LIVE Interview with Jason BARNARD from Kalicube.com

SERP, SEO and Compliance. How do these two match? And how does this for the foundation of the business online?

levgen Saveliev [00:00:00]: We’re best.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:00:02]: All right, so we are going live now, I guess we are.

levgen Saveliev [00:00:09]: Wonderful. Jason, so it’s great to have you here. And it’s our second interview and we are happy that it’s gonna be with you because Jason Barnard is a special client, special partner and a friend of ours. And it’s definitely a great honor to kind of to know such person as you because you’ve been supporting our country, our nation, our company, us as individuals and your partners and friends. And that is why it is great pleasure to have this interview with you because we shared a lot of different things during these two and a half years, including private one and not in social and, of course, business. So a few words about Jason. Jason, could you please tell the world about your red shirt and about that brand name which is behind you.

Jason Barnard [00:01:19]: This one?

levgen Saveliev [00:01:20]: Yes.

Jason Barnard [00:01:20]: Alright. Well, I’m Jason Barnard. You can see here, I was actually a professional musician for many, many years. My first career was professional punk folk musician playing the double bass, and I did that for ten years, and it was hugely fun. My second career was cartoons for kids, and I was the voice and the songwriter for a cartoon for kids, which was hugely successful. I was a blue dog in the cartoon. My ex wife, Veronique, was a yellow koala. And we can talk about that if you want. Or just search Jason Barnard.

Jason Barnard [00:01:51]: Boowa and Kwala on Google and you will find out all about it. Because my third career is optimizing what people find about you on Google when you search their name. So you search my name, Jason Barnard. J-A-S-O-B B-A-R-N-A-R-D, and you will find everything you need to know about me, including the blue dog, the punk folk musician group, and my digital career today with Kalicube.

levgen Saveliev [00:02:20]: Indeed, indeed. Wonderful. Can you tell what does the bird means on your brand? Because there was koala. Now it’s a bird.

Jason Barnard [00:02:32]: Very good point. Dogs, koalas and falcons. The falcon is a powerful bird that flies and swoops and masters the skies, which is what we do at Kalicube. We fly, we swoop, we master the skies. But we’re colorful and friendly and fun and courageous and smart, just like the falcon.

levgen Saveliev [00:02:56]: Intelligent and kind.

Jason Barnard [00:02:59]: And kind. That’s the blue dog as well. And I’ve just realized that Kalicube is a rebirth of Boowa.

levgen Saveliev [00:03:07]: Right. Indeed.

Jason Barnard [00:03:08]: Because Boowa is the kind, gentle, generous friend of Kwala who is showing Kwala a world of which she is afraid, explaining it to her in a way that helps her to understand and not be afraid of this hugely scary world that she’s faced with. As a small child. And Kalicube does that for our clients and for the rest of the world, helping everybody to not fear Google, to understand that Google’s a child and we can educate it, that we can guide it. And so we’re here to reassure the world that they can be self determining in terms of what these machines, all of them, Google, ChatGPT, Facebook, Apple, all of them, we can educate and guide them. So they say what we want about ourselves, no need to be afraid.

levgen Saveliev [00:03:56]: Oh, that’s great. So basically, we can start from here and just a few words as our mindset. It’s kind of similar and our mission is quite similar to what you do. Just the landscape is a bit different. Your landscape is Google search and other things that helps to maintain your, let’s say, individuality online. And our mission is to guide people who run business online on the western market so smoothly and with pleasure and not with that pressure of all the regulations and stuff. So basically, that’s what we do.

levgen Saveliev [00:04:45]: We’re helping people, both of us. I mean, our teams, yours and ours.

Jason Barnard [00:04:51]: That is why we’re working with you. Because working with you the last couple of years, I feel that I have somebody who has my back on something I don’t understand that I find scary and honestly, really boring.

levgen Saveliev [00:05:05]: It’s boring sometimes it’s boring.

Jason Barnard [00:05:06]: But having somebody, or knowing that somebody who knows what they’re talking about, who really understands that they have your back, is hugely important. And that’s what we do at Kalicube, that’s what you guys do. And from my perspective, it means that I can relax and get on with my job and know that you’re gonna figure out the legal aspects and I don’t need to worry about it.

levgen Saveliev [00:05:27]: Oh, that’s a great feedback.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:05:30]: Thank you very much.

levgen Saveliev [00:05:31]: Thank you. Thank you, Jason.

Jason Barnard [00:05:32]: And it’s true, I sleep well at night.

levgen Saveliev [00:05:36]: Basically, to sleep well at night is very dramatically important. We truly know that we’re both in Ukraine, in Kyiv, so we know the value of a good sleep at night. So two of us, we will run this interview, just giving ball from one to another. So I will start because basically I’m…

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:06:03]: You were the generator of this interview.

levgen Saveliev [00:06:06]: Yeah, I was the generator because two years and a half, almost three years ago. Can you imagine, three years ago when we met, we made great interview on the streets of Kyiv and it was wonderful about totally brand new thing for Ukraine.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:06:24]: Yeah, actually it was three years ago.

levgen Saveliev [00:06:27]: Three years ago in October. Yes, 2021. It’s kind of two and a half years so we talked there about, I would say, advanced approach to Google. I would call it this way, how you need to do it, more profound, more kind of mature, and how it can help you with your business. So Kalicube is helping to browse through Google smoothly for businesses and individuals. But what exactly does it mean? Because unfortunately, because of invasion, we haven’t put this into your online and that project is closed. But temporarily we plan to renew it together with Myro.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:07:20]: That interview hasn’t gone?

levgen Saveliev [00:07:22]: No. Unfortunately, no. So when we’re gonna renew project jobs garage, I think we will public it. So the point is, three years have passed already. Almost three years have passed. And let’s talk about SERP and maybe some other things that already have been added to these things to this industry. Tell us a few words. Why is it important and why Kalicube helps really, in this matter?

Jason Barnard [00:07:55]: Well, why it’s important is something I’ve been thinking about for twelve years. And I started off with Google as your business card, with the idea that if somebody searches your name or your company name, what Google shows will affect how people perceive you. Then I started thinking what Google shows is its analysis, its perception of the world’s opinion of you. So more than just a representation of you to your bottom of funnel clients when they’re Googling your name, which they all will at some point, Google is an insight into what’s wrong with your digital strategy, your digital ecosystem. Because if Google is representing you incorrectly, or not as positively as you would like, it’s an immediate sign that either your Digital Marketing strategy is not correct or Google isn’t seeing what you’re doing. And since Google sees everything, it means Google isn’t understanding what you’re doing. So what we now realize at Kalicube is that we can take it as a business card, as the last step before converting, that people will take will search your name. We need that representation to be as positive as possible.

Jason Barnard [00:09:10]: But also we can learn from Google what we’re doing wrong. Then we can start putting it right.

levgen Saveliev [00:09:18]: Even so, it’s interesting perspective.

Jason Barnard [00:09:23]: Oh, and that’s the beauty of it. We’re learning from Google what we’re doing wrong. From that, I can analyze and figure out exactly what needs to be done across the entire Internet, including your website, but also LinkedIn, your PR, if you’re on forbes.com, your reviews, your awards, how you’re presenting yourself both to Google and to your audience, and start to set that right. And what then happens is you correct your entire digital ecosystem so that it’s clear consistent corroboration of who you are, what you do, who you serve, and why you’re a credible solution. That then means that everywhere you’re standing online, you’re standing exactly where your audience is looking. You’re making sure that you’re offering them the solution to their problem in the place where they’re naturally hanging it out on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on forbes.com, wherever it might be, you’re inviting them down the funnel. Google then sees that, understands that you’re making the right offer to the right people at the right time, in the right place, and it will then reflect it in the search result for your name, because that search result for your name will become perfect, perfectly accurate, perfectly positive and perfectly convincing. Then it becomes a great business card.

Jason Barnard [00:10:39]: But the business card is just the wrapping paper, because what you’ve done is absolutely mastered your funnel. Every touch point your clients find you on across the web is perfect. The right solution for the right person at the right time.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:10:54]: And on this way, making it perfect in Google. Have you come across some challenges with Google guidelines? Are you coming across them now permanently or you just found a way how to bypass them?

Jason Barnard [00:11:17]: That’s a lovely question, because Google’s guidelines are there to say, play honestly. So Google has this huge dominance of the search market. It’s Google’s game, Google make up the rules. We have no choice. So we can’t say, well, I don’t like the rules, I’m not gonna play this game, if we want to play the Google game. Google’s rules are there, or their guidelines with the idea of preventing us from cheating. So we never actually get into any trouble with those guidelines because we’re simply serving the user, our audience, and then packaging that service that we’re giving in a way that Google can digest and understand. And that’s how we get it to represent us properly.

Jason Barnard [00:12:03]: So Google always say, and it’s a really annoying thing, just focus on the user and it doesn’t mean anything. Just said like that. It’s this really trite thing for them to say because it’s not actually helping people know what they need to do. Just focus on the user doesn’t mean anything.

levgen Saveliev [00:12:25]: No, it’s just a strong word, but useless.

Jason Barnard [00:12:30]: And so what we’re saying is, well, Google’s saying, focus on the user. Google’s aim is to please the user. Your audience is a subset of Google’s users. What you need to do is analyze Google to understand how it perceives what you’re doing with your audience by looking at what Google sees, understands and represents allows you then to serve the user in the way that Google would expect. But the way Google expects you to serve the user is actually the way you should be serving the user as a business anyway. So what we’ve done at Kalicube is taken this very trite statement that the Google employees make, just focus on the user and said, well, we’re just gonna use Google to understand what we need to do, in what order of priority, how we need to engage with the user to make sense to Google. And luckily for us, that makes sense for my business.

levgen Saveliev [00:13:19]: In this case, does this story works only for the enterprises and big businesses or it works for individuals and just small and middle-sized businesses, because it sounds like you need to invest a lot of efforts, time and money to set up a good SERP profile and to please these customers. Because Google really, as far as I’m concerned, it works with big money and it wants bigger brands to be on the top. That’s from my perspective as just a regular user, because I see on the top, usually you see big names if you’re Googling something, and of course not small businesses which don’t have great resources.

Jason Barnard [00:14:07]: Yeah, I think that’s a really common misunderstanding, is, yes, we do often see the big brands. We see the big brands because they’re putting a lot of money into optimizing for Google and that’s the way the world is. They have the means so they can optimize, they employ the best people who can do the best optimization. But that’s the great thing here, is that none of this is expensive and none of it is purely for Google, which means you’re going to be driving revenue with all the rest of the stuff you do. And Google is simply a natural extension of everything you’re doing for your business anyway. So if I’m a small business and I look at the search result for my name as an example, and I’ve made lots of videos and I put them on YouTube and I think this is brilliant. I’ve made these amazing videos, I’ve got people watching them, I’ve got lots of thumbs up, I’m really pleased with myself. But Google doesn’t put those videos on the search result for your company name.

levgen Saveliev [00:15:01]: Usually, no, we know that with our videos.

Jason Barnard [00:15:04]: Well, that means you’re not doing it right.

levgen Saveliev [00:15:06]: I see.

Jason Barnard [00:15:08]: You’re either getting the wrong audience or they’re not engaging in a way that would make sense for Google to indicate to Google that you have solved their problem or it’s simply not the right platform for you. And that’s what Kalicube does, is we say, okay, those are the three options for why YouTube videos aren’t ranking on your Brand SERP, the Search Engine Results Page for your brand, we need to identify, is it misinvestment?

levgen Saveliev [00:15:35]: Sorry, can you repeat please, slowly? This SERP.

Jason Barnard [00:15:40]: Yeah, Brand SERP, which is written up here.

levgen Saveliev [00:15:43]: Right.

Jason Barnard [00:15:43]: Search Engine Results Page. For a brand name.

levgen Saveliev [00:15:45]: I see. It’s the first page that you see, right, when you’re Googling. I see.

Jason Barnard [00:15:53]: Okay.

levgen Saveliev [00:15:53]: Because it’s not the common word, Jason. It’s not the common word in business at all.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:15:57]: SEO is more common.

levgen Saveliev [00:16:01]: Yeah, just SEO, blah, blah, blah. But actually, when people use SEO, usually they misspelling it and say CEO as the Chief Executive Officer. So even here, there is an S.

Jason Barnard [00:16:18]: We have somebody who was working at Kalicube last year, Kristina, who constantly says SEO when she means CEO and CEO when she means SEO, and it gets really confusing. But yes, SEO Search Engine Optimizatio. SERP, Search Engine Results Page. And so what we’re now looking at, if we come back to talking about YouTube, is if those videos do not appear on Google when somebody searches your brand name, AVITAR, for example, then you might be misinvesting, mistargeting your audience or simply be on the wrong platform because Google understands that isn’t something that’s going to interest your audience. And one thing that always confused me and now doesn’t is that I didn’t understand how Google could understand at the tiny, tiny volume of searches we’d get for AVITAR or Kalicube or Jason Barnard compared to the whole world, how it could understand what it should be showing. And it does it two ways. One is it tracks the clicks and the mouse movement on the page. Google have often said they don’t do that, but in fact they do.

Jason Barnard [00:17:25]: They just do it in a way that allows them to tell a white lie, let’s say. But they also use cohort analysis. And cohort analysis sounds complicated, but it actually just means they identify which group you belong to and they use the cumulative information for that group to predict what should be happening. So it’s a mixture of which group you belong to, plus your own content, how people are engaging with your content on the different platforms, and how Google perceives that, plus how people interact with the search engine results page for your name. So that’s three triggers that will allow Google to understand what results, what information is gonna be valuable, helpful, and useful to your audience when they’re searching your name. And as you can see, I’m talking about a very simple thing, which is one search engine results page for your name. And I’ve already managed to talk about your entire digital ecosystem, how Google functions, how the internet functions. And at Kalicube, we’re saying we have solved Digital Marketing.

Jason Barnard [00:18:31]: But I would go further than that and say we have solved digital. Is that for any individual, any small company, any big company, just by using our analysis of Google’s understanding of the world’s opinion of you through the search engine results for your name, we can figure out exactly what you need to do to correct your entire digital ecosystem. That is solving digital. Oh, and it didn’t cost me a penny. I just asked Google and it’s free.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:19:03]: So for those who are listening now, just for me, as a business, I’m just starting my journey. What are the three key directions or points that I would like to target in order for my SERP, for my result page to be decent?

Jason Barnard [00:19:33]: Great question. Having said that, you need to look at every aspect of your digital ecosystem, from LinkedIn to YouTube, to forbes.com to your reviews, to government websites that talk about your company. I’ll come back and say the first thing you need to do is clean up your home and your home is your website. So the first thing I do with any client is look at what appears at the top of the results, how it’s presented and what’s being said. And generally speaking, it’s not very good. Sometimes it’s really bad. Very rarely is it even good, because people make a very common mistake, or multiple common mistakes. And the biggest one is Amazon.

Jason Barnard [00:20:15]: They changed the title of their home page to buy. Sorry, smile more, pay less Amazon. They changed that in 2021. So for 25 years, when you search for Amazon, what you saw was cheap bikes, high five books and more. So they had their brand message was, we’re really cheap and you can buy all these different things. And I would argue for the first ten years that might have been a good idea. But from 2006 onwards, everybody knew what Amazon was. They needed then to promote their brand message.

Jason Barnard [00:20:53]: And it took them a further 15 years to figure out that the home page and the top result for their brand name is for branding and making the customer, the client, the prospect, feel comfortable and happy and confident that they’ve made the right choice. Cheap bikes, books, hi fi and more does not make me feel comfortable and happy. I’ve made the right choice. Pay less, smile more Amazon does make me feel like I’ve made the right choice. First thing is it a brand message? Often no. Second is to look at the other results. How many results from your website is Google able or willing to show? If it’s not able or willing to show five or six results, you’ve got a problem either with the structure of your website or you’re not providing the information that is actually useful for your audience searching your name.

Jason Barnard [00:21:41]: Contact us. About us. Login. Email newsletter. Latest blogs.

levgen Saveliev [00:21:47]: Jason, what does it mean, able? It means that it doesn’t have enough sources where it’s gonna take the information. What does it mean, able, in this case?

Jason Barnard [00:21:57]: It either means the pages don’t exist or it means that you’ve packaged them wrong. And so we talk at Kalicube about packaging for Google. SEO search engine optimization is often seen as this huge opportunity where you build everything for Google and Google will love you and Google will send you lots of people to your website because you’ve tricked Google into thinking you’re much better than you really are. That’s what search engine optimization has been for 25 years.

levgen Saveliev [00:22:20]: Right. That’s true.

Jason Barnard [00:22:23]: Today, modern search engine optimization is you take your branding that you should have anyway. You turn that into marketing materials and you place those marketing materials in the places where your audience is hanging out, so you’re standing where they’re looking with the right offer, the right presentation, inviting them down the funnel. All of that you should be doing as a business anyway.

levgen Saveliev [00:22:45]: Indeed.

Jason Barnard [00:22:46]: Then all you do is package it for Google. All you need to do is take the things you should be doing as a business anyway, package it for Google so Google can understand what it is you’re offering, why you’re such a great solution, and that it can present that information on its search engine results pages. So SEO is just packaging for Google. And there are people in the SEO industry who don’t like me very much for saying that SEO isn’t very important. It’s simply an extension of your branding and your marketing packaged for Google.

levgen Saveliev [00:23:18]: So thank you for broad description of the world, able. And this was the second thing. And what is the third?

Jason Barnard [00:23:28]: Well, if you don’t have the page, if it’s not packaged correctly, or simply the pages that Google can find in your website are not actually interesting at all for your audience. And Google isn’t always right, but it generally is. Look at the amount of data it has. It’s not gonna get it wrong very often. When it does, obviously we can complain. A lot of people complain, oh, Google’s got it wrong. How terrible and stupid is Google not to have understood. The truth of the matter is, generally speaking, let’s say 95% of the time, you’ve got it wrong, because you’re presenting it wrong, you’re packaging it wrong, or you’re giving the wrong information that your audience simply aren’t interested in.

Jason Barnard [00:24:08]: And I’ll give you a really quick example. We’ve got a client called Ubigi and they do eSIM data plans. So it’s the SIM card you’ve already got in your telephone when you buy it. And then you just activate the eSIM and it becomes an electronic SIM, a virtual SIM card, and you can get data plans, but they also offer those same packages in cars. So if you buy a Jaguar or a Land Rover or a Jeep, these are three examples of manufacturers who have inserted this card in their internal system in the car. You can just click a button, activate the eSIM and get data connectivity within your car. So you can surf the Internet in the car. And this is more and more common.

Jason Barnard [00:24:55]: All cars are gonna have it. And then the question is, which eSIM do you choose? So part of my job with that was to look at what is appearing when people search the name Ubigi in the USA, in America, in France, in Australia. In the UK, one of the links is, get data plans for your Jaguar, Land Rover car. But in America, the same place, it says, get an eSIM for your Jeep, because Jeeps are hugely popular in America. Land Rover, Jaguar is hugely popular in the UK. So the client was saying, I don’t understand why it’s showing Jaguar, Land Rover. The answer is because it’s helpful to the user, because those cars are so popular in the UK, but not in the US. So the immediate reaction is Google’s getting it wrong. And when you think about it, Google’s actually getting it right and it’s telling you something really important.

levgen Saveliev [00:25:49]: Amazing. So it means it gives you free advice, what do you need to use in your kind of articulation and messages to your clients, right?

Jason Barnard [00:26:00]: So then you go to Italy, and if it doesn’t say, get a data plan for Fiat, it means that you’ve got a really bad page for Fiat and you’re not communicating correctly, that Fiat contains your solution, which it does. And presumably, I mean, I’m guessing, but I would imagine Fiat is pretty popular in Italy.

levgen Saveliev [00:26:18]: Indeed. Very straightforward things. Thank you for wrapping this up and back again to the small businesses. If we don’t have budget. Yeah. When you’re starting business and you want to run it right where you need to allocate your resources on, which I would say maybe whether it’s a LinkedIn, maybe it’s Instagram page or etc., so just, just put your efforts so it could work the most effectively.

Jason Barnard [00:26:52]: Yeah. I mean, once again, Google’s free and it will give you all the advice you need if you know how to look for it. So what we do manually, I mean, we have a service that we sell to clients and we do this for them. We use huge amounts of data. We’ve got a database with a billion data points. So we can pull this information in minutes. But you can do it manually, you can do it for free, which is you look, you search your own name on Google and you look at what appears. Oh, sorry, before you search your name, you think, what do I think will appear? What results do I think Google will show for my brand name? And then think, why do I think that’s gonna be the case? Then you search your name and you look at what it does show, and then you ask yourself, why is there a discrepancy between the two? And if you really think that you were right the first time, then you need to change Google’s perspective.

Jason Barnard [00:27:40]: And you do that from reading to the top to the bottom of the search engine results page for your name, and you fix each one on the way down. So if you thought LinkedIn should be important, so it should be up there near the top, but LinkedIn appears either not at all or right at the bottom, then it means that either Google’s telling you LinkedIn isn’t a good strategy or you’re not doing a very good job.

levgen Saveliev [00:28:03]: Got it.

Jason Barnard [00:28:04]: So if you’re absolutely sure LinkedIn is the right one, then you can look at it and say, well, I need to improve my strategy. So it gives you that priority, saying, well, let’s go in and figure out why Google doesn’t see that LinkedIn is so important to my business. If you can then go in, you pick five competitors. You Google each of their names, one after the other. You put all the results next to each other. And you look at the similarities and the differences and you might see that everybody has LinkedIn ranking 2nd, 3rd place. Then you know that that’s what you should be doing. So once again, free, simple. It would take me ten minutes to do that, takes our machine five minutes to do it, and it would probably take you about an hour.

Jason Barnard [00:28:44]: But when you look at all of this side by side, you will immediately see patterns and you will see what the generality is, and where you’re missing, and potentially where you’re investing where it isn’t important. For example, investing in Instagram. If you’re investing in Instagram and it is ranking reasonably well, but then you see for your five other competitors, Instagram isn’t even present.

levgen Saveliev [00:29:05]: Oh, wow.

Jason Barnard [00:29:06]: You might want to rethink your strategy. Even though it’s working, is it actually useful and relevant because Google is only showing it because it’s working for you, but for the others it’s not. So don’t just look at one competitor. Look at four, five, maybe six competitors. We at Kalicube look at 70, we will put 70 competitors in and then we will template it and we will tell you that that that that. But you can do it manually and it’s free.

levgen Saveliev [00:29:04]: So learn from your competitors’ SERP results, right?

Jason Barnard [00:29:37]: Learn from what Google perceives your competitors to be succeeding at.

levgen Saveliev [00:29:42]: I see.

Jason Barnard [00:29:36]: So it’s what I call competitor envy. A lot of people say my competitors doing that, therefore I should. And actually what I’m saying is look at what Google is showing you about what’s working and what isn’t working from multiple competitors. Aggregate that and you’ve got your strategy. And you were talking about priorities. We don’t have money or much money. We need to prioritize. So you have multiple things is what we do at Kalicube is we say, here’s what your Brand SERP tells us you should be doing.

Jason Barnard [00:30:10]: Here’s what the industry Brand SERPs tell us you should be doing now. Tell us what your business goals are and what you’re currently doing and what you feel is working for you. We can bring those together and find the balanced approach, the balanced priority of those three, because none of them on their own is right. A combination of the three is gonna make business sense for you. You know, Kalicube, we don’t have huge amounts of money. We’re not a big corporation with a lot of money to spend on marketing. And yet we have a huge marketing strategy because we built it up this way of prioritizing according to what we understand Google is seeing about our competitive landscape. So we have a YouTube strategy, we have a LinkedIn strategy, we have a newsletter strategy, we have a podcast strategy, we have an event strategy, we have a guesting strategy.

Jason Barnard [00:31:06]: We’ve got twelve already, different strategies for marketing. We didn’t do them all one day to the next like that. We started two and a half years ago and we built them up one by one and we prioritized them in a way that made sense to our market and our audience. And, you know, we’ve doubled in revenue the last two years.

levgen Saveliev [00:31:27]: True.

Jason Barnard [00:31:29]: How much of that comes from Google? Maybe 10%. Everything else comes from LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts, events, guesting, conferences. So we would appear to be a search engine optimization company because we talk about Google a lot, but actually search engine optimization and Google bring us very little. But what it does bring us, this is an interesting point, is recognition and authority, because when somebody finds us on LinkedIn, then they see us on YouTube, they then search our name, they then search around the topic and they keep seeing this red shirt and they come to us and they say, well, you’re obviously the person and Kalicube is obviously the company for this because we keep seeing you everywhere. And when we looked on Google, Google appeared to be recommending you, which is what it does. And if you look at ChatGPT, if you search for who can help me with my Knowledge Panel, which is one of the aspects of what we do, it says Kalicube.

levgen Saveliev [00:32:28]: Oh, even so.

Jason Barnard [00:32:30]: Yep. And we got a client in December who said, I asked ChatGPT who could build me a Knowledge Panel. It said Kalicube. Jason Barnard is a world renowned expert in this and he didn’t want anybody else to work on his Knowledge Panel. His reputation is proactive at reputation management.

levgen Saveliev [00:32:47]: Cool.

Jason Barnard [00:32:49]: Yeah. And the sales call lasted five minutes. I know what you do. I know you’re the best. How much did it cost?

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:32:56]: Perfect.

levgen Saveliev [00:32:58]: Very good.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:33:02]: What to ask after this?

Jason Barnard [00:33:04]: No, you don’t have to ask a question. I’ve got a question for myself that I will ask myself. Hold on. So, Jason, the future of ChatGPT, Google search generative experience, Bing’s chat, so Generative AI in search. What’s happening? And what’s going to happen? Great question, Jason. Thank you.

levgen Saveliev [00:33:24]: It’s so good to have such a wise person. Yeah.

Jason Barnard [00:33:31]: Well, the fact that we got this client through ChatGPT and ChatGPT saying basically it’s a no brainer, mate. Kalicube and Jason Barnard comes to what Google and Bing call the perfect click. That’s what they want to get. They want you, the user of Google or Bing, the perfect click that when you click on it, you already know what you want to buy, who you want to buy it from. Sorry. So you’re gonna go to the page and you’re gonna convert. That’s what we got with ChatGPT, the perfect click and Fabrice Canel, who builds BingBot told me that’s an official internal term of what we’re looking to achieve at Bing, Microsoft, the perfect click.

Jason Barnard [00:34:16]: So what happens with Generative AI is we need to build into the Generative AI what our funnel looks like, answer all the potential questions so that when Bing and Google start that conversation with the user, they can bring that user down the funnel, answering all the questions about you, your company, your offers, refunds, options. So they get to the bottom of that funnel, to that perfect click, and they have reproduced your entire funnel, but it’s them doing it independently, recommending you. So when they click, they’re not clicking to read your page to be convinced. They’re clicking to convert because they’ve already been convinced by the Generative AI on the way down the funnel, convinced by a trusted third party, Google or Bing or ChatGPT.

levgen Saveliev [00:35:12]: Wow. Before this interview, we discussed with Myro that we need to have this interview kind of very smooth but short, so we can go to the second interview. Yes. Not to make it too official and to kind of fool with difficult facts, because it’s quite difficult to digest even the word SERP. It took me some time to learn it. So we have two more questions. While we were cooperating with you, the question regarding privacy and those things that goes with privacy and stuff, these things you’ve passed to us and said, I don’t want to deal with that. But yeah, I know that it’s important, right? I don’t want to deal with that.

levgen Saveliev [00:36:15]: Please help us with this. Do you feel that ChatGPT, Google and others, they started to care more about privacy, or they started just to make it more kind of sophisticated, but not more carefully? This is the one question and the second one, do you feel that Google and ChatGPT knows so much that they can manipulate us with this privacy data and stuff?

Jason Barnard [00:36:47]: Well, the privacy question is you give away the data that you choose to give away. Often you choose to give it away without actually explicitly thinking, I’m giving away this amount of data because we don’t pay attention when we click allow the cookies, we don’t read the cookie policy, we don’t read the information that we should read, but nobody has the time, nobody does it. So you have the European Union, who have very strict GDPR rules as a company, it’s boring, it’s annoying, it’s a lot of things that we need to think about. Thanks to you, I don’t have to think about it, and we’re now compliant. But from Google’s perspective, when they don’t respect GDPR, they’re looking at billions, tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in fines. So Google are freaking out and somebody pointed out to me, why weren’t there any major Google updates between July 2022 and July 2023?

levgen Saveliev [00:37:46]: Why?

Jason Barnard [00:37:48]: Because Google told all of their teams, drop everything until you’re GDPR compliant. Because GDPR compliant comes in July 2023. And a lot of projects just got put to one side. They launched GA4, Google Analytics 4 in July, and it wasn’t ready and nobody wants it and it’s terrible and it’s horrible and it’s impossible, but they had to do it so they didn’t get fined by the European Union. What then happened in July was there was a huge knowledge update in Google’s algorithms. Then in September, oh, sorry, August and September, then October, then December, multiple updates, one after the other. So Google had actually put a lot of stuff to one side to comply with GDPR. And then the floodgates open and all the stuff came out, which is one of the reasons they missed the boat with Generative AI.

Jason Barnard [00:38:39]: How did Microsoft get the jump on Google? Because Microsoft didn’t need to worry about GDPR as much as Google did. So Microsoft launched it, I think knowing full well that Google were going to struggle to follow because Google had so many other focuses and they simply weren’t ready. And they weren’t ready because of GDPR.

levgen Saveliev [00:38:58]: Wow.

Jason Barnard [00:39:01]: You like that, don’t you? That’s your job and just taught you something.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:39:03]: Insightful strategy overview.

levgen Saveliev [00:39:08]: Right. And back to the question on the manipulation. Do you feel that on the market, that SERP or other things? And you said that to point, to help you to make the best choice that fits your needs. Isn’t it kind of, sounds manipulative a bit?

Jason Barnard [00:39:32]: Yeah. Yes, it is manipulative. The idea for them is saying, well, we want the best for you. So it’s a bit like they’re treating us like a child and saying, we know what’s best for you. Yes, here you go, we’ll give it to you. But if you turn it round on its head, they’re the child. They don’t understand we’re in control. We need to control our own data, both the cookies, the private stuff, but the stuff that’s out there. If I take anybody and analyze their digital ecosystem, I will find a total mess.

Jason Barnard [00:40:01]: And one of the jobs we do at Kalicube, the first thing we do with any client is get every reference to the person or the company online and we start to clean it up. We clean up their digital footprint, their digital ecosystem, not because of privacy, but because that’s the way we can get the machine to understand. If the machine understands who we are, what we do, which audience we serve and why we’re credible, it will recommend us to the subset of its users who are our audience, but also it will represent us the way we want to be represented. And that’s key. You don’t want to change the facts, you don’t want to lie. But what you can do is change Google’s focus, change its focus so it appreciates you for what’s important for your current audience. And the example there would be, I was a blue dog in a cartoon. As we said right at the beginning, there’s a huge amount of information about Boowa, the blue dog online.

Jason Barnard [00:40:53]: So Google’s immediate reaction ten years ago was, Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog, no doubt about it. The reason I got into this particular niche in the industry, I created this niche in the industry is because I thought, how can I get Google to focus on me as a digital marketer? And I realized very quickly the weight of evidence out there is the blue dog. What can I do to reduce the focus on the blue dog without removing any information about the blue dog and increase the focus on the digital marketer? And that’s a question of creating the right content in the right places for the right audience with the right offer. Suddenly I’m doing business, but I’m not doing business on Google. I’m doing business on all these other different platforms. And Google is simply reflecting the fact that I’m doing good business.

levgen Saveliev [00:41:43]: You convinced us that. I feel that, that you convinced that we need to look at once again, once again, we are looking at our SERP AVITAR’s page every month or maybe even more often, but once again, we need to take a look at our SERP and our individual SERP. Yeah. Because it’s like to go to the doctor, to the dentist. You need to check your SERP from time to time on a regular basis and then go to the Doctor Jason Barnard. Yeah.

Jason Barnard [00:42:18]: And that’s a really good point. People often say to me, but it isn’t really that important. It’s something I can do next week, next month, next year.

levgen Saveliev [00:42:26]: Yeah.

Jason Barnard [00:42:27]: And they don’t realize that it’s the foundation of everything they’re doing and that it should actually be what they’re building everything on. It’s not this thing you do at the last moment thinking, I’ll do that when I have time. It’s something you do today in order to build the foundations that will build your business online for tomorrow or your personal brand online for tomorrow. Sorry.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:42:47]: Yeah. It must be in this block. Urgent, important and urgent.

levgen Saveliev [00:42:53]: All the time.

Jason Barnard [00:42:55]: Important, urgent, ongoing. Don’t drop it. Don’t drop the ball. You need to have that ball constantly in your hand because it’s the ball. You talked about a ball. Yeah, we’ve got a cat. It’s the ball that drives your business. And I don’t know if that actually makes sense now that I’ve said it, but there we go.

Jason Barnard [00:43:13]: That’s how we have a ball driving our business.

levgen Saveliev [00:43:16]: Thank you. So we can highlight it on the top of the interview. The ball that drives your business. How to roll this ball.

Jason Barnard [00:43:24]: How to roll with it.

levgen Saveliev [00:43:26]: How to roll with that. Yeah. Amazing. Jason. I think it was like a useful snack of the very sharp and great advices.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:43:38]: I actually feel like I had some dinner.

levgen Saveliev [00:43:40]: With the steak. Yeah. For us. I think I felt like Myro was kind of digesting and looking at it from our perspective, from our business. And I hope that our viewers could look at their business from this new perspective. And not to forget, of course, we cannot say, as lawyers and compliance officers, that please don’t forget about those dull and not interesting things like documents, GDPR, et cetera. Even if you go…

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:44:11]: It’s also a brick in your foundation.

levgen Saveliev [00:44:13]: It’s also a brick in your foundation.

Jason Barnard [00:44:16]: And that whole point is I sleep well because I know you guys are there and you guys are helping my team implement all the things we need to do. You haven’t rushed us. You haven’t pushed us faster than we could run. We’ve managed to implement it all. And now I feel serene. I don’t worry. And that’s brilliant because it’s a huge worry that I don’t have to bear.

levgen Saveliev [00:44:38]: Thank you for this word. Actually, serene is pretty much what we want to feel our customer, to be serene and to run the businesses. Thank you. I think it’s a good kind of not final line, but just a small break. We can make it in some time and to proceed this discussion because there’s so many things I want to…

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:45:03]: Yeah, actually, we just pinned the skin of the apple.

levgen Saveliev [00:45:11]: Right. And I see all your interviews actually on Twitter. I browse it and I see how many activities you do on a regular basis. And I hope you’ll be kind enough to proceed this discussion with us maybe next month or sometime.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:45:30]: Yeah, we surely will make a decent summary and post it on our LinkedIn pages so that our viewers can relate to what we’ve discussed here.

levgen Saveliev [00:45:42]: Yeah, it’s a great pleasure, Jason. I’m very happy. And we are happy that we had this kind of not an interview it was just a friend chat.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:45:53]: It was a discussion.

levgen Saveliev [00:45:54]: Yeah. It’s a great thing.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:45:56]: Thank you very much.

Jason Barnard [00:45:57]: Brilliant.

levgen Saveliev [00:45:57]: And the cat, it’s kind of blessed our… Blessed our approach, it appears like in memos.

Myroslav Khmarskyi [00:46:07]: It’s time to feed me.

levgen Saveliev [00:46:09]: Go.

Jason Barnard [00:46:12]: She’s a lovely cat and she’s very well behaved. And she can just sit here as long as she’s not far away from me. She’s happy.

levgen Saveliev [00:46:17]: Wonderful. Great, Jason. So we wish you a great time with your close ones and with the cats and to mow smoothly in what you’re doing. And we hope to see you soon. One of our interviews.

Jason Barnard [00:46:30]: Thank you. Thank you both. That was delightful.

levgen Saveliev [00:46:33]: Indeed. Thank you, Jason. Okay.