilliant. It will be absolutely delightful. And we definitely need to do one when we’ve got your Knowledge Panel for Olga Zarr. 

[01:09:30] Olga Zarr: Yeah. And walk everyone through the process of what you did, what I did, what I didn’t do. Because we are working, I think, on a case study for that, so yeah.

[01:09:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That would be a lot of fun, and I would love to do that. Thank you, Olga. Brilliant. Thank you everyone for watching. 

[01:09:47] Olga Zarr: Thank you. Thank you everyone, and bye bye. See you soon.

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