How to Get BILLIONs of Traffic with EEAT (Jason Barnard)
Contact Jason Barnard: https://kalicube.com
🔗 Free SEO Course 👉 https://go.juliangoldie.com/opt-in-36…
Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m…
Master SEO and Build Your E-A-T with Jason Barnard
In this episode, we dive deep with Jason Barnard to uncover how he achieved billions of page views and actionable strategies you can implement to boost your SEO efforts. Learn about the importance of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) in the age of AI, how to get a knowledge panel, and why notability plays a crucial role. Jason also introduces the concept of NEAT (Notability, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness, Transparency) and shares step-by-step methods to package your credibility for Google. Don’t miss out on insights about personal branding, entity understanding, and tips to stay relevant in a rapidly advancing digital world.
00:00 Introduction to Jason Barnard and EAT
00:15 Understanding EAT: Credibility and Manipulability
01:38 Introducing NEAT: Adding Notability and Transparency
02:46 Implementing EAT and NEAT: Actionable Strategies
06:18 Schema Markup and Knowledge Panels
10:54 Building Confidence and Entity Understanding
20:03 Challenges with AI and Entity Management
29:41 Jason Barnard’s Journey and SEO Insights
34:06 The Three Tiers of SEO
36:27 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Julian Goldie [00:00:00]: Today, I’m going to be interviewing Jason Barnard on how he got billions of page views with E-E-A-T. Some actionable strategies to implement it, plus how you can get a Knowledge Panel. And finally we’ll be coming on to why E-E-A-T is so important in the age of AI. And it’s some pretty terrifying stuff. Let’s get into it. Is E-E-A-T BS?
Jason Barnard [00:00:17]: No, E-E-A-T is a real thing. And I think, you can start by saying E-E-A-T is just credibility. It’s a fancy word for credibility, where Google have broken it down into the four components they consider the most important. And the fact that Google have been trying to measure it to improve on their simplistic measuring of credibility using links is normal. Links is not enough. It’s popularity, it’s easily manipulable. Expertise, authority, experience and trustworthiness is less manipulable and also applies at a different level, which we’ll talk about later, is links apply only to the webpage and the website. E-E-A-T applies to the person who’s creating the content and the company that’s publishing it, which is how we approach things at Kalicube with the three tiers of SEO.
Julian Goldie [00:01:12]: And that’s more of an asset. Right? For example, you can have a website where you’ve built these links, but if it gets clapped or it gets algorithmically penalized, then it’s hard to recover that. Whereas, for example, if you have an offer with a lot of credibility, a lot of trust is recognized on Google, the Knowledge Panel and everything else, then whatever website they set up next has a higher chance of ranking. Right?
Jason Barnard [00:01:32]: Yeah. You take your E-E-A-T with you. That’s a lovely way of putting it. As a publisher or as an author. I would add one thing to E-E-A-T is that Kalicube, we’ve added an N and a T. So it’s N-E-E-A-T-T NEEATT. And we insist that transparency, the second T, is absolutely vital because as soon as we hit a company or a person who doesn’t want to be 100% transparent, we’re blocked. And notability, the N is vital because it’s all well and good being credible.
Jason Barnard [00:02:04]: But who gets the top of the list? Who gets the top of the list of best digital marketers? Who gets the top of the list of best digital companies? The most notable one. So notability is something Google don’t really talk about, that we know that Kalicube is very important from the data we collect. We’ve got 2 billion data points we’ve been collecting, and the data clearly shows that notability is super, super important. So think outside or beyond E-E-A-T and think about NEEATT credibility.
Julian Goldie [00:02:32]: And for example, for someone watching this, obviously, like if you look at these frameworks, like E-E-A-T or NEEATT, as you’ve talked about, these are quite like high-level structures. But I know that people watching this, they want all the actionable stuff. Where would you start with this? How do you implement it?
Jason Barnard [00:02:50]: Yeah, you need to start with the foundational understanding that without entity understanding, E-E-A-T cannot be measured or NEEATT, or credibility cannot be measured for a person or for a corporation. So Google needs that explicit understanding in order to apply whatever E-E-A-T NEEATT credibility signals it has. Entity understanding means you have to have a Knowledge Panel, you have to be in the Knowledge Graph. That was the foundation. And then you can start to think about, well, what signals do I need to communicate to Google? It then becomes a question of communicating. So we have a lot of clients, we do a lot of personal branding for CEOs and founders of corporations, especially in America, $5 million of revenue and over. And the first thing we do is sit down and say, what makes you authoritative, trustworthy, expert, experienced, notable and credible? And they say, oh, this, that. I say, where does it say online? Where do you communicate it? First of all, to your audience and when you do communicate it to your audience, do you then make sure Google can discover it, digest it and understand it? And the answer is always no.
Jason Barnard [00:03:59]: So the first thing we do is look at what somebody has and wrap it up in a way that presents it incredibly well to their audience. People who need to know you’re credible. And second of all, to Google, we call it packaging for Google. So, I mean, I would think of things like my degree in Economics, Statistical Analysis, my career, the companies I’ve founded, 66 years cumulated businesses that have been profitable their entire lives. That gives me credibility as an entrepreneur. Digital Marketing, writing all the articles for Search Engine Land, for Wordlift, for Semrush, for Search Engine Journal, that gives me credibility because they’re recognized authorities in the field.
Jason Barnard [00:04:44]: Customer comments that mention me personally, that gives me credibility. All of that are things you need to think. What demonstrates my credibility to my audience, and how can I package it for Google?
Julian Goldie [00:04:56]: How would you package that for Google. For example, for me, I’m publishing every day on YouTube with content there. I do have a lot of reviews published online, for example, like the SEO boardroom, as like 22 five star reviews. How do you package that information so that Google understands it and recognizes it?
Jason Barnard [00:05:14]: I love the question. First thing is actually something we all, as SEOs think is simple, discoverability. But when we’re talking to CEOs and founders of corporations, they don’t understand that being discoverable is not automatic. So making sure it’s discoverable, making sure there’s a link to the content that demonstrates this. And our first step is always create a personal website for the CEO or founder because that’s where you can then link out to all of these resources and say, that’s me, that’s me, that’s me, that’s me. At which point, Google will go to them and say, ok, I understand that’s Jason Barnard, I understand that it’s talking about this Jason Barnard, not another Jason Barnard, the circus clown, the ice hockey player, the podcaster about music, the CEO of Lithium, they’re all called Jason Barnard. And Google doesn’t know which one is which and it doesn’t know which ones to pay attention for my entity, my named entity.
Jason Barnard [00:06:08]: So if I have a website it recognizes as being me, I can point it to all the right places. So that discoverability and explicit information, confirmation, reassurance that it’s found the right one. Then on the website itself, wherever it happens to be, you’re looking at Schema Markup, you’re looking at how do you write the content? So it’s all on page stuff. How do you structure it? What are your H1s? What are your H2s? Can the machine read, understand, analyze it? And then the Schema Markup, a company like Wordlift or nLinks is really helpful with that, with the Schema markup they create. And I would just make one point about Schema Markup. Schema Markup isn’t an end in itself in terms of Google’s understanding. It gets you the pretty things in the Snippets in the SERPs, which is great. But what it should be doing is reassuring the machine it’s correctly understood the page, the content in the page. It shouldn’t be providing new information, it shouldn’t be the crutch that you’re using to support yourself.
Jason Barnard [00:07:10]: It should be explicit confirmation in what we call Google’s native language. So always think in my Schema Markup, am I saying something new or am I confirming what the machine should already have understood? And I’m simply reassuring it and building its confidence.
Julian Goldie [00:07:24]: What sort of Schema Markup would you use?
Jason Barnard [00:07:27]: Well, for example, on the entity home at Kalicube, we have Schema Markup that we generate ourselves. We start with About page. So it’s an About page main entity, Jason Barnard, who is a person, this is his description, this is the same as he’s subject to these. This is his mother, this is his father, this is when he was born. My approach to this is every single Schema Markup should start with the type of webpage it is. We’re a web page and that’s where we start. And then we build inside that to explain. Companies like Wordlift and nLinks use mentions and about, or in fact it’s now main entity.
Jason Barnard [00:08:08]: Once again, Google should have understood it with its NLP analysis. It’s pretty good. And the mentions with a link to a Wikipedia page or resource Google will recognize is once again helpful corroboration to build its confidence. And I insist on confidence. It should already have been able to understand that from your web content. If it can’t, your web content isn’t good enough.
Julian Goldie [00:08:32]: Yeah, that makes sense. And then when it comes to Knowledge Panels, one of the things that I found worked really well for me is, and this is how I got my Knowledge Panel originally for Julian Goldie is just having a book published on Amazon. Like that seemed to be a bit of a shortcut. What would you recommend? Do you think that’s one of the best ways to go about it?
Jason Barnard [00:08:52]: Yeah, a book is a great way. It’s pretty much guaranteed. So publish a book. Publish it on Amazon. I would advise you to put it in Google Books through Google Play. That goes right to the heart of Google and it will trigger you a Knowledge Panel and you will be in the books knowledge Vertical. You won’t be in the Knowledge Vault, so the books will create you a Knowledge Panel and a place in the Knowledge Graph.
Jason Barnard [00:09:16]: Sorry, but you’re not in the main Knowledge Graph. And what you want to do is be in the main Knowledge Graph, the Knowledge Vault, which is the one you can research on Kalicube. If you go to Kalicube.pro, we have a Knowledge Vault explorer and what we’ve been trying to explain to people is getting the Knowledge Panel is great, but the foundational understanding Google has in order to apply E-E-A-T signals is actually in the Knowledge Vault. And you need to move the entity from the Knowledge Book Vertical into the Knowledge Vault Vertical. And we’ve done it for multiple clients who come to us and say, I’ve got the Knowledge Panel and I want to improve it. And one of the first things we need to do is encourage Google to move it from the Books Vertical into the Knowledge Vault Vertical.
Julian Goldie [00:09:59]: How do you go about that?
Jason Barnard [00:10:01]: Same way you go about everything for a Knowledge Panel, even building it or correcting it from the entity home. On the entity home, you state the facts, you link out to the corroborative sources. You make sure all the corroborative sources corroborate. Confirm what you’re saying. You link to them back to your entity home. You create a cycle of infinite self-corroboration and Google will get it after a while. The reason it will move you from the Books to the Knowledge Vault Vertical is pure confidence. So I keep saying the word confidence and I think it’s something everybody underestimates in every aspect of SEO.
Jason Barnard [00:10:39]: Google is always going to go for the one it’s most confident about. So getting things understood or getting the machine to like or appreciate what you do is great. Building confidence is what’s going to get you priority over everybody else.
Julian Goldie [00:10:54]: And does confidence just come from like multiple sources and consistency over time?
Jason Barnard [00:11:00]: In this particular case, yes. I would say also confidence in the understanding of the content of a web page would come from adding Schema Markup because you’re explicitly saying what you’ve understood is correct. So I use, I mean, it doesn’t really work like this, but if you let Google analyze a page using its NLP, using its algorithms, it will get confidence of 40%. If you then add Schema Markup, you’re reassuring it with explicitly in a language it understands natively. So we’ll push it up to 70%. If you then link out and link back any piece of content to sources that confirm what it is that’s being said, Google goes and finds it comes back and it sees that this is corroborated by other sources around the web, you’re going to build it up to 90, 95%. That’s when you win the game.
Julian Goldie [00:11:51]: Yeah, that makes sense. So then you just, you’re adding like the finishing touches to the puzzle and confirming it across multiple sources. So I guess, if we were to recap on the actionable ways to improve someone’s E-E-A-T, and I know that a lot for a fact, I know a lot of people listening to this probably haven’t built up their author profile so much. And so I think this is really useful. But for example, setting up a personal website for the actual person, social media, adding markup schema in the ways that you talked about it and then also adding a book if you can, to somewhere like Kindle or directly to Google Play. So it goes straight to that.
Jason Barnard [00:12:24]: 100%. And make sure that your texts are semantically solid. So you would want to use semantic triples. Jason Barnard is an entrepreneur. As a semantic triple, subject-verb-object, two entities connected by a relationship. You want to focus on that. You want to make sure that you start with the most important information first, the most pertinent information. So I’d start with my life as an entrepreneur. I would then go on to Digital Marketing, then go on to the cartoon blue dog that we talked about earlier on, which was my previous career, then the music career, which was before that, then my university.
Jason Barnard [00:12:57]: So it’s from top to bottom, most important to least important right now. And that’s something a lot of people overlook. And the idea that you need to start with your own version of the facts on your own entity home, on your own website is so important and so overlooked. And I’ll come in with another comment. I mean, I see a lot of SEOs saying that E-E-A-T is something you can’t build. Now, I would disagree, because, number one, the first thing you need to do is establish what it is that makes you credible today, what already exists, before doing anything else. State that on your website. Get the corroboration point to it.
Jason Barnard [00:13:40]: Sort out your current digital footprint before you do anything else. Don’t publish a book until you’ve sorted out your digital footprint, then start expanding it. Think, how do I demonstrate to my audience and to Google why I have the credibility, the authority within this industry? Where do I need to stand? Who do I need to exchange with? Who do I need to engage with to demonstrate authority within a particular niche? And don’t get distracted by saying, oh, I’ll go and create a profile on the football site. If you’re a digital marketer or an entrepreneur, that confuses things. Stay focused.
Julian Goldie [00:14:15]: Yeah, that makes sense. Did you see anything? Because I know we’ve already touched on it. Backlinks were a massive part of the Google Leaks, right? When you look at all the attributes, like 14,000 of them in the Google Leaks, a big part of that was backlinks. Did you see anything? Have you had a chance to look through them in terms of other elements of E-E-A-T?
Jason Barnard [00:14:33]: Yeah, well, there are a couple of things there. Number one is, I wouldn’t get too overexcited about the Google Leaks. If you think about it, the Google Leaks are human-created functions from the engineers who were building the algorithms before machine learning took over. So it’s actually old stuff. And machine learning, if you look at the leaks, a lot of it’s saying, oh, don’t use this function anymore. Machine learning is dealing with it. So I think we need to be. What we can understand from that is this is how they built it, and it’s now, machine learning, so that’s where the machine started from.
Jason Barnard [00:15:08]: But machine learning has been dominating for four or five years now. So take it with a pinch of salt. However, some of the things will tell you, will show you directly exactly where Google’s going. For example, I wrote an article on Search Engine Land about is author and is publisher. Two variables, Boolean. And what the engineers were doing was saying, here’s a piece of content, here’s a person. Is an author, yes or no? It’s a zero sum game. Google understands who you are, understands you wrote it or it doesn’t.
Jason Barnard [00:15:41]: So from the E-E-A-T perspective, if you want any E-E-A-T signals to be applied to a piece of content you’ve written, you need two things. It needs to understand who you are. Knowledge Panel. And it needs to understand that you actually wrote the piece of content. And that would imply putting your bio at the bottom, a mini bio. Google recognizes your entity home and you link to it. Google understands that it’s you. It’s reassured that it’s you.
Jason Barnard [00:16:05]: The link goes back, it’s double reassured that it’s you. So you actually need to work to build the E-E-A-T the understanding. So understanding your entity is one thing, understanding what you’ve actually done online is another, and which references it to you. And, sorry, the same applies to a corporation.
Julian Goldie [00:16:23]: One of the most interesting things that I’ve found about, for example, doing YouTube, is there’s a lot more Branded Search about me that’s associated to different things. Like, for example, someone types in Julian Goldie on YouTube or Google, it will pop up with the autocomplete, like topical maps or keyword research or backlinks and that sort of thing. Would you say that Branded Search as well is another thing that can trigger more E-E-A-T, more credibility or more expertise tied to entities?
Jason Barnard [00:16:51]: Branded Search is popularity. It’s a bit like links, but popularity is notability. So it adds to NEEATT but not necessarily EEAT. However, if the associated query is Julian Goldie, best person ever in the universe.
Julian Goldie [00:17:09]: Which is true, by the way, to anyone listening.
Jason Barnard [00:17:13]: That will add to your E-E-A-T. So I think if what you need to look at is volume of Branded Search for your brand name is simply notability, volume of search queries that imply or suggest that they love you is going to be E-E-A-T credibility.
Julian Goldie [00:17:30]: One other thing that I saw, particularly after March 5th, so obviously some of my sites, they got deindexed. Actually, the reason for that came out today. Very interesting. We won’t come on to that, but one thing that I saw was that if you look for example, on a Knowledge Panel. Mine previously, before much of it, before my sites got deindexed, my case study ones, they previously said author. Then that changed to Internet personality, and now that’s changed to YouTuber, like, just over the last few weeks. It’s interesting how it changes so quickly, right?
Jason Barnard [00:18:06]: Yeah. The subtitle that Google has for you is incredibly important. And your initial subtitle was writer because you published a book. So if you put yourself in the Google Books Vertical by publishing a book, Google’s going to say, great, author. So you’re categorizing yourself incorrectly because you’re not an author who happens to know about YouTube, you’re a YouTuber who happens to be an author. Then it moved to Internet personality. And if I understand correctly, that was because there was a lot of social chatter around your case. And Google’s algorithm would have said, well, all of a sudden it’s very socially.
Jason Barnard [00:18:42]: The noises I’m hearing around this person are social. The engagement is very social. So he’s an Internet personality, which is very vague and general. Then it settled down and realized it’s actually all focused on YouTube. The chatter on Twitter, I would imagine, has now died down. And Google’s saying, okay, we can be more specific and say he’s a YouTuber. But I would argue if you want to be presented to the subset of Google’s users who are your audience, and your audience is YouTube visitors, that’s perfect. But if your audience is primarily digital marketers or SEOs, you would want Google to recognize you as an SEO or a digital marketer.
Jason Barnard [00:19:19]: So YouTuber who happens to talk about SEO is less good than SEO consultant who happens to be a YouTuber.
Julian Goldie [00:19:28]: Yeah, that makes sense. Priorities.
Jason Barnard [00:19:30]: Yeah. I mean, I’m currently right now. Well, I’m currently. I’ve already done it. I’ve moved from musician because I have a music career, to author with a book, to entrepreneur. So I’ve overpowered Google’s algorithms where it was thinking I was a musician, then I’ve overpowered when it thought I was an author. Now it sees me as an entrepreneur. That’s what I want, because I want Google to put me in front of other entrepreneurs, CEOs, founders, because those are our perfect client.
Jason Barnard [00:19:59]: Those are our audience. Those are the people that Kalicube can help.
Julian Goldie [00:20:03]: One of the things that I think is terrifying. I know we talked about this. We were both speaking at SEO Vietnam. Right? SEO Mastery in Vietnam. It’s quite a terrifying idea, which is like, if the AI data, you know, these AI models, for example, like ChatGPT is trained on old data. And so if you’re not out there currently building your profile across all these platforms and having an actual presence, then you can kind of get lost in AI. And so, like, if people search for you or they search for products around you, you’re nowhere to be found, essentially.
Julian Goldie [00:20:36]: Right?
Jason Barnard [00:20:37]: Yeah. And there’s a delay. The Google dance from years ago was you would wait three months for Google to reanalyze its index, so you would wait three months. That was 2007 when I was being super SEO friendly with the cartoon blue dog and yellow koala with, as we mentioned earlier, the billion page views in 2007. And that was a huge success. But I remember very clearly sitting and waiting three months each time for Google to update its index. And so that Google dance, it was called, there’s now a Google knowledge dance and a Google LLM dance. And you’re going to be waiting three months, let’s say, for the knowledge and six months for the LLM. And the LLM, the trick is not only to be out there with the right information, but to be out there with the right information on the sources that they are using, because they don’t take the whole web, they’re using the most trusted sources that they rely on.
Jason Barnard [00:21:33]: So you need to get to be top tier content or you need to be present on top tier content for them to pay any attention to what you’re saying at all.
Julian Goldie [00:21:41]: Do you think then there’s a switch from, say, your traditional sort of marketing to more PR-based marketing? Because, like, for example, if you can get a presence on Forbes or Wikipedia or something like that, that’s the sort of source AI Overviews is going to source from. Not just like some niche site with a DR ten. Right?
Jason Barnard [00:22:00]: Yeah, 100%. And I would add to that, you would want to make all of your websites be reference sources for them. And that means topical. You need to be filling the information gap, so they need you. You need to be incredibly focused and topical so they don’t get confused and think you’re trying to talk about all sorts of different things. And then you will be used as a source of information. And that’s what gives you power. If you rely on Forbes, Wikipedia, Bing.com, whatever it might be, you’re relying on somebody else.
Jason Barnard [00:22:30]: If they’re relying, if they’re sorry, they’re using your websites as sources for information, then you have control. Does that make sense? Sorry.
Julian Goldie [00:22:39]: Yeah.
Jason Barnard [00:22:41]: I’ll tell you something else I saw in the leaks that is really scary.
Julian Goldie [00:22:45]: What?
Jason Barnard [00:22:47]: There is a function that is switched off by default, which provides a description for any entity in the Knowledge Graph or any of the Knowledge Graphs. That description is written by the machine and they can switch it on, or they switch it on when they’re doing Knowledge Graph updates. And at Kalicube, we track that there’s a Knowledge Graph sensor and we see the updates. It’s every couple of weeks for some of them, for some types of update, and every four or five months for other types of updates. When they switch it on, the machine spits out the description. That’s the only time humans can actually see them. The engineers presumably check some of them, then they inject it back into the machine. Synthetic data as truth.
Jason Barnard [00:23:30]: So they’re using synthetic data for your entity description based on what the machine currently thinks. So if the machine is getting it wrong, it will inject back into itself something that is false, inaccurate or incomplete, and it will reassure itself that it was right. So the longer you leave it, the worse it gets, the more difficult it will be to correct this machine, because it will have built up confidence in a false truth or an inaccuracy or an incompleteness over time, feeding itself with its own synthetic data. I would be very scared if I wasn’t looking after my own entity.
Julian Goldie [00:24:07]: The other thing I wonder as well is like, if you look at the way that the Internet is going, I think come next year, or come the year after, 95% of the content online that we find will be AI generated in some way. It will be touched by AI in some way. And so with so little fact checking involved, and with the way that all these AI models can hallucinate so much, that could lead to massive issues with E-E-A-T. Right? And the way that we’re seeing in the algorithm.
Jason Barnard [00:24:36]: Yeah, 100%. I mean, this could go horribly wrong. Absolutely. No doubt at all. I mean, it could spiral spectacularly out of control. And my immediate thought about that is all you can do, realistically, is manage your little corner of the Internet, and it’s a tiny, tiny corner, and it seems insignificant, but it’s you, it’s you, it’s your company, it’s your product. All of these are things that you need Google to understand. You need to manage it intentionally, you need to manage it carefully, and you need to make sure that you don’t think, oh, I’ve got my Knowledge Panel job done.
Jason Barnard [00:25:09]: You need to, as you said earlier on, you need to manage it over time, and you need to make sure you’re keeping up, and you need to make sure that the machine isn’t feeding itself with fake, false, inaccurate, incomplete information. And if you do that, at least you have some level of self determination in a world of AI, where machines are going to get smarter than humans. And if you don’t, you’re just leaving it to luck. And luck isn’t something I would count on, especially if the machines will. If you think about it, once they get it wrong, it will spiral towards more wrongness. And as you said, thats super scary. And I think whats likely to happen is that the big tech companies are going to become a little bit more cautious because theyre going to see that its going to spiral very quickly out of control at this scale. Which means that the people who are actually intentionally managing their entity in Google, Bing, Perplexity, ChatGPT, are going to have a huge advantage over those who don’t.
Jason Barnard [00:26:15]: A huge relative advantage. And you know, for Kalicube, I mean, I’m betting my whole company on that. That entity management is going to be the single most important thing for corporations in the years to come. Oh, corporations and people.
Julian Goldie [00:26:33]:
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me. What happens if you are competing with other people with the same name? Do you have any tips for that? For handling that?
Jason Barnard [00:26:41]: Yeah, I mean, this is kind of one of those tricky questions where I would say it depends, but I’m not going to. Oh, we should. Darn, I already said it, too late. If you have a unique name or a fairly unique name, let’s say you’ve got 30 other people in the world with the same name, you don’t have a huge problem. You’re likely to be Geo relevant and be dominant. If you have a popular name, it’s going to be very difficult to be dominant. And by that, I mean, be the entity that Google thinks it’s most probable somebody is looking for to get your Knowledge Panel to trigger when somebody searches your name. But it’s also going to be difficult to be dominant in Google’s algorithms and develop your E-E-A-T unless you can be incredibly consistent and build up its confidence.
Jason Barnard [00:27:33]: So the problem with somebody with a common name, and my name isn’t particularly common, but let’s say there are 300 Jason Barnards in the world. I’ve already mentioned circus clown, CEO of a company, podcaster, ice hockey player, can’t remember what the other one. Oh, a professor at San Francisco University. Those five people, let’s say, all have a digital footprint that’s relatively developed. So Google sees them as five people. I have entrepreneur, digital marketer, musician, screenwriter, script, sorry, author, and some others. So that’s five. So it could potentially see ten people there.
Jason Barnard [00:28:11]: So we have two problems. Number one is I’m competing with these other people. Number two is it’s looking at ten and I have to make sure it understands that all of these five are just one and that none of these are me. Because if once it says, oh, Jason Barnard’s got these five different careers going on, it might think I’m also an ice hockey player or a circus clown, at which point I get merged with somebody else. Then things get confusing and I start to lose control. So the ambiguity of a name is problematic on multiple fronts. Number one is being understood. Number two is not duplicating yourself into those five different people. Number three is to distinguish yourself from the others.
Jason Barnard [00:28:49]: And I can end this particular kind of comment on, you might want to think about rebranding. So I might want to think about calling myself Jason M. Barnard or Jason Martin Barnard because then I reduce the ambiguity very significantly. Adding my middle name, I’ll go from 300 to three, at which point, my job becomes very easy with just three competitors. So I think there’s going to be a move towards rebranding, adding your middle initial, adding your middle name over the coming years because it’s going to be a necessity for people with popular names.
Julian Goldie [00:29:28]: Yeah, that makes sense. Totally.
Jason Barnard [00:29:30]: And of course, we offer those services. Couldn’t resist the plug.
Julian Goldie [00:29:36]: We tried to avoid plugs, but that was a sneaky one.
Jason Barnard [00:29:39]: Sorry.
Julian Goldie [00:29:41]: All right, so with your site previously that you got to, I know you got 200-million page views from SEO, 1 billion page views in total. Could you tell us a little bit about that and how that happened?
Jason Barnard [00:29:55]: Yeah, I started the website for kids in 1998 and we grew it very quickly and in 2007, we ended up with a billion page views for the year 2007 and 200 million came from Google. And I thought, wow, I’ve nailed it. I’m a super SEO. So when I got ripped off by my business partner, ended up not being involved in the company, lost the characters and I had to build a new career. So I thought, I’ll build a career in SEO because if I can do that for a kids website, 200 million page views in a year, think what I can do for your business. And I got a lot of work that way. And it only really occurred to me the other day that the 80-20 rule hits here. I’d actually done a marketing campaign where 80% of the traffic came not from Google.
Jason Barnard [00:30:42]: And then I look at Kalicube today, with the Kalicube Process that we use for Digital Marketing, where we take branding and marketing and we package it for Google. So SEO for me is just packaging the great branding and marketing you should be doing anyway for the machines. And Kalicube, although it’s sometimes seen as an SEO company, actually gets 80% of our business and our traffic from not Google. So at the end of the day, what I’ve done throughout my career is build a brand, market it very intelligently to the right audiences in the right places at the right time with the right content and then package it for Google to get that as the natural extension. Because at the end of the day, what’s Google and Bing and ChatGPT and Perplexity trying to do? They’re trying to emulate the world. They’re looking at how we’re all interacting with each other, they’re looking at who the best solution is. They’re trying to evaluate who’s the best solution for my user in their specific situation and then match the two together. So if you’re walking the walk, you’re doing great branding, you’re doing great marketing, you’re standing where your audience is looking, you’re presenting them with the credibility signals, the proof of your own credibility, you’re giving them the content that demonstrates you can solve that problem or you do solve that problem. A, youre getting 80% of your business already, b, the machines will see that, emulate it and give you the extra 20%.
Jason Barnard [00:32:04]: You’ve got a great business.
Julian Goldie [00:32:07]: Yeah, I see that. I think a really good example of that is for example, Neil Patel. If you look at Neil Patel, he’ll get hundreds of thousands if not like a million page views on his website. But actually he’s getting millions and millions of impressions across all his social media platforms. And so it’s the 80-20 again. It’s like he’s got an impressive amount of SEO traffic to his site but he’s got an even more impressive amount from all his channels.
Jason Barnard [00:32:31]: Yeah, I think that’s a really, really good example. I think in SEO people tend to focus on the website and I think the next stages of all of us is going to be it’s all there. If you look at universal search, you look at how Google’s presenting results, you get videos, you get images, you get news stories, you get Twitter feeds, all of that comes from not your site and you need to pay attention to it. And the other thing of course is Google is watching everything. And if you think about entity understanding, if it understands Jason Barnard as this entity and it keeps seeing me on YouTube with you or on Twitter, talking to Barry Schwartz or on Forbes.com, engaging with entrepreneurs. It’s seeing the content. It can use that content, it can put me in the search results or the Generative AI results using that content that isn’t actually on my site, that third party content that you guys control. And that’s key, I think in credibility in N-E-E-A-T-T is when you publish this interview, you are vouching for me as an expert and you’re a third party.
Jason Barnard [00:33:38]: I have no control over you. Google understands that you’re vouching for me. Demonstrates my authority, my credibility within the sector of SEO, Digital Marketing. That’s powerful.
Julian Goldie [00:33:50]: That is powerful.
Jason Barnard [00:33:51]: Thank you very much.
Julian Goldie [00:33:54]: Happy to help. One final thing that I wanted to come onto because obviously we’ve covered E-E-A-T, we’ve covered Knowledge Panels, we’ve covered actionable ways to actually implement E-E-A-T and plus how you got to billions of page views on your website too. One final thing I wanted to cover was the three tiers of SEO that you mentioned earlier. Could you run us through that?
Jason Barnard [00:34:12]: Yeah, it’s something that occurred to me a few weeks ago. Sometimes, I’ve been quite negative about SEO as I move towards Digital Marketing and entrepreneurship. And to anybody who’s ever been offended by that, I apologize. I was wrong because in fact, I realized that SEO has simply evolved and traditional SEO, which is what I now call it, is what we’ve all been doing for years. It’s content, website level, it’s the content itself, the link building, the great HTML, the discoverability, the crawl ability, the indexability, all of that stays and it’s all incredibly important and we cannot do without it. What’s been added in SEO is entity optimization, for E-E-A-T or NEEATT for us at Kalicube, of the content creator and of the website publisher. So it’s simply adding two layers and saying now we need to consider more. We need to consider not only the content itself and the website that contains that content, but who publishes the website, who’s publishing the content and who’s creating the content.
Jason Barnard [00:35:14]: Can Google identify them explicitly? And if it can, you get a bonus, let’s say, where it adds that. Super brownie points, super booster. I’ve understood the author. I believe the author is an authority in this field. I believe they’re expert, experienced, notable, trustworthy. I will give them a huge boost. Same thing for the website publisher. So for me and Kalicube, that’s obviously great news because we can help the SEO community build on their existing skill set, which is content website level, use that same set of skills to simply add two additional tiers that give you a huge competitive advantage.
Jason Barnard [00:35:57]: As long as nobody else is doing it as well as you do.
Julian Goldie [00:36:01]: Yeah, definitely. And when are we starting the band?
Jason Barnard [00:36:06]: I’ll get my double bass and we can write a couple of songs. We both sing, but I love doing backing vocals, so I’m happy to do the backing vocals and whenever you want.
Julian Goldie [00:36:17]: All right, let’s do it. Next conference.
Jason Barnard [00:36:19]: Brilliant. Oh, yeah. Oh, I’ve always wanted to do that.
Julian Goldie [00:36:22]: That’d be cool.
Jason Barnard [00:36:23]: Yeah.
Julian Goldie [00:36:24]: Anything else you want to say before you go?
Jason Barnard [00:36:27]: Um, no, you covered it all brilliantly. We went through all the different points and I think this is a really exciting time. I’m not worried or frightened or scared. I see the machines are getting smarter and smarter and that if you’re not intentionally managing your entity or your entities, you have reason to be scared, but nothing is. You’re not going to stop them, you’re not going to change it, you’re not going to slow them down. Complaining about it won’t change anything. What will change something for you in your tiny corner of the Internet is intentionally taking control, which is what we do at Kalicube, which is what I’ve been doing. And honestly, right now is Kalicube’s time. I’ve been waiting ten years and I’m in the right place.
Jason Barnard [00:37:16]: And I’ve been waiting ten years for everybody else to. Well, actually, for Google to catch up, I built Kalicube Pro, which is the platform with 2 billion data points in 2015, because I thought Google were telling the truth when they were saying from strings to things, but in fact they weren’t. Now they are. They’re actually implementing that idea of strings to things. So ten years later, they’ve caught up.
Julian Goldie [00:37:43]: Yeah. The other thing I would say is, like, particularly personal branding, it’s just a superpower. You know, if you can do, for example, if you can get PR and build backlinks that way, if you can create content on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, your own blog, etcetera, these are all things that just differentiate you. If you’re selling any sort of service or any sort of product. It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done.
Jason Barnard [00:38:08]: A personal brand is so important and we’re now focusing on that at Kalicube more than anything else. Because personal branding is something where we can really help. Because it’s PR, because it’s PR mixed with SEO, because it’s your own entity, because it’s self determination, it’s self important. And the other thing I would add to that is links remain very important, but linkless links, which we’ve been talking about for years, are a reality. If Google’s understood your entity and it’s saying is author for a page, then that’s a linkless link. It’s saying, I know that this person wrote that article. So it’s a link in its brain, it’s just in the Knowledge Graph. It’s not a link we can see.
Jason Barnard [00:38:47]: So that idea of mentions of known entities being linkless links is reality. You have every interest to build up your entity. Google’s understanding your entity and I will finish with and work continuously to increase its confidence in that understanding.
Julian Goldie [00:39:04]: Awesome. All right, thanks very much for being on. We’ll leave a link to Kalicube inside the description so anyone can get in touch.
Jason Barnard [00:39:10]: I thought you were going to tell me that I would make do with a linkless link and you would just mention it with no link. That would teach me.
Julian Goldie [00:39:15]: I can do that if you want.
Jason Barnard [00:39:19]: Yeah. Okay.
Julian Goldie [00:39:20]: All right. Cheers then.
Jason Barnard [00:39:22]: Thank you, man.
Julian Goldie [00:39:22]: So thanks so much for watching. If you want to get an SOP and a guide based on the transcript today, I’ve left that links inside the comments in description and if you want to get a free one to one SEO strategy session, feel free to book then. We’ll show you how. We take websites from zero to 145,000 visitors per month and generate thousands of dollars in sales. We’re answering any questions you have and one to one, we’ll build an SEO domination plan plus show you how to quickly outrank your competitors with link building. Feel free to book in. Thanks so much for watching. Appreciate it.
Julian Goldie [00:39:51]: Bye.
