Interview with Felipe Bazon to Don’t Panic It’s Organic
Saiba tudo sobre a Killer Whale Update e N.E.E.A.T.T, a evolução do E.E.A.T com um dos maiores experts no assunto, Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP GUY).
A Killer Whale Update foi um das maiores atualizações do Knowledge Graph de todos os tempos e teve impacto direto na Helpful Content de Setembro de 2023.
Em mais um Tutorial de SEO com Experts, Jason Barnard, explicou no detalhe o que foi a Killer Whale e porque quase ninguém falou dela.
De quebra falamos extensivamente sobre N.E.E.A.T.T, um conceito que complementa o EEAT e direciona a forma como devemos trabalhar com Marketing e SEO.
Conecte-se com o Jason:
https://jasonbarnard.com/
Felipe Bazon [00:00:25]: We are live, with another episode of Don’t Panic, It’s Organic — our first one of 2024. I’m Felipe Bazon, and today we’re going to talk about EEAT or NEEAT, Killer Whale Update, and also Semantic SEO, with one of the individuals who is an entity — if I may say so — in this field. Please welcome, Jason Barnard. Jason, welcome to the show once again. I was just doing a little intro in Portuguese explaining the topics that we’re going to talk about, saying that you are in my opinion, the expert, the entity I said, when it comes to Branded SERPs, EEAT and all things related to entities and Semantic SEO. Jason, please, for those that don’t know you yet, please could you introduce yourself and explain?
Jason Barnard [00:01:01]: Well, you seem to have introduced me very well already. Yeah, I’m Jason Barnard. I’ve been focusing on how Google understands and represents entities, people, companies, podcasts, music albums, music groups, cartoon characters, even for the last twelve years. And I created Kalicube as a company eight years ago to provide those services to businesses and people so that we can optimize how Google understands you and how it represents you to its audience. And in the last couple of years it’s gone much, much further, is that we have realized that when we educate Google correctly, we also clean up the funnel and create a full Digital Marketing strategy that works. Kalicube has solved Digital Marketing.
Felipe Bazon [00:01:55]: I love that slogan. And we were talking in the background about your experience with a Digital Marketing event. Maybe I’ll pick your brain on that later. But let me go back a few years in time. I think that was 2006 when we first met. The first time I went to Brighton SEO and we did an interview in the first day of the event. Remember that you interviewed me for Kalicube? Do you recall that?
Jason Barnard [00:01:53]: That would have been 2019, I think not as early as 2006.
Felipe Bazon [00:02:27]: No, 2016. I think, or 17, something like that.
Jason Barnard [00:02:33]: Oh, you may well be right.
Felipe Bazon [00:02:31]: Yes, because 19, I think it was the first time I spoke at Brighton and a few years back, I think Fernando introduced, from Semrush, introduced us and I did an interview with. They were building the stages at the booths and we did an interview in the afternoon, if I recall correctly. Since then I’ve been a big follower of your work, your guide that enlightened me into this how entity works, Knowledge Graphs and so on. We’re going to talk a lot about that. But can you explain how Kalicube evolved ever since? Because you guys became the go to reference when it comes to Knowledge Graph, understanding the entities. Could you go a little bit deeper into explaining what you guys do and how you guys are solving Digital Marketing, if you will.
Jason Barnard [00:03:22]: Well, I built Kalicube Pro, which is our SaaS platform for automating what we call the Kalicube Process. So the Kalicube Process is the way that we educate Google, but also we get Google to teach us what’s right and wrong about a digital strategy. And the Kalicube Process is the implementation of Google’s critique of your digital strategy, and it’s hugely powerful. The problem I’ve had since 2015, when I built the platform, is Google wasn’t able to do everything I expected it to do. And this year, with the Killer Whale Update that you mentioned, Google finally caught up with me. 2013 was the year that Google could actually do what I thought it could do in 2015, but it actually couldn’t. So the machine was eight years ahead of its time. We intend that the Kalicube team to keep Kalicube Pro, the SaaS platform, eight years ahead at all times.
Jason Barnard [00:04:23]: So our aim now is to keep working, keep working and keep working to make the platform perform for today, of course, but also be ready to perform tomorrow when tomorrow happens. So the thing about last year was the SGE, Generative AI and search caught everybody flat footed except Kalicube, because we were ready eight years ago. And the other evolution that you might have missed is three years ago, I was completely alone. Kalicube was just Jason. And today Kalicube is 24 people working towards the aim of educating Google, helping business owners and people to both learn from Google and educate it. But most of all, and this is something that struck me this year, is we can remove the fear- Digital Marketing, the digital world, Generative AI in search and make it simple and effective using data, but also an incredibly simple, straightforward business sense Digital Marketing strategy. And I’m really, really happy about that. Being able to remove the fear and give people confidence when faced with all of the changes that are happening is something I’m really really keen to maintain.
Felipe Bazon [00:05:47]: Well, I must say that I didn’t know you guys were with as many people as you are now, growing as you are. So well done on that front. Congratulations. You do an exceptional job. I follow your work. So I knew you started back then. We first talked, you were kind of like one man band, and then now I saw you doing all this content and your newsletter, a lot of things happening. So I do follow up and I’m happy to know that I’m like Google back then.
Felipe Bazon [00:06:14]: I didn’t understand what Kalicube was when we first met. And now it makes total sense, you know, with your process, everything that you guys are doing. That said, am I correct in understanding or interpreting that now Google is being able to analyze all the expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of your brand, of your online presence? Is that what you’re trying to say that Google can do that algorithmically with the assistance of maybe the quality raters? Is that, am I correctly interpreting that and all the things that you were predicting you can now do for companies, is that correct?
Jason Barnard [00:06:56]: Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at, let’s just say, credibility. Credibility used to be just links. Google would count links and it would say that’s a credible source because it’s got lots of links and the links come from sites that also have lots of links. It’s a super easy system to game and people have gamed it for years. Page rank is the gameable part, but credibility now goes way beyond just links. Links are still part of it, but if they were 100% of it five years ago, now let’s say they’re 10%. So anybody who’s focusing purely on links is going to be in trouble very quickly.
Jason Barnard [00:07:32]: And the reason for that is there are so many other credibility signals that Google can now use, which is expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. And it can find that anywhere in your digital ecosystem, and it can find it if it can identify you when you get a mention. So what we used to call linkless links. So if somebody on a website, let’s say Semrush, says Jason Barnard is an expert in Digital Marketing. That’s a third party corroborating the fact that I’m an expert in Digital Marketing. If Google doesn’t understand who Jason Barnard is, that’s pointless. Doesn’t help. If it doesn’t understand which Jason Barnard, because there are 300 in the world, then it’s also useless.
Jason Barnard [00:08:18]: So it needs to understand not only Jason Barnard, but this particular named entity Jason Barnard. So what I need to do is educate Google that a mention of Jason Barnard on Semrush that talks about Digital Marketing is this one. And a mention of a music expert on a podcast site is the Jason Barnard in the UK who has a music podcast. So that perspective of saying, well, credibility is expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. How do we make sure that Google understands that it’s talking about me with all of these credibility signals, the reviews, the user comments, this podcast, Felipe Bazon has invited Jason Barnard. Luckily he invited the right one. Not the podcast about music, but the digital marketer.
Jason Barnard [00:09:05]: And we’re talking about the right topic. And those credibility signals, as you can imagine, are significantly more intricate and more important than just links and impossible to game completely. Then you mentioned NEEAT, which is the new Kalicube special word is that we realize that Google also takes into account notability. So you have a N at the start. And notability is not what Wikipedia says notability is. In Wikipedia, notability is about being famous. In Google’s mind, notability is being important and recognized within your industry, within your niche, and that can be industry and geo region. So if I’m an expert just in the UK, then I can be notable in the UK.
Jason Barnard [00:09:58]: And that’s hugely important to Google. And Google can figure this out to such a microscopic degree that I could actually just be the Jason Barnard who is notable for Digital Marketing in Birmingham. That’s all possible. And then there’s another aspect, which is the double T at the end. So you have trustworthiness and you also have transparency. If you’re not transparent…
Felipe Bazon [00:10:28]: So NEEATT, is N double E A T. So, guys, you’re hearing firsthand for the Brazilian audience. People all over the world had read Jason’s Kalicube article, I believe so. I read it, but I misstep the double T at the end. So it’s notability, experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness and transparency. Guys, this is this is huge here. First time, I think the Brazilian audience is hearing about that. So pay attention to what he’s going to compliment now, guys, Go on, Jason. Sorry to interrupt.
Jason Barnard [00:10:56]: Yeah, no. And transparency, to give credit where credit’s due. That’s Jarno Van Driel, who’s a Dutch SEO, who’s a super expert in schema markup. We’ll talk about him later on as well.
Felipe Bazon [00:10:55]: From Wordlift, right?
Jason Barnard [00:11:07]: No, he doesn’t work with Wordlift. He’s an independent contractor.
Felipe Bazon [00:11:11]: Okay, okay.
Jason Barnard [00:11:11]:
And, but he’s super smart. And if you want to know anything about schema markup, that’s the guy to ask. But he helps Kalicube, he’s helping us with our schema markup. He’s giving me the really NEEATT tips and tricks that he knows works because he talks to the Google engineers who are involved in schema.org. So he actually knows what Google do take into account. And he’s part of that conversation at all times. And then Kalicube added notability.
Jason Barnard [00:11:38]: And the one thing I really do, and I’ll say it again, I have to stress it, notability is not what Wikipedia says it is. You do not need a Wikipedia page to demonstrate your notability. You can be notable at a regional, industry level and you can be notable within a very small group of people. And it still makes sense to Google because it can manage with the astonishingly powerful algorithms and data sets it’s got. It can analyze to an incredibly small degree somebody who is notable or a company that’s notable. But the really important thing about NEEATT is that Google cannot apply the signals that it has, unless it understands your entity explicitly. And that’s gonna come back in the Killer Whale Update when we talk about that.
Felipe Bazon [00:12:28]: That is, just answered the question I was gonna ask you regarding the brand mentions. No, it’s good because it’s a few of a compliment, because I was going to ask you. So a lot is being talked about. The brand mentions are the new links or the new way to build links, or they have the same weight, but that doesn’t work if you are not an entity recognized by the Knowledge Graph. Exactly. So first of all became a notable entity within the Knowledge Graph and then those brand mentions will start work, correct?
Jason Barnard [00:13:02]: Yes, that’s exactly it. Be an entity. And you said notable, but I would argue it’s actually confidently understood. Being understood is one thing.
Felipe Bazon [00:13:12]: Recognized. Yeah, okay.
Jason Barnard [00:13:12]: But confidence in Google’s mind is vastly underrated by people. So you can get yourself to be understood and people think, oh, that’s job done. I’m in the Knowledge Graph and I’ve got my Knowledge Panel, but in fact, they should be continuing to work because they want to build that confidence over time. And as you said, notability. That’s why we added it back in, because PR is going to build you notability and those signals become increasingly powerful as you become more notable within your industry. But the foundation is being understood as a named entity that Google clearly understands that when there is a brand mention, that brand mention is you. And don’t ever forget that ambiguity is a huge problem, especially with people’s names.
Felipe Bazon [00:13:54]: I think even sometimes brands, you know. We, at Hedgehog, I’ve discovered that there are another four or five digital agencies that are called Hedgehog. Two in the US, one, obviously us being in Brazil, in the UK, but I think there’s two in the US and one in Australia. So, with just… With the help of the Knowledge Graph explorer from Kalicube, I was able to identify our entity, claim the Knowledge Panel, and we are on our way to building that notability. On that front, what’s the difference between… because in my mind, they’re very close together, notability and authoritativeness. Because if you’re an authority, you’re notable, you’re notable. I don’t know.
Felipe Bazon [00:14:37]: My mind works that way. So could you maybe explain the difference between those two?
Jason Barnard [00:14:43]: I can see that they are very similar. Being an authority is that people listen to you when you speak and they believe you. Being notable could be that people listen to me, but they don’t believe me, they don’t trust me.
Felipe Bazon [00:14:57]: Got it.
Jason Barnard [00:14:58]: Simply because they see me all over the place, so there is a difference. And so notability is more famousness. And I’ll give you a really good example of the mentions that you were talking about earlier on. We track the Beatles, and the reason we track the Beatles is two of them are alive and two of them are unfortunately deceased. And then they all have the commonality of being in the Beatles. So you have four people, one group. What happens with the Knowledge Graph is every time there is a news cycle about one of the Beatles, the confidence score goes up. That’s notability, it’s not authority.
Felipe Bazon [00:15:35]: Got it. Perfect.
Jason Barnard [00:15:36]: And, for example, one point, I think it was in July, the confidence score in the Knowledge Graph went up significantly for the Beatles because it was the Beatles anniversary in June. So there was also a delay from one to the other. Then John Lennon, the anniversary of his death was in December. And so you tend to get an increase in the confidence score for John Lennon in January because there’s so much news about it. Once again, famousness, not necessarily authoritativeness.
Felipe Bazon [00:16:09]: That’s interesting. On that front, Paul McCartney did a show here in Maracana, the most famous football stadium in Brazil, that he did, I think, 30 or 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and now he did it again. So that also counted towards notability of Paul McCartney, right? They did a live coverage on Disney Plus and so on the streaming. And so I think all that counted. So on that front…
Jason Barnard [00:16:39]: Sorry just very quickly. Because often we talk about people like Paul McCartney, who’s hugely famous, and everyone thinks, well, I can’t do that. Always remember, at your micro level, you can be notable. So you just need to scale it all down to something that resembles your market and yourself, and you can be as famous as Paul McCartney within your little niche. And that’s good enough.
Felipe Bazon [00:16:57]: Perfect. And to explain a little bit further for people about these ambiguities, The Beatles is the band. The Beetles can be the Volkswagen car, and the beetle can be an insect. So it’s utterly important that you tell Google, obviously, Google before that, was able to understand all these things, but this is how you reason or resolve ambiguity, correct? So, using the entity in the Knowledge Graph to tell Google that you are the Beatles, the band, not the car nor the insect, correct?
Jason Barnard [00:17:33]: There’s a subtlety there that people often overlook, is you say the Beatles with a capital T and a capital B, it’s obvious we’re talking about the band. Whereas the Beetles with a small t and a bee is the Beetles, the car with a capital b. So the capitalization is hugely important. The capitalization means this is a proper noun, it’s a thing, and it’s a clue that Google is desperately searching for all the time. And people who capitalize badly are gonna be badly understood. The other thing that I think people don’t talk about enough is that Google looks at interpretations. So ambiguity. How does the public interpret this term? And that it uses the example in the quality rating guidelines of Apple.
Jason Barnard [00:18:18]: Apple, the company is the dominant interpretation. Therefore, the result for Apple will be mostly Apple the company. Apple the fruit is actually just a common interpretation, so they will include it because you might be looking for that, but it’s simply a common interpretation. And therefore, less people are looking for it than Apple the company. And then, Apple, the person’s name or the town name is a minor interpretation. So when you’re looking at ambiguity, you need to consider as well, am I talking about main, oh sorry, the principal interpretation, the common interpretation, or the minor interpretation? And that’s gonna change how the Brand SERP looks. And so, for example, if you’re a company who’s called yourself what you do, you know, Car Leasing Limited, you’re gonna really struggle to be the dominant interpretation there. And you need to work very very very very hard. So all of these companies that called themselves what they did because it worked in the old traditional SEO are now gonna be struggling. But if you can master it like Apple did, you’re going to be winning all the way.
Jason Barnard [00:19:28]: But that’s a huge amount of PR you need to do. You need to be super notable in order to be able to become the dominant interpretation.
Felipe Bazon [00:19:39]: And therefore, own your Branded SERP, which is my next question. You are known as… as you guys can see under his tagline here, The Brand SERP Guy. Jason, how important is that to… please explain the concept of Brand SERP and how important it is for us moving forward in this world of entities and Knowledge Graphs and making Google understand all these connections between NEEATT and so on.
Jason Barnard [00:20:12]: Yeah, it’s a great question. The Brand SERP is actually the KPI for Google’s understanding of you. If you have a really solid Brand SERP that represents your company with the brand narrative that you have chosen, that you’re communicating across your digital ecosystem, then Google has understood who you are, what you do, whom you are useful, and why you’re better than the competition. It’s also a way to measure and understand what’s right and wrong with your digital strategy. So if it’s a complete mess and it doesn’t reflect your brand message, what’s going on? Google has misunderstood. And when Google misunderstoods, it’s your fault.
Jason Barnard [00:20:58]: And a lot of people say, well, Google should just understand. And that’s foolishly letting go and just saying, oh, I give away all responsibility for this to Google. Help Google by educating Google. Educating Google involves improving your digital ecosystem, improving your brand message across your entire digital ecosystem, which means improving the brand message that people, your audience are seeing all the way down the funnel. So in fact, by looking at the Brand SERP to understand, correcting the Brand SERP to make it look perfect, you’re creating an incredibly good funnel for people and also an incredibly good understanding for Google. And you can just use that Brand SERP as the representation of Google’s understanding of the world’s opinion of you, which is actually the best measurement you can come up with because Google is the biggest machine that sees the most things going on and its judgment of you is actually its judgment of the world’s opinion of you. Oh! And the cherry on the cake is that people searching your brand name, who are bottom of funnel about to do business with you, see that a really perfect Brand SERP and it looks like a recommendation from the machine that they trust. They use Google because they trust it.
Jason Barnard [00:22:12]: When Google represents you incredibly positively, incredibly accurately and incredibly convincingly. When somebody Googles your brand name, you’ve got the recommendation from the best, biggest, most trusted search engine in the world.
Felipe Bazon [00:22:27]: Amazing. And you are, back in the first time we met you and we talked, you mentioned something to me, that I use it up until this day, that your Brand SERP is your new business card for your name and for your brand, obviously. If you recall my first talk when I was in Brighton SEO, I remember you were on the stage and I did mention you because I said, I just put my names. If you want to know a little bit more about me, just Google my name. That’s my business brand. And I saw you on the audience and I said, I learned that with my good friend Jason Barnard. And I don’t know if you remember that, but I’ve been using that ever since and people find it brilliant.
Felipe Bazon [00:23:09]: Up until this day, like six, seven years, five years ahead of the first time I did that. I always start my talk saying, if you want to know a bit more about me, Google it. If you want to know a bit more about Hedgehog, just Google it. That’s our business card and it saves a lot of time in talks because to be honest, I can’t stand people that spend ten minutes talking about how their MBAs and this and that, and then you know, I want to see what you have to. I know you’re good because you’re on stage. So go ahead. So that saved me a lot of time. And you know what? It inspired people to search for your name, which, correct me if I’m wrong, it’s a signal that inspired Google to see that you are trustworthy.
Felipe Bazon [00:23:50]: The more searches about your brand, the more searches about your name. Does that count towards what? Notability, authoritativeness? Where does that the number of searches for your brand or for your name increases your confidence level in the EEAT or the NEEATT score.
Jason Barnard [00:24:06]: Yeah, which is a brilliant question. It’s going to be mostly notability, but what you’ll find with all of the aspects of NEEATT is that the signals will often touch on multiple. If somebody’s searching my name, I’m notable. If somebody’s searching my name, presumably they see me as an expert, especially if they associate it with a word within my industry. So if they search for Jason Barnard Digital Marketing, immediately Google is seeing that as a signal that I am an expert. The other really really important thing, I mean, the volume of Branded Search is hugely important. We’re right now with Sara Moccand-Sayegh, we’re working on pulling the data to demonstrate what we’ve seen manually, just doing spot checks that when Branded Search goes up, the volume of Branded Searches goes up, the SEO performance follows in the year after.
Jason Barnard [00:25:04]: I mean, we’ve seen it on individual cases. Now, we’re pulling the data for, I’m not, we’re not sure yet, maybe two, maybe 6000 brands to demonstrate the Branded Search will drive SEO.
Felipe Bazon [00:25:19]: Oh, I’m really looking forward to those results because that is just gonna put from my end now the cherry on the cake or the icing on the cake for something that I’ve been talking a lot. How, Why SEO needs to be included in the mix of marketing, it’s definitely a discipline that it needs to be there and it connects with branding. So the more you inspire people to search for your brand, the better your SEO performance will be. So, please send me those data, that data when you have it because I really wanna delve into it and use it in my presentations.
Jason Barnard [00:25:54]: Yeah. What I’d love to point out is all credit to Sara Moccand-Sayegh. I mean, she comes in, she helps out at Kalicube and she’s been talking to me about this for ages and I say, I know it’s true. How do we get the data? And she’s super smart and is coming in getting the data. We’ve got Damrey and Allyssa working on it too and I hope that the data we pull will prove what we’re saying, what I’ve been seeing. And actually, I say hope, I’m very sure it’s going to work. It’s gonna demonstrate exactly what we’re talking about. I can’t see that there’s gonna be any other result. That said, the data will speak, I can’t speak ahead of time.
Jason Barnard [00:26:37]: But the other important thing is the Kalicube Process, which is an entire Digital Marketing strategy built around teaching Google and learning from Google, which is lovely. And it’s all about branding, marketing and SEO in that order. If you have a brand, then you have something to market. If you have marketing content, package it for Google. That’s all SEO is. It’s packaging, marketing content that you should be creating anyway for Google.
Felipe Bazon [00:27:08]: And that said, I think finally, I think I’m gonna coin a phrase here, let’s see how it’s going to shape up. SEO will not die, but will be finally incorporated to the marketing department. Because it will be… if brand inspires searches, searches will make you rank higher or improve your SEO performance, will finally come out of the basement and be moved into the marketing department, finally.
Jason Barnard [00:27:36]: Yeah, I really like that approach. And if you look at it from an SEO perspective, a lot of SEOs focus very much on the website. They focus on that thing that we control. And what they haven’t kept up with is universal search is about your entire digital ecosystem. So you necessarily need to get involved in all of the different marketing strategies. And if you can, how can I put it? If you can suppress your pride and accept that SEO is packaging, SEO is making this content that should be there anyway, digestible and understandable for Google, then you have a very powerful situation. You say to everybody on the team, when you create marketing materials that you know will work and will pay for themselves already in and of themselves within the context you’ve created it for the audience, give it to me so I can package it. Then Google will give us the natural extension of this amazing content. And I was writing an article for Search Engine Land today and it starts with Google…
Jason Barnard [00:28:45]: How often have you heard from a Google representative, create content for people, not machines. It sounds and it feels like this incredibly trite, unhelpful comment that has no substance to it. But then if you look at it and work through it with the Kalicube Process, what you’ll find is if you focused on branding, marketing and then package for SEO, that’s exactly what you’re doing. And if you focus on the marketing across your entire digital ecosystem, you’ve got an incredibly consistent, incredibly efficient, incredibly profitable funnel. And we haven’t even started talking about Google yet and you’re making money and you’re getting people down the funnel. Google then becomes, I would call it a bonus, but I get told off by Leanne because she says it’s a natural extension of what you should be doing anyway. And it helps you to clean up everything you’re doing so that it makes sense to everyone, people, search engines and indeed your business.
Felipe Bazon [00:29:48]: And this is, if you look into the bylines of what Google says or the small letters, is always telling you, don’t do SEO, just focus on your brand, your marketing. So this is, I think that’s the SEO of the future, if I may say. Just you know, build your brand. Build a good website. And don’t even bother sending your websites to Google via Google search console or a sitemap or anything. Let Google find you. If Google finds you and understand your notability, your experience, your expertise, authoritativeness, blah, blah, blah, you’re just gonna rank. So focus on your marketing and your branding.
Felipe Bazon [00:30:25]: And that’s I think, if we are to evaluate an SEO campaign from now on, that’s it. What you have done in SEO? Nothing. But I built a very good brand website with a very good experience and I have a lot of experts writing content. I’m helping people solve problems and I have a state of the art product. Apple, for instance. I doubt Apple do any SEO. They just have what they have, right?
Jason Barnard [00:30:49]: Yeah. Added to that, I also have my content in the places where my audience naturally hangs out, which isn’t necessarily in my website. I am always standing where my audience is looking. My marketing materials indicate to them that I have the solution to their problem, indicate to them what the next steps are. And that’s what Google is looking for across your entire digital ecosystem. Are you standing where your audience is looking? Are you demonstrating them to them that you have the solution, that you’re the best solution, and are they coming down your funnel? And if all of that fits together, Google can match the subset of its users, who are your audience, to you, when you’re going to be useful and valuable to them.
Felipe Bazon [00:31:32]: This talk is becoming not about the Killer Whale Update. Killer Whale Update. My tongue is not working correctly today. The Killer Whale Update. But how the SEO of the future will shape up, right? How it should be. This is amazing, but Jason is still on the Branded SERP or the Brand SERP. A lot of people are listening to us and saying, hang on, I already rank first for my branding. Yeah, it’s much more than that, right? Can you elaborate on that? And if I may compliment or guide your answer here, which I don’t want to do it.
Felipe Bazon [00:32:07]: Is the first step to controlling your Brand SERP acquiring or getting your Knowledge Panel approved? Yeah, go on. Let me ask the expert.
Jason Barnard [00:32:23]: The Knowledge Panel isn’t the first step, but what I can do is read a Brand SERP and tell you immediately where you need to focus first. And it can sometimes be the Knowledge Panel. But I look immediately at the top. Now you rank number one. Happy. That’s all you’re thinking about. But do you have rich sitelinks? If you don’t have rich sitelinks, you have a structural problem within your website.
Jason Barnard [00:32:44]: Or you have the pages that are key to engagement and the transparency that Google is looking for and your users, your audience are looking for. You have problems with those pages. The contact page, the about page, the login page. Pages we typically don’t think about in SEO. These are transparency pages. Then as you go down your Brand SERP, you’ll be seeing social media platforms. You’re gonna be seeing two or three. Those are the ones that Google sees as the most relevant to your audience.
Jason Barnard [00:33:12]: Are they the ones you expect and are they the ones that your competitors have? Are those the ones that your market needs? Are the ones that your audience is actually hanging out on? So if your entire market has Instagram ranking, but you’ve got LinkedIn ranking, you have a problem with your social media strategy. You’re putting all your beans in the wrong social media platform. Then you can also look at reviews. Have I got a review platform ranking? Is it, are they good reviews? Is it the right one for my market? You can also look at the different rich elements, the video boxes. If I’m investing in video, am I investing correctly and wisely? If I’m investing in video and video boxes do not appear on my Brand SERP, then I’m investing badly because my audience are almost certainly not engaging with the videos in the way that Google would expect. Which means that Google then judges them to be not helpful for a Brand SERP and will not rank them. Image is the same thing. People also ask are hugely interesting.
Jason Barnard [00:34:14]: If you look at people also ask, what are the questions people are asking about my company? And are there questions in that list that are generic that I should be answering as in priority? But sometimes the people also ask is not questions people are actually asking. It’s simply Google knows the answer to the question. So it puts the question and the answer there because it’s so pleased with itself for having understood. So if you search for Kalicube, the question is, what is the Kalicube Process? Pretty sure very few people ask that question, but Google sees it as associated with Kalicube. So you’re starting to see that it’s matching a topic and a question with my entity brand. If you search for Jason Barnard, you will see who is The Brand SERP Guy? It understands that the follow up question to Jason Barnard is The Brand SERP Guy.
Jason Barnard [00:35:08]: It used to be who is Boowa, which was the blue dog in the cartoon. That was the most relevant thing, and that’s hugely important as well, is that I’ve repositioned myself in Google’s brain from a cartoon screenwriter and actor to a Digital Marketing specialist. And that’s how I started with Brand SERP is because Google used to say Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog. And that doesn’t get you very many clients when you’re trying to sell Digital Marketing.
Felipe Bazon [00:35:36]: Not at all, I believe.
Jason Barnard [00:35:38]: And then the Knowledge Panel is something that everybody should have and people think, well, I don’t have a Wikipedia page, I’m not famous. I need famousness, I need notability. You don’t. Anybody can get a Knowledge Panel. And on that aspect, it’s actually quite interesting that Mary Ann, who works at Kalicube, who’s been at Kalicube for a little over two years now, has a Knowledge Panel, but she only has three social media accounts and one mention on the Kalicube website. So she has a very small digital footprint. And yet she has a Knowledge Panel because Google understands and is confident it’s understood because she cleaned up that very small digital footprint incredibly well and she’s incredibly clear and she’s mentioned on an authoritative site, Kalicube.com. So becoming an authoritative site, in fact, sorry, I’ll come back on that.
Jason Barnard [00:36:30]: She’s mentioned by an authoritative brand that is represented by Kalicube.com, the website, and it’s really important in the quality rated guidelines. Google now talk about website owner and not website. They’re looking for the owner of the website. The website is simply a representation of the brand or the company or the person behind it. And in the quality rated guidelines, they’re also looking for the author of the content, which will bring us into the Killer Whale Update, I think, quite neatly. And that understanding as an entity, as a person, allows it to attribute articles to people. If you think about it, attributing articles to a brand, if you’ve understood which the website itself and the brand that owns the website, it’s easy. But people write for multiple different platforms and generally don’t have a personal website.
Jason Barnard [00:37:25]: So identifying authors of content is hugely difficult. And the Killer Whale solved that problem for Google, or was at least the start of the solution to that problem.
Felipe Bazon [00:37:25]: Got it. So let’s dive into the Killer Whale Update. I’m gonna nail that one last time. So, the Killer Whale Update, what was that all about? And could you provide a bit of context so people understand a bit how you guys are monitoring the Knowledge Graph and all these entities and how that came along? The explanation for that.
Jason Barnard [00:37:58]: Right. I’ve been tracking the Knowledge Graph since 2015. And every December and July, there is a huge update to the Knowledge Graph that nobody notices, as far as I know, because I’m the only person tracking it, or Kalicube is the only company now tracking it. And we track 4000 entities every day and 100,000 entities every month. We have 8 million Knowledge Graph IDs, entities in the Knowledge Graph. We have a list of 8 million that go back right now in the database only to 2019. But I’ve got the cold storage of the other four years.
Jason Barnard [00:38:37]: But we don’t need it anymore. That time has passed. There’s no point in thinking about it anymore. But every July and every December, I look for an update. What’s the update this time? December, we just had one, but the big big big big one was in July. And over four days, the number of person entities in the Knowledge Graph tripled.
Felipe Bazon [00:39:01]: Jeez.
Jason Barnard [00:38:59]: And if you imagine that the Knowledge Graph now contains 50 billion entities, that’s a huge change. And in just four days, number one, Google added, sorry, tripled the number of person entities, but didn’t increase the number of corporation entities or the number of song entities or the number of music group entities. So it was purely focused on people. Number two is it stripped away a huge number of subtitles. So Jason Barnard, CEO of Kalicube. Sorry, Felipe Bazon, CEO of Hedgehog Digital. Bill Gates, entrepreneur. I’m trying to think Lily Ray, let’s say writer, a musician. I think she’s a musician, DJ.
Jason Barnard [00:39:51]: And it stripped them away except for writers and authors. So it was focusing on writers and authors and reclassifying everything and setting the bar for confidence in terms of at what point the algorithm can attribute a subtitle to somebody much higher than it was before. So they reclassified people. They reclassified people with a focus on writers and authors in particular, which already is gonna give you the idea of where we’re going with this. What was interesting is that happened in July and then the helpful content update in September. Guess what happened? A huge number of Knowledge Panels suddenly appeared and a huge number of Knowledge Panels with the subtitle writer or author. So what Google did was updated the Knowledge Graph in July. That’s all internal, didn’t reflect it in the SERPs until September, at which point Gary Illyes said a huge part of the September update is classification.
Jason Barnard [00:40:59]: We’ve improved our classification. We saw that in the Knowledge Graph two months before. So what they’ve done is they’ve reclassified people looking for authors because they want to be able to attribute pieces of content to people, and that’s hugely difficult for them to do. But now they can recognize three times more people and a lot more authors. So there are two things at least going on here. Number one is if we can identify the author of the content, we can apply all and any NEEATT signals that we find because we’ve understood the entity, the person who’s created this content, and we can evaluate through mentions, through the qualifications, the awards they’ve got, whether or not they are authoritative, whether they’re expert, whether they’ve got experience. If we understand their career, we can understand if they’re experienced. If we can understand all of the different content they’ve written, we can immediately see that they’re experienced because they’ve written so much content.
Jason Barnard [00:41:57]: Are they authoritative? Is this person being applauded by his or her peers? Other people in the industry? If people in the industry keep mentioning my name, I’m immediately gonna become authoritative. Am I being mentioned on media sites? Notability. Obviously, in order for Google to understand this and to be able to draw through all this, we need to be transparent. That’s point number one. If you’re understood as an entity, Google can apply all of any NEEATT signals, whatever they may be, fully. If it doesn’t understand your entity, it simply can’t. Point number two, which Mary Ann on the Kalicube team pointed out to me, is that now they will be able to attribute content to people. It means that the AI-generated content can be put to one side if they have a better, an alternative, written by a real human being that they recognize.
Jason Barnard [00:42:50]: So theoretically, and we don’t know where this is going, if you generated a piece of AI content about Brand SERP and SEO, whatever, and I wrote one, Google would say, well, all things equal, as long as they both bring enough value. We’re gonna prioritize Jason’s because we know it’s a human being and we know that it’s real. Expertise, experience, authoritativeness, trustworthy, trustworthiness, credibility.
Felipe Bazon [00:43:17]: Got it. No. Yeah, yeah. So the Killer Whale Update had a direct impact on the helpful content update of September.
Jason Barnard [00:43:27]: Yes. The first time I’ve ever seen a Knowledge Graph update, them being replicated or being used or being visibly and undeniably present in a core update. And for me, that’s huge. And the other thing is when we’ve discovered the Killer Whale Update, I’ve been in SEO since 1998. I started when Google started. I’ve seen every iteration of Google. I’ve grown up with Google in my career. This is by far the biggest update I have ever seen, the most visible one that’s made the most difference.
Felipe Bazon [00:44:02]: This is amazing. And the thing is, I’m connecting the dots in my head here now.
Jason Barnard [00:44:12]: Just like Google.
Felipe Bazon [00:44:13]: Yes.
Jason Barnard [00:44:14]: That’s what a Knowledge Graph does.
Felipe Bazon [00:44:10]: Exactly. That’s where I’m headed. So would you say that the way to optimize, to start optimizing, if I may say that, optimizing for your NEEATT score. Let’s call it NEEATT score. We don’t keep saying all those five massive words all the time.
Jason Barnard [00:44:34]: The NEEATT score.
Felipe Bazon [00:44:37]: The first step, being become a recognized entity within the Knowledge Graph and then work on those six letters or what I own the NEEATT score, your notability, authoritativeness or transparency and so on. So am I correct in saying that? So this is the Killer Whale Update proves that, correct? Google’s the correlation between the Killer Whale with the helpful content and the NEEATT signals. That’s where you need to start. So first of all, become an entity. So I have people thinking, watching us. I’m seeing the future here when I publish the video. How do I become a recognized entity within the Knowledge Graph?
Jason Barnard [00:45:28]: Right. It’s actually really simple. You need a web page on your website that represents the entity. So one web page that represents one entity. So it’s the about page for a company or on my website. It can be my home page or the about page. You then need to describe clearly who you are, what you do, which audience serve, and why you’re credible. You need to link out all of the different resources that prove what you’re saying is true.
Felipe Bazon [00:45:55]: Got it.
Jason Barnard [00:45:56]: So you lay out your story to Google and then you point it to the corroboration. Of course, on the web, everybody’s digital ecosystem is a mess. So we have Kalicube Pro, the SaaS platform that agencies use to crawl Google’s results to figure out what are the knowledge sources? Which are the most important knowledge sources for any individual entity? And then you go around in order of importance and you correct everything so that the message Google is receiving is incredibly consistent. You can add schema markup, but it’s not necessary. And that’s a mistake a lot of people make. They think it’s all about schema. It’s not.
Jason Barnard [00:46:37]: It’s about a consistent message and accurate information across your entire digital ecosystem. And then what happens is Google will go in an infinite loop of self corroboration. So it goes from your website, sees the information, you point it to LinkedIn. It sees the same information, it comes back. You point it then to Wikidata, it sees the same information, it comes back. You then point it to Crunchbase, it comes back, it sees the same information, comes back, and so on and so forth. So this machine, which is in essence a child trying to learn everything about you, is a child that learns by pure repetition. And like a child, if there are contradictions, it will get confused and it will, once again, confidence. It will lose confidence in what it thinks it’s understood. The more consistent you are and the more corroboration you get from relevant, authoritative and trustworthy sources. And that doesn’t mean website, it means brands and other entities that Google recognizes, the better you will build that entity.
Jason Barnard [00:47:39]: And what you will have noticed there is, by going around all of these different sources, correcting everything and adding additional information, you will naturally be adding yourself. Proof of your expertise, authoritativeness, notability and trustworthiness. And the transparency as well, because it will be very clear that you’re being very transparent and open with Google and indeed your audience. And that’s the point. Google’s trying to measure as well how you interact with your audience. And if you’re not transparent with your audience, that doesn’t look good, does it? So as you build that digital ecosystem, or you clean up the digital ecosystem, you will naturally be amplifying the signals that contribute to NEEATT. And by creating the entity, you will then doubly amplify them, because Google will then be able to apply them to you. And from there on in.
Jason Barnard [00:48:35]: I had a client asking me the other day, he said he spent $20,000 building Knowledge Panels with snake oil salesmen. And he’s hugely disappointed because they keep disappearing. And he said, all of it was SEO. And I said, well, that’s the point. This is much closer to PR than it is to SEO. It’s a PR strategy packaged for Google. So we’re back to that idea of SEO is just packaging for Google. Focus on the PR, focus on demonstrating your NEEATT credentials. Package it for Google so it can understand, become an entity so that it can apply them.
Felipe Bazon [00:49:12]: I believe the concept you use. When you mentioned that you need to have your home page or your page with the information about you, is the entity home, correct? I’ve noticed that, correct me if I’m wrong here, because I didn’t notice you before you had your jasonbarnard.com. Now you have this website. That’s your entity home. But what’s the weight between a domain with your name that becomes your entity home or just a page within your website? For instance, in my case, I’m building my entity home on my about us page or an about us page or about me page on Hedgehog. That can be my entity home. Is it more effective to have a domain in your name or it can be within my brand? Because that will correlate to Hedgehog and that will help both becoming more NEEATT. Let’s say it.
Jason Barnard [00:50:07]: Right well, when clients come on board with Kalicube, with Allyssa, who works on building entity understanding in Google’s brain, for our clients, the first thing we do for people is build them a two-page website because that entity home belongs to them as a human being, as a person. Otherwise it belongs to their company. And the company and the person are two very different things. Google is much more comfortable having one entity per website when it’s a cornerstone entity, such as a person, the CEO of a company, or the company itself. Pages for products can be entity homes. So you need to identify which of the really important entities and the really important entities should have their own website. And for a person, that website can be a home page and an about page. That also means that the entity home.
Jason Barnard [00:50:58]: Google will often show the home page, but it will actually read the about page for the information. So that’s a little bit kind of confusing. But you don’t want the homepage to be where you’re gonna say all the boring stuff about who you are and link out to all these different sources. You want to do that in the about page and keep the homepage for sharing the wonderful things that you have to share with your audience as a person or as a company. What we’ve seen is that Google may represent your entity home in the Knowledge Panel using the homepage, but it’s actually reading the about page. And you should have your schema markup and all the links and all the information on the about page. And you don’t need to worry about the home page because Google makes that connection. And the entity home is the single most important thing by far.
Jason Barnard [00:51:46]: It’s not schema markup, it isn’t even the description or even famousness. It’s, does Google understand where your entity lives online? Does it understand that that description of you is trustworthy? At that point, you can start building whatever you want and you can pretty much get Google to say whatever you want about yourself. And as an example, at one point, I got it to say that Jason Barnard played bass on the Ace of Spades, which, of course, I didn’t. That was Lemmy Kilmister.
Felipe Bazon [00:52:14]: Yeah, Motorhead.
Jason Barnard [00:52:17]: Motorhead, of course. And it’s simply because Google trusts me so much about myself that it’s willing to repeat anything I say. I once got it to say that I played the ukulele when in fact, I play the double bass. So I can basically get Google to jump through hoops pretty much at will. And to be really fair, Allyssa, who is the Kalicube Pro team lead, who uses Kalicube Pro for our agencies and for our clients, is better at this than I am now. The student has surpassed the master, and she’s done that in just two years.
Felipe Bazon [00:52:52]: There you are. Well, you taught her very well. I definitely know. I learned a lot from you. From all the times we met in the Brighton SEO. I think the other years that followed up talking with you, the chat we had a few years here, Don’t Panic, It’s Organic as well. I learned a lot with you from that.
Felipe Bazon [00:53:14]: You are my go to reference when it comes to Brand SERPs, Knowledge Graphs and Panels and entities and so on. I imagine her working alongside with you. She’s just like absorbing everything but going back to the image of structured data. A lot of people talk about entity SEO and semantic SEO, and definitely structured data plays an important role. So am I correct in saying or thinking that structured data is not necessarily essential for you to become an entity, a recognized entity within the Knowledge Graph, but it is how you can manipulate the information fed into Google that will shape up your Brand SERP?
Jason Barnard [00:54:01]: Right, well, we’ll come back to Jarno Van Driel, who is the super duper schema expert. I mean, he treats schema markup like a language, and he says, I can speak schema. And if you ask him, he can just write it off the top of his head, pretty much anything. Huge respect for Jarno. And he and I have been chatting for the last six or seven months, and what has come out of the conversation is that he does explicit semantics. He can explain something using schema markup, Google’s native language, if we like, so that Google can immediately understand it and be very confident in it’s understanding, and that confidence comes back again.
Jason Barnard [00:54:44]: What we do at Kalicube is what he calls implicit semantics, is that you take away all the schema markup, you create a page, you link and you repeat, and you’re consistent with the message. And everything you write, everything you communicate, is designed to be easily understood by Google. You literally don’t need the schema markup because we’ve done implicit semantics. And the explicit semantics without the implicit semantics simply won’t work long term because if the schema markup says one thing but the rest of the web disagrees or contradicts or has inconsistencies, this will just fall off. So you need implicit semantics first and foremost, and then you can represent those implicit semantics with the explicit semantics of schema markup.
Felipe Bazon [00:55:34]: Got it. Very very interesting. Now that you’re talking about it, it is super interesting. My mind was going like, I’ve had loads to analyze and talk to my brain about this and put into place. But as you’re talking about Jorno, I met him in St. Petersburg. Now, I was confusing him with Andrea Volpini from Wordlift. I met him in St. Petersburg.
Felipe Bazon [00:55:58]: He was just moving from Distilled to Yoast. He was the one that created the whole schema library for Yoast. Correct?
Jason Barnard [00:56:05]: Right.
Felipe Bazon [00:56:05]: I do recall. And he was doing that. And he had the feedback from the guys from… on Twitter from Google that were doing all the structured data from Google and so on. Yeah.
Jason Barnard [00:56:14]: There’s still a slight confusion. Jono, who worked at Yoast and has now left Yoast, is a genius, but I’m talking about Jarno. J-A-R-N-O Van Driel, who’s a Dutch guy that nobody has heard of.
Felipe Bazon [00:56:29]: All right. Okay. So, yes, the name is very similar. Yeah, it’s all the guys.
Jason Barnard [00:56:28]: Andrea Volpini, Wordlift works with Kalicube. They’re partners with Kalicube. Jono Alderson has helped me multiple times. He’s a super smart, super lovely guy. Jarno Val Driel. Those are the three people in the world who are truly, truly experts in schema markup for SEO.
Felipe Bazon [00:56:50]: Thank you. I just updated my Knowledge Graph now. So the ambiguity. Amazing.
Jason Barnard [00:56:58]: I just kind of wanted to say one more thing. It’s slightly out of place, but I really wanted to get it in. It’s the Killer Whale Update, where Google is actively looking for authors. We have proof that that’s what it was doing, because at one point it attributed one of Barry Schwartz’s articles to me in my articles carousel. It was Barry Schwartz’s article that appeared. Why? Because it was an article that he hadn’t put his bio at the bottom of. And mine was the first bio of the related article section.
Jason Barnard [00:57:37]: So Google took the first author it recognized and attributed the article to me. So they are dynamically attributing articles when there is no signature.
Felipe Bazon [00:57:47]: So that’s very interesting because if you have a blog that don’t have like an attributed alter to it, it could be messed up even with your competitors, let’s say. And then be attributed to your competitors, and then you know, you’re losing all your reputation. I don’t know, just going very AO here. But yeah, it could happen. I don’t know.
Jason Barnard [00:58:11]: It indicates or it shows and demonstrates that Google is guessing that the machine is out there and it’s saying, well, if I can find an author, and I’m pretty confident, then obviously I can attribute it. But if I can’t find an author, I will guess, and if I’m reasonably confident, I can attribute it to that. And Bill Slawski talked a lot about author vectors, which means that it can read your content and it can analyze whether you wrote it or I wrote it. And if you sign one of my articles, Google can theoretically figure out that we’ve cheated, that I wrote the article and you’ve put your name on it because it recognizes my style.
Felipe Bazon [00:58:46]: Got it. Very, very interesting. I still have one question regarding the structured data and semantic SEO, if you will, because you said that there is no say, need to use structured data to become a recognized entity within the Knowledge Graph. And you can manipulate that, your information, your entity information, let’s say, without structured data. But I’m seeing a lot of work around structured data. How does that fit into all this new and modern SEO? Because I saw you interviewing a few guys on your podcast as well. I saw you talking quite a bit about structured data, how important it is for us to use it nowadays without thinking just about the Knowledge Graph, but in a way that helps Google understand our content. Is it essential? Do I need to put a lot of effort into building a nice structured data for my article pages, for my organization, for my authors? How do you see that?
Jason Barnard [00:59:51]: Yeah. I mean, it’s a great question because it clarifies something. Well, I’m not saying don’t use it, I’m not saying it’s not important. I’m saying it isn’t strictly necessary. You don’t need it. It’s also something I say about Wikipedia. You don’t need Wikipedia for a Knowledge Panel. If you have Wikipedia, that’s great, but people think I hate Wikipedia because I keep telling them, don’t bother with Wikipedia. But I don’t hate Wikipedia.
Jason Barnard [01:00:14]: I just say you don’t need it. Why go through all that trouble if you don’t need it? Unless it’s for your ego. But back to schema markup is it is hugely important, and it’s hugely important because Google is giving you the carrot by saying you will get all of these rich elements in the SERPs and we will explain to you how to do your corporation schema markup and we will give you additional bonuses. So what Google is doing is feeding us carrots to get us to implement schema markup because it needs it to ensure, sorry, that the machine is confident it’s understood the content of the page, whatever page it might be. Because when it reads the page, it’s understood the page. If you add schema markup, it’s sure that it’s understood the page because you’ve just confirmed it in Google’s native language. So it is very important because it builds confidence.
Jason Barnard [01:01:03]: It’s simply, in our particular case with the entity home, it’s not strictly necessary, but I would advise you to do it anyway because it is hugely helpful. So Kalicube Pro, the platform, generates the right schema markup, the ones that we know work, so we don’t tell our clients, don’t use it, we provide them with a schema markup that will work on their entity home.
Felipe Bazon [01:01:22]: Very interesting. And my last question regarding the connection between the Killer Whale Update, man should do it right now and the helpful content. Yes, and the helpful content update of September, I didn’t know the connection, but I was gonna ask you about that, because regarding that, I saw a lot, Mary Haynes and Glenn Gabe talking about how they noticed the influence of UX or user experience within the impact of the helpful content update. So you clearly said that the authors played an important role. So clearly Google is trying to understand who’s writing the content to see if that content is gonna be useful for the users and so on. But what’s your take in this UX approach? Where does the user experience of a page, of a website fits into the NEEATT score here?
Jason Barnard [01:02:20]: Right. Yeah, which is a great question. The user experience is obviously hugely important. I mean, what I would always say is when somebody comes to your website, you should be solving their problem, and if you solve their problem, then they bounce out again. As long as they don’t search for the same thing again, Google will see that you’ve solved the problem. So the pogo sticking idea is not actually a problem unless people are going back and forth between different answers. The best way to demonstrate to Google that you have solved the problem and have engaged the user is by having a next step for the user on every single page. Keep them moving through your website. We all say this all of the time, but what we’re doing at Kalicube now is considering that every single page on the website is a pseudo landing page, there should always be a next step.
Jason Barnard [01:03:13]: And that’s an interesting point. We need to decide what that next step is. And if we look at that, in fact, as business owners, we need to be more decisive. People from Google like John Mueller say don’t make Google guess. I mean 100%. And that’s what we’re doing at Kalicube is we’re stating the facts, making sure that those implicit semantics corroborate and confirm what Google understands. We’re ensuring it isn’t even starting to guess because it’s also clear. But it also goes for everything in your website.
Jason Barnard [01:03:12]: Google needs you to lead the way and show Google which pages are important, which pages it should be focusing on, for which particular need or problem that you can solve. It’s up to us to stand up and say, well, this is the page, this page, that page, that page, this image, that video. And that goes for users too. And I think one huge weakness in Digital Marketing in general is people aren’t decisive enough about what they’re showing, to whom and what the next step is. And it’s absolutely huge and it’s a huge hole in most of our Digital Marketing, including Kalicube. And we’re putting that right right now. And we’re gonna add it to the Kalicube Process. So the Kalicube Process becomes just that little bit better.
Felipe Bazon [01:04:32]: That’s amazing. Jason, my mind is blown away for this talk. I expected a lot for talking with you, but no less than that. It’s just like this just became as you were talking here, I was just gonna use this hour chat here to see this is SEO in 2024 and beyond, guys. This is what you have to focus on. Forget about AI, forget about link building or so on. This summarizes like the way I’ve been seeing SEO, but not as clear as it should be. I’m going to call the NEEATT score.
Felipe Bazon [01:05:08]: The NEEATT score for me is what you need to focus on, on these little letters, N-E-E-A-T-T, and work on those because in each one of them you do have to work a little bit like a technical SEO side of things or link building or better content, build topical authority. The NEEATT just summarizes what SEO is all about. Man, this has been an incredible chat. I would like to ask you for your final words in terms of like, if we were to summarize or give some tips for our SEO community here in Brazil regarding SEO in 2024 and beyond, what would you say? What should they focus on?
Jason Barnard [01:05:51]: Yeah, I would love to come back to what I said much earlier, which is the Kalicube Process is for me the future of Digital Marketing, let alone SEO. But it includes SEO. But despite the fact I come from an SEO world, I’m a marketer, not an SEO now. I just happen to know a lot about SEO. So what I focus on with all of the clients that we have at Kalicube and what we encourage the agencies who use the Kalicube Pro SaaS platform to do is within a Digital Marketing strategy, educate Google. Learn from Google, build your digital strategy based on branding first, marketing second. Just package it all up for Google and Bing as a bonus.
Felipe Bazon [01:06:39]: Yeah, I think that reminds me of a post from Jes Scholz on Twitter or X. She said, I don’t recall, if you master Google Knowledge Graph, you understand Google’s brain. If you understand language, language models, you know how Google talks. And it was three things that was like summarizing what you said. I’m gonna recall this, guys, and I’ll send it to you as well. And I put it on the description of our video here. But I think she’s summarizing three topics, which I love her work as well. For me, Jes’ shows is one of the references in the SEO world.
Felipe Bazon [01:07:14]: Like you, Jason. I love. I’ve seen two talks from her, three talks in Search Love three years in a row. She’s fantastic. I just love the last time I saw her, she was doing that. She’s like three years ahead of us every time I talk with her. I think the last year in Search Love, she did a talk about Google ecosystems. Like, as you said it, you need to think about universal search. You need to think about being present in all the different ecosystems that Google offered to you. From Google My Business, to News, to every platform that you have available, you need to optimize for that.
Felipe Bazon [01:07:50]: And I did that two years ago. I said that blew my mind. And talking with you was the same level of talk. Like you know, you started talking at Kalicube was eight years ahead of Google, and now Google is catching up to you guys. I can’t wait to see what comes in the future from Kalicube and from The Brand SERP Guy.
Jason Barnard [01:08:10]: Yeah, brilliant. Absolutely. I mean, I’m really interested to figure out how Kalicube can stay ahead of Google and stay ahead of the rest of the industry. And that’s what I love coming back to the Kalicube team is we have a huge number of people working in marketing, and what we then do is take that, create SOPs standard operating procedures. We create vanilla standard operating procedures. And then they become part of the Kalicube Process that we sell to our clients. And that means that we’re all building the product and we’re all making sure that Kalicube stays way ahead of the competition. And my analysis and Allyssa’s analysis now as she takes over Kalicube Pro of Google’s Knowledge Graph and Google SERPs is helping us to see where Google is going, what Google is doing. Understand, as Jes’ says, how it thinks, how it talks, and there must be a third one, but I’ll have to think about that.
Felipe Bazon [01:09:09]: Yeah, I think it was ranked brain Knowledge Graphs and large language models. I think ranked brain is the brain, the Knowledge Graph, how you correlate things and language models, how Google talks. It was such a simple post that kind of like said, again, she nailed it. Her understanding of the whole ecosystem that we work like you, it’s unbelievable. So yeah, Jes, if you’re seeing that, I would love to have you on the show, but I’ll reach out to you and so on. But Jason, thank you very much for your time. Once again, it’s been amazing talking with you. I hope to see you around in events in Europe sometime soon.
Felipe Bazon [01:09:53]: So I should be in Amsterdam in Eindhoven with Alex Tachalova, in her event in the 31st of March, but I’ll be around. So yeah, hopefully to see you sometime soon. And thank you very much for your knowledge and all your expertise.
Jason Barnard [01:10:15]: Thank you very much for the questions. They got all of the best stuff out of me, which is delightful.
Felipe Bazon [01:10:13]: Great. Great. Guys, that’s it then; another episode of Don’t Panic, It’s Organic. I hope you enjoyed it. All of Jason’s information will be here in the description. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel and enable notifications so you can stay tuned for the next videos. Jason, thank you very much and see you soon, man.
