Google Knowledge Graph: Online Reputation Management feat. Jason Barnard
Jason Barnard explains how you can make your Online Reputation Management effective and preemptive in detail. Find out exactly what you need to do and how it works.
Knowledge Panels are “understanding”… and control of them gives the entity control (or heavy influence) on what Google understands, presents to the world. It seems too that by getting Google to understand, topicality and relevance for specialist topics is becoming a big thing!
Full story: https://fajela.com/seobox/orm/
Video by: Olesia Korobka. Host: Olesia Korobka. Guest: Jason Barnard. December 16, 2021
Reputation Management Through Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels
[00:00:00] Olesia Korobka: Hello, Jason.
[00:00:11] Jason Barnard: Hello, Olesia.
[00:00:13] Olesia Korobka: So we are going to talk about Online Reputation Management with Knowledge Graphs on Google. Most people don’t understand how these properly work together. They think that most of the negative SEO and negative Brand SERPs results are cleared away with the proper backlinks or managing some stuff around that.
[00:00:35] Olesia Korobka: And what can you say about that? So is there any application with what you do to help people manage their reputation online better?
[00:00:44] Jason Barnard: Right. My approach is very much proactive Brand SERP and Knowledge Panel Management. The idea is that if you organize and control what Google is showing when people Google your Brand Name or your Personal Name, you really can easily control the reputation.
[00:01:03] Jason Barnard: The reputation for me is an added bonus. So I don’t come from an Online Reputation Management perspective. But what I think is happening now is that once you control your Brand SERP and all your Knowledge Panel, you can control what appears, what doesn’t appear. You can basically tell Google, educate Google what you want it to show your audience about you.
[00:01:30] Jason Barnard: And so there is Reputation Management, but it doesn’t come from a negative point of view. It isn’t saying this is bad, I need to get rid of the bad stuff. It’s saying, I want this to represent me correctly, positively, accurately, and convincingly. Now, when you’ve got something negative on the Brand SERP, traditionally what ORM, Online Reputation Management, experts will do is create new content to try to drown it.
[00:01:56] Jason Barnard: That can be helpful, but I would argue it isn’t ideal. The problem with new content, of course, is that new content won’t have any historical value in Google’s eyes. It won’t have back links. So that’s an awful lot of work that you need to do to put into getting that to rank. But if you look at page two of your Brand SERP, you can find all the stuff that Google is ranking, but it’s not convinced a hundred percent that it’s really representative of you.
[00:02:24] Jason Barnard: All you then need to do is convince Google that that content, that great content on page two represents you, and Google can push it up onto page one which would then push the negative content down and off. Page one onto page two. I call that leapfrogging. It’s taking great content that’s underneath that bad result, promoting it, doing some SEO for others.
[00:02:46] Jason Barnard: Do the SEO for somebody else, push their page up onto your Brand SERP, pushing that bad content off, solves your problem. And it’s much more effective, much more efficient, much more honest than creating brand new content, bespoke content, and also when you create bespoke content specifically for that reason, your audience isn’t necessarily interested. Google will tend to figure that out for itself because it wants to show your audience things that are valuable and helpful to them when they are searching your Brand Name.
Why Wikipedia Isn’t Always the Best Strategy for Online Reputation and Knowledge Panel Control
[00:03:17] Olesia Korobka: What do you think about Wikipedia? Would creating a page in Wikipedia help with managing your reputation online, or is it sometimes not necessary and sometimes even misleading?
[00:03:30] Jason Barnard: Right. Well, Wikipedia. That actually is a really nice segue into the right rail, which is the Knowledge Panel.
[00:03:37] Jason Barnard: First of all, Wikipedia will tend to rank page one when there is a Wikipedia article about the entity, which means if that Wikipedia article is negative or inaccurate in any way, it’s gonna rank and it’s very difficult to get rid of. So you’re taking a risk. If you go down the Wikipedia route, you are allowing the Wikipedia editors to say what they want about, you don’t have direct control.
[00:04:01] Jason Barnard: So you’re taking a risk if you go down that route. Now, what a lot of people say is, if I create a Wikipedia article, I will get a Knowledge Panel. But the problem with that is that you get a Knowledge Panel on the terms of Wikipedia. Whatever Wikipedia says is going to be taken to be truth, which means you lack control.
[00:04:22] Jason Barnard: Now today, about 50% of Knowledge Panels are driven by Wikipedia. That means 50% aren’t. That means you don’t need Wikipedia. And Rand Fishkin actually had his Wikipedia article deleted because he said, I don’t want some Wikipedian controlling my brand message, controlling the truth about me or my Brand SERP, and I think Rand Fishkin was right.
[00:04:48] Jason Barnard: I don’t think Wikipedia is a great way to go forward. Now talking about Reputation Management, I have a client who in their Knowledge Panel, it actually says, what is their annual revenue? And the fact is wrong. And they say, we want to get rid of it. The solution to that, of course, is what Google has taken the information from a third party source, that third party source has got it wrong.
[00:05:15] Jason Barnard: In this case, it’s not Wikipedia, but it could have been Wikipedia. The answer to that problem in terms of reputation is to provide that information on your own site, optimize that information, that page. It will then rank for that specific query, and it will probably appear in the Knowledge Panel, which gives you control.
[00:05:33] Jason Barnard: So reputation in the Knowledge Panel becomes incredibly important, especially now in the Knowledge Panel. Not only do you have the facts, but you have what I call entity statements, which are basically questions people ask with the answer in the Knowledge Panel on the right hand side. And that is presented as fact by Google.
[00:05:50] Jason Barnard: So if somebody says, or one of the questions that Google is showing in that Knowledge Panel is for example, let’s think of a company, is the SNCF legitimate? If I let somebody else answer that question, that will appear and it could potentially be negative. If I answer the question on my own site, I give myself a very good chance of getting that answer, my answer in my own Knowledge Panel, controlling it and not having that reputation problem.
Turning Competitor Visibility on Your Knowledge Panel into a Strategic Advantage
[00:06:25] Olesia Korobka: You know, at the Knowledge Panel at the bottom there, they sometimes list your competitors.
[00:06:30] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:06:30] Olesia Korobka: Can you get rid of that? Should you be getting rid of that?
[00:06:35] Jason Barnard: You can’t get rid of it. You can influence it indirectly. It’s really tricky. The problem with that is it’s based on multiple things, one of which is user activity. Once Google starts showing them on your Brand SERP underneath your Knowledge Panel, if users are clicking on them, if users are interested, Google will tend to leave them. The second is if Google sees a close relationship that it thinks is significant and valuable and relevant, it will keep showing those related entities so that in those two cases, you are really struggling to get rid of them. You need to demonstrate to Google that another entity is more closely related to you than the entity it’s currently showing. And that is very difficult to do. But if you look at it the other way around, if your competitors are showing on your Brand SERP, you presumably can easily show on their Brand SERP.
[00:07:30] Jason Barnard: And from Google’s perspective, that’s really logical. It’s saying here’s a company, you’ve searched for Kalicube. And it will show you equivalent companies that it thinks you would be interested in. That’s a good experience for the user. Not a good experience for you as a marketer. But what you can then do is say, well, if, for example, SE Ranking is showing on the Kalicube, people also search for potentially, I can show on SERP rankings and I can leverage SERP ranking to me just as much as they can leverage from me to them.
[00:08:03] Jason Barnard: And if I’m smart, I can really take advantage of it by doing a better job or a great job to valorize my brand in their SERP, which is, I would argue, an opportunity, not a loss.
Stay Ahead with a Strong Brand Profile
[00:08:18] Olesia Korobka: Another question. So back forward, backwards a bit.
[00:08:21] Jason Barnard: Let’s backtrack.
[00:08:22] Olesia Korobka: Yeah, backtrack. So people often start thinking about their reputation when they really have lots of problems already.
[00:08:29] Jason Barnard: More fool them.
[00:08:30] Olesia Korobka: Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, sorry. But maybe they should prepare in advance, especially big companies, some corporations though. Is there any way you can prepare for possible negative feedback in the future or possible negative attack? So what can they do in terms of their Knowledge Panel, Knowledge Graph. What Google knows about them to be strong enough to withstand better if they meet any consequences in the future.
[00:09:02] Jason Barnard: Right. Well, this is what I was talking about with proactive Online Reputation Management. And I actually don’t really like the term Online Reputation Management, but what I do like is saying it’s up to us all today to take control of our own brand message that Google transmits to our users, our audience, that who are Google’s users.
[00:09:22] Jason Barnard: So if you consider that Google is projecting what it thinks is our correct brand message to its users, then we need to make sure that Google’s correctly understood it and we should start today. We shouldn’t wait until there’s a problem, because when there’s a problem, it’s really difficult to deal with.
[00:09:40] Jason Barnard: You would expect with bad results coming up on your Brand SERP, you would expect six months of work to get rid of it completely. But if you’ve spent two years gently, easily simply building up what I would call a buffer, page one, page two, page three, totally controlled, totally great for you.
[00:10:06] Jason Barnard: It’s very difficult for that negative content to push through this incredibly representative layer. And the other point is that if you have managed to fix in Google’s mind who you are, what you do, who your audience is, and that you are trustworthy and you are a good company who serves that clients, it doesn’t have the motivation to push that negative content up onto page one because it doesn’t represent you.
[00:10:30] Jason Barnard: Because you have convinced Google. You’ve educated Google about how great you are. You’ve made sure that it’s got that balanced message, understanding who you are, what you do, who your audience is, and that you are credible. So from Google’s perspective, if one piece of bad information turns up, it will ignore it if it has enough solid information that proves that you are authoritative and credible for its users. So that buffer is not only a buffer of results, page one, page two, page three, on the Brand SERP, it’s also a buffer of confidence that Google has in your good name. It’s up to you to build up the buffer, physical buffer on the Brand SERP and the psychological buffer of Google’s incredible confidence in your glory.
Building Your Brand Message on Your Own Website
[00:11:23] Olesia Korobka: And, how do you do that? How do you build that?
[00:11:27] Jason Barnard: Good Digital Marketing.
[00:11:29] Olesia Korobka: Yeah. But where to start? So here I am, I have a company, what do I do? So where, do I begin?
[00:11:36] Jason Barnard: Well, you start at home. You start on your own website, you start by thinking, what are the things I need to communicate to Google? And you start by communicating them to Google on your website.
[00:11:46] Jason Barnard: So you make sure that every piece of information, every part of your brand message is communicated clearly, concisely and intelligently on your own website. And then you build out from there.
Essential Pages for Your Website
[00:11:58] Olesia Korobka: Should I do that on every page or should I pick only one page for that?
[00:12:02] Jason Barnard: Well, it depends. I mean, I would advise you need an about page that about page needs to state who you are, what you do, who your audience is.
[00:12:09] Jason Barnard: Then you need a page, let’s say for reviews that states why your customers are so happy with you. There may be another page that says in the press where you show all the press that you’ve had this glorious press and you point out to it and you show Google. You say, look, they’re talking about me. They’re talking about me. They’re talking about me. I am credible. I am authoritative. So it depends on the company, but you need to build a series of pages, preferably in one silo, that really explain to Google and convince Google once again, who you are, what you do, who your audience is, and why you’re credible, why you’re a credible, trustworthy solution for its users.
[00:12:46] Jason Barnard: If you can do that, you’ve given it the baseline, you’ve given it, this is the basic message I have, and then you can build on it by pushing corroboration. And corroboration is for everything on any other sites, all other sites that are authoritative around you. So it’s building out from your own website, this self-fulfilling perpetuation of the message that you are giving on your own website.
[00:13:15] Jason Barnard: Incredibly powerful and a really good trick if you want it, and you want to know what is the priority. The priority is whatever’s appearing on your Brand sERP in order. You go through it in order. It’s really simple. Whatever’s at the top is considered to be most important to Google. Your homepage, sort it out. Your site links, sort them out. Your social profiles, sort them out. Crunchbase, sort it out.
Efficient Brand SERP and Knowledge Panel Management in Kalicube Pro
[00:13:40] Olesia Korobka: Do you have that in Kalicube Pro?
[00:13:42] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:13:43] Olesia Korobka: In your tool. So how it’s organized in your tool.
[00:13:46] Jason Barnard: Well, we have two sides, one of which is the Knowledge Panel, one of which is the Brand SERP. The Brand SERP side just goes through the Brand SERP. Line by line and says, do this, do that, do that, do that, and you just do it in order.
[00:13:59] Olesia Korobka: So someone who needs to organize that properly, they can use your tool, kalicube.pro.
How Kalicube Makes Knowledge Panel Management Faster and More Effective
[00:14:05] Olesia Korobka: They can see the URL on the screen and they can go there and it’s basically the checklist of what they need to do, right?
[00:14:12] Jason Barnard: Exactly.
[00:14:13] Olesia Korobka: So it’s the full checklist. So if they, go sign up, they will have the full checklist of what they need to do themselves.
[00:14:21] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And that’s a really good point because a lot of people tell me, I don’t need Kalicube. I can do it myself, which is true. I can just look at my Brand SERP and go through it and do it one by one, which is fine. same thing for the Knowledge Panel. Getting a Knowledge Panel, it’s a three step process.
[00:14:34] Jason Barnard: It isn’t very complicated. Takes a lot of work, but yes, you can all do it yourselves, that’s fine. And I’m not hiding anything. I’m not kind of keeping my secrets to myself. The power of Kalicube is to make it faster, more efficient, easier, and more effective for you because what we do is then say, right, we’re gonna organize it for you.
[00:14:56] Jason Barnard: So you can actually just use Kalicube, and you can keep track of what you’ve done, what you haven’t done, and then we’re gonna track both your Brand SERP and your Knowledge Panel and your presence in the Knowledge Graph over time so you can measure how well you’re doing. So with the buffer I was talking about earlier on, for example, we can show you now have a three page buffer.
[00:15:12] Jason Barnard: You have a two page buffer, you have half a page buffer so we can, it’s not only organizing your work, it’s providing measurement and tracking that you can then report with and you can reassure yourself with. And it is also an early warning system because what happens when your three page buffer suddenly becomes a two and a half page buffer?
[00:15:32] Jason Barnard: You’ve got a problem on the horizon. Sort it out now before it hits page one because these things creep up. So you just need to keep an eye on it, and that’s what Kalicube does.
The Role of Schema Markup in Boosting Google’s Confidence for Knowledge Panels
[00:15:42] Olesia Korobka: So we don’t need to talk about this whole checklist. There’s no point in it because it’s kind of a routine that one can easily access in Kalicube Pro.
[00:15:51] Olesia Korobka: But, we’ll talk about something else, for example, about Schema. What’s the role of schema in maintaining your online reputation or in terms of Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Panel?
[00:16:04] Jason Barnard: Schema is, I mean, I like to suggest a lot of people look at schema and think it’s just a way to get the pretty features in SERPs. That’s fine, but that is really only the tip of the iceberg. It’s the cherry on the cake. It’s the icing, the cake itself, which is Schema Markup. What it does is it explains to Google what it is you are trying to communicate in any given page in Google’s native language. So it’s taking the content of the page and wrapping it up or reiterating it in Google’s native language. Now, why is that important? Because Google’s probably understood what’s in your page. Google’s pretty smart. Let’s say it’s 40% confident. You add Schema Markup, you are adding a reiteration of what you’ve already said in the page that Google’s already understood, and that reiteration in its native language, that it can digest natively, will boost its confidence, let’s say to 70%.
[00:17:04] Jason Barnard: And confidence is incredibly important for Knowledge Panels, for the Knowledge Graph, for Brand SERPs and for any SEO. If Google is confident in anything, it will rank. And so in this context, what we’re do using Schema for is to boost Google’s confidence in its understanding and potentially give it details that we didn’t necessarily say in the page.
[00:17:29] Jason Barnard: The other incredible powerful thing about Schema Markup, and as you can see, I’m getting into the big chunky cake, the cherry, which was the nice elements on the SERPs, the Rich Elements on the SERPs is not the main name because what we can do with Schema Markup is every time we say something, we were talking earlier on about stating facts like revenue reviews, who I am, who the CEO is, whatever it might be, you can point using same as to all the corroborative sources that prove what you’re saying. And once again, confidence. Now what we have is without Schema, we were 40% confident. With Schema, we become 70% confident because Google has seen a reiteration in a language it understands natively. Then we point out to the corroboration, it says on all these third parties say the same thing.
[00:18:16] Jason Barnard: We’ve now got to 90, 95% confidence. Google is incredibly confident in what that page contains and what you are trying to communicate with the content in that page that goes for your about page, your reviews page, the CEO page, the board page, but any page which you are doing SEO on, building Google’s confidence is absolutely key throughout SEO and not just on Brand SERP and Knowledge Panels.
Boosting Reputation and Knowledge Graph with PR
[00:18:44] Olesia Korobka: Building a PR, a strong PR around your company is inevitable in case when you are trying to manage your reputation?
[00:18:53] Jason Barnard: Right. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people go into this and say, right, I’ve got a reputation problem, so I need some pr, and they start from that aspect.
[00:19:01] Jason Barnard: I say, get your PR to boost Google’s confidence in its understanding of you, and in fact that PR, proactive, preemptive PR is gonna save you the effort down the line when any kind of problem does appear. And the other thing about PR, it’s not just about Reputation management, it’s also about the Knowledge Graph and Google’s understanding of us in the Knowledge Graph.
[00:19:21] Jason Barnard: What happens with the Knowledge Graph confidence score? If you’ve ever looked at Kalicube Pro, the free tool, you can look up in the Knowledge Graph using the API from Google. Whether some an entity is in the Knowledge Graph or not, and what confidence Google has. Now, what tends to happen is you will get this in, you’ll get the presence in the Knowledge Graph.
[00:19:39] Jason Barnard: You’ll build up a confidence score. Let’s have a thousand, which is a good score. That’s based on the information you have provided and the corroborative sources you’ve indicated to boost beyond that thousand takes PR, news coverage, recent events, recent things that are being talked about on authoritative expert site within your niche.
[00:20:00] Jason Barnard: So the PR is necessary just to build up the Knowledge Graph presence. It also plays off into the proactive ORM we were talking about earlier on. It also helps your PR brings in new clients. It’s a win, win, win win, win win situation.
How to Prioritize the Right Targets for Your Industry and Entity Type
[00:20:17] Olesia Korobka: You were talking about that you need good reputable sources for that.
[00:20:21] Olesia Korobka: How do I pick them up and how that’s different from building backlinks?
[00:20:24] Jason Barnard: I personally don’t particularly like building backlinks. I don’t think it’s something we need to do. Mentions are fine. The point about all this is if I mentioned a press section earlier on, you don’t need a backlink from the Guardian or the Times or the New York Times, you can actually just have it on your press page and point to it using same as, or a link or direct link to them say, yes, that is about us. And that’s absolutely fine. That helps Google to understand that this article is actually about us, we can corroborate it ourselves.
[00:20:56] Jason Barnard: So getting a link back from them is not actually necessary, from a Google perspective, at least. Beyond that, the idea of PR is aiming at the right targets and the right targets and PR are the ones that are most relevant to your audience. Now, what we do at Kalicube Pro is we will take what we call Equivalent Entities.
[00:21:20] Jason Barnard: We will take a hundred Equivalent Entities. An Equivalent Entity is an Entity, same type of Entity, a person, a brand, a podcast, a music album, a product that’s in the same geo region and in the same industry. And we take those and we analyze them and we find what is ranking on the Brand SERPs, what is appearing in the Knowledge Panels, and then we can identify which of the sources Google is looking at, which is the, are the sources that Google is promoting, prioritizing within that industry.
[00:21:51] Jason Barnard: And once again, industry geo entity type. That’s when you get the valuable information. We had a client who was an NFL player in America and they needed news. They needed some news to boost his visibility, his career and they asked me. They gave me a hundred NFL players. We pushed them all into the Kalicube system and we came up with the top news sites, the top video sites, the top social sites, and they could then go to the news sites and they could pitch their PR to the top five news sites for that industry, that entity type in that country, i.e. an NFL player in America. What that meant is that they only had to pitch five companies to get the news, to get the three pieces of news they needed to boost his career. Instead of 20, they usually had to aim for because we could prioritize it because we knew which news outlets ranked within this industry for that entity type in that geo region.
[00:22:59] Jason Barnard: And we could tell them this is the order of importance, this is the order of priority, this is the order that Google is looking at, from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, which is in my opinion, immeasurably useful because you know you’re aiming at the right targets when you do your PR outreach.
[00:23:23] Olesia Korobka: Yeah, that’s good.
[00:23:24] Olesia Korobka: That works. Question from me personally.
[00:23:28] Jason Barnard: I like kalicube.
[00:23:29] Olesia Korobka: Yeah, I like Kalicube too. I recommend anyone who’s listening to go and sign up for Kalicube because it’s the best tool you’ll ever find.
[00:23:37] Jason Barnard: Oh, I’ll go and do that now.
The Dangers of Overusing “SameAs” in Schema Markup
[00:23:40] Olesia Korobka: What I wanted to ask you personally from myself, I’m often seeing people spamming with the SameAs attribute in the Schema Markup mentioned same as and they have thousands sometimes.
[00:23:52] Jason Barnard: Right. I can tell you a couple of things about that. It’s totally counterproductive. Using mentions, nos, whatever it might be, you can think. Oh, I’ll just put as much in there as I can but what you end up doing is throwing so many entities at Google that it just doesn’t make any sense anymore. You need to, for mentions for example, I would say between four, six, maybe eight top mentions, because you don’t want to disperse the message too much. What are the eight, maximum eight, four to eight entities that actually matter to this page?
[00:24:23] Jason Barnard: What are the eight entities that identify the topic of this page, what we’re talking about, and the validity of what we’re saying? And the spamming of the same as I can give you an a direct example of that. I know somebody who spammed SameAs who pointed to all these different sources thinking this is absolutely brilliant.
[00:24:41] Jason Barnard: They lost their Knowledge Panel. Why? Because they were pointing to too many sources but didn’t make sense, didn’t corroborate, and or weren’t authoritative. So they thought, if I throw all of this information at Google, Google will figure it out. And what Google actually does is say, I’m not sure anymore.
[00:24:59] Jason Barnard: And what I mean if we, if we look at Google as a child, which I do a lot, and we’ll probably talk about that later when a child isn’t sure, it stops talking. When a Google isn’t sure, when Google isn’t confident, it says, I better not say anything ’cause I’m not sure anymore. So it disappears. Confidence is so important, and if you just throw everything at it, you’re gonna break that confidence because you’re throwing so much confusing, contradictory information at it.
[00:25:26] Jason Barnard: It’ll just get lost like a child. That’s not how you educate.
[00:25:30] Olesia Korobka: Do you know how the hill is called where we are filming this?
[00:25:34] Jason Barnard: That’s a very good point. It’s called Hill of the Child. Child Hill. So in fact, we are standing on Google. Google is a child. We are the responsible adults in the room. We need to educate Google.
[00:25:49] Jason Barnard: And today in Kiev, standing on Child Hill, we are standing on Google. Wow.
[00:26:00] Jason Barnard: Isn’t that cool? I love that.
Measuring Google’s Confidence Score and Kalicube’s Approach to Brand SERP Control
[00:26:06] Olesia Korobka: This confidence score, how is it measured? Is there any way you can measure it?
[00:26:11] Jason Barnard: We’re working on a score within Kalicube, which is going to measure. We’ve got a control score and a quality score for the Brand SERP. And I was initially using Google’s API confidence score to measure presence in the Knowledge Graph.
[00:26:24] Jason Barnard: But there are multiple problems with that, which is that not all Knowledge Panels are triggered by the main Knowledge Graph. Therefore, I can’t measure the confidence score for different verticals with Knowledge Graph, which means that my score doesn’t mean anything outside of that specific area. The other is that, as I said earlier, once you’ve got to a certain level, it’s news that’s going to make you that confidence score go up. And news actually isn’t a measure of understanding or confidence and understanding. It’s a measure of getting overexcited about this particular entity. I used the Beatles as a measurement stick, and what I saw was that, for example, John Lennon, had a confidence score that was fairly flat, and then in January 2021, it went right up.
[00:27:11] Jason Barnard: It absolutely shot up. What had happened in December 2020 was the anniversary of his death, so there was absolutely loads of news about him. So the confidence score and the Knowledge Graph went up. But in terms of what we are actually trying to do pragmatically and practically at Kalicube, that actually isn’t a helpful measurement in and of itself.
[00:27:34] Jason Barnard: We need other things to come into play, so we’re actually building a score that will measure both Google’s explicit understanding that it’s showing through its API, but also the Knowledge Panel. What’s being shown there? The quality of the knowledge, of the Brand SERP, the control of that Brand SERP, to bring it all together into one school that says Google understands who you are, what you do, who your audience is.
[00:27:56] Jason Barnard: It’s incredibly confident, and you are now able to start controlling what Google is showing your audience when they Google your Brand Name, which is where Kalicube is going from beginning to end. It’s saying take back control. You are the responsible adult. Educate Google. Tell Google what you want it to show.
[00:28:15] Jason Barnard: If what you want it to show is an honest representation of your brand or your person, Google will show it. It has no reason to show anything else.
The Relationship Between Confidence Score, Trust, and Brand SERP Representation
[00:28:23] Olesia Korobka: Is the confidence score somehow related to trust or correlated to trust? Can you measure the trust somehow with anything, with any tool or with any score, or make some assumptions about that.
[00:28:38] Olesia Korobka: Well, can there be any correlation?
[00:28:41] Jason Barnard: Well, I think this isn’t a question I’ve really dug into, but it’s a really interesting question from that perspective, because from my perspective, I’m looking at basically all of SEO is based on three things. It’s getting Google to understand what it is you’re offering.
[00:28:57] Jason Barnard: And being confident in that understanding, making sure that it thinks you’re a credible solution, which is the credibility, expertise, authority, and trust, which is the second one. And thirdly, providing the content to Google in the format that is relevant for Google’s SERP or Google’s usage for its users, be it on SERP or off SERP.
[00:29:16] Jason Barnard: So those are the three things you’re looking at. And the three things would need to be measured separately. Understanding and confidence in that understanding, credibility, expertise, authority and trust. And deliverability, usability for Google’s suitability is the correct word. I do apologize. The suitability of what it is you’re offering for Google’s product, which is its SERP.
[00:29:36] Jason Barnard: The suitability of what you are offering for Google’s users when users are searching for whatever term it might be. So if we come back, well that’s general SEO advice. If we come back to what we’re talking about, we’re saying understanding, confidence in that understanding, credibility, expertise, authority, and trust.
[00:29:54] Jason Barnard: And the third one is actually, is Google on my Brand SERP delivering my brand message as I wrote it? And I think that’s an important point is a lot of companies spend thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars creating a brand image and a brand message, and then don’t bother or don’t think to make sure that their brand message is reflected in their Brand SERP, which is foolish beyond belief because that Brand SERP is something their audience will see at some point in their journey.
[00:30:27] Jason Barnard: And once they’re a client, they will see it multiple times, potentially per day. When they’re searching to navigate to the site. So making sure that your brand message is being reflected in your Brand SERP is phenomenally important, vastly overlooked. And is the third aspect of understanding, credibility and representation.
Exploring the Multiple Verticals in Google’s Knowledge Graph
[00:30:48] Olesia Korobka: So you’ve mentioned that there are several verticals in the Knowledge Graph. Can you expand on that?
[00:30:56] Olesia Korobka: I think it’s somehow a new concept for people. They didn’t know about Knowledge Graph so much and now it appears there are like several Knowledge Graphs actually.
[00:31:05] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Which is actually logical.
[00:31:07] Jason Barnard: I mean if you look at Microsoft, I think there’s probably only one real Knowledge Graph and there are presumably other ones, but they’re really focusing on that one big one, which is why I think Bing a probably slightly better with their focus Knowledge Graph because they’re not dispersing their focus.
[00:31:21] Jason Barnard: Now, what I had noticed is that the main Knowledge Graph, what I will call the Knowledge Vault, which is the one the API plugs into. That’s the big daddy of them all. It’s where Google is going. It’s trying to fill this up with information, but it has multiple other data sources, more or less curated, that also contain knowledge and also have Knowledge Graph KGMIDs.
[00:31:46] Jason Barnard: And that would be Google Scholars, Google Books, Google Podcasts, Google Maps and the Web Index actually has a Knowledge Graph built into it. And each one of these is in a silo. It’s a several vertical Knowledge Graphs that don’t communicate between each other. And that means, from my perspective, and this is a guess, but I’m pretty confident, so the correct guess, Google is taking all these Knowledge Graphs, including Google My Business.
[00:32:14] Jason Barnard: And moving them little by little into the main Knowledge Graph so that it has one global source of information that it can refer to entities, relationships, attributes. That is where Google is going and that is where Kalicube is driving our clients, is saying, if you are in the books vertical, we are going to gradually move you and your books from that books vertical into the main Knowledge Graph because that is where the power lies.
[00:32:37] Jason Barnard: That is where you’re gonna get your return on investment.
Key Performance Indicators for Managing Online Reputation and the Knowledge Graph
[00:32:40] Olesia Korobka: In terms of all that said, what can be the KPI for anyone who is trying to work on their online reputation and working with Knowledge Graph at the same time. So how can they measure if they are effective or not? If they are doing the right thing or not?
[00:32:59] Olesia Korobka: What can be the KPI?
[00:33:02] Jason Barnard: Right. Well, I think online reputation without the concept of controlling the Brand SERP and the Knowledge Panel is short term. I would even say meaningless in the sense that if you’re just saying, I’m trying to drown this bad content, get rid of it, or make sure that it’s kind of pretty enough to get going with, but you don’t look at the underlying problems, you don’t look at the the overall situation, your overall digital ecosystem, then you’re making a big mistake because it’s gonna keep coming back and you’re not building on Google’s understanding, which is the foundation of everything that’s to come in entity-based SEO, and entity based-search.
[00:33:38] Jason Barnard: Now in terms of KPI, that’s exactly what we’re working on at Kalicube. We have a set of measurements, the quality, the control of your Brand SERP. We have a measurement for the Knowledge Panel and we’re building a measurement for Google’s confidence in its understanding, as I said earlier on. So we’re gonna have four or five different measurements that allow you to then track your progress, track that you’re actually moving forwards.
[00:34:04] Jason Barnard: But the fundamental thing you want to be able to boast is that you control what Google understands about you, that Google trusts you as a source. Now, I’ll give you one really great example. The day that Google uses the description from your own site in your Knowledge Panel and does it consistently, is the day that Google trusts you to provide information about yourself, and that’s the day you are really starting to win the war.
How Companies Can Get a Knowledge Panel
[00:34:33] Olesia Korobka: Imagine I have a company, I’ve all established one, and it has a website and it has some backlinks and it has lots of information but it doesn’t have Knowledge Panel. How do I make Knowledge Panel appear for them? Because it might be very important for some companies for different reasons.
[00:34:50] Olesia Korobka: How do I trigger the Knowledge Panel?
[00:34:52] Jason Barnard: If your company or yourself, you think you should have a Knowledge Panel but you don’t. The problem Google is having is what John Muller from Google calls reconciliation. Reconciliation is basically bringing that information together into one consistent whole that Google can actually make sense of and understand and be confident in its understanding.
[00:35:12] Jason Barnard: If we look at that as a plate, a China plate, Google has lots of fragments of this China plate that it’s found all around the web and it’s trying to piece them together into the full plate and it can’t do it. It doesn’t know how the puzzle fits together. It doesn’t have a reference. So what you need to do is give it a reference.
[00:35:31] Jason Barnard: You need to give it that plate, the puzzle all put together correctly with all the right pieces in all the right places. And that involves creating that plate on your site. On the about page on your site. You create the plate. You say who we are, what we do, who our audience is. You give it the CV of the company, the CV of the person, and you say, this is the complete plate.
[00:35:53] Jason Barnard: Then Google can take these pieces and it can say, I’ve put it all together and it makes sense. Okay, here we go. And if it was almost there, if it had almost got that plate right, you will trigger a Knowledge Panel pretty quickly in a couple of weeks. If it was quite a long way and it hadn’t been able to piece it together at all, or it had some bad pieces in some pieces that aren’t actually you, or it had got the pieces in the wrong place, or it didn’t have the sticky glue that stuck it all together correctly and it was all floppy and falling apart, then it will take something like three months because Google needs to actually reconstitute that puzzle and put it all back together again.
[00:36:30] Jason Barnard: So the steps are very simple. It’s saying, all the information is out there. I need to show Google how it all fits together. If I can show Google how it fits together, Google has a comparison to how it has fitted it together. Once it can fit it together and it’s confident that it’s fitted it together correctly, you will trigger a Knowledge Panel.
What to Do When Google Doesn’t Trigger Your Knowledge Panel
[00:36:49] Olesia Korobka: So if it’s not triggered, how do I find out that it’s incorrect? How do I debug?
[00:36:55] Jason Barnard: Right. Well, once again, if you think it should trigger, but it hasn’t triggered, it’s probably that there are some bad pieces, incorrect pieces. For example, if it’s found a fragment over here, let’s say on Wikidata or on Crunchbase, and the fragment is the wrong shape because it’s incorrect, the information is incorrect, it will be trying to fit this piece in and it won’t fit into the puzzle.
[00:37:16] Jason Barnard: So what you need to do is go and correct the source, Wikidata, Crunchbase, whatever it might be, so the piece correctly fits into the puzzle. And once you do that, Google has this full plate. So until you can get that full plate for Google, you will have a lot of trouble triggering that Knowledge Panel.
[00:37:35] Jason Barnard: Now, next question I’m sure you’re going to ask is how do we know which sources to look at? Which of the pieces that don’t fit? And this is where Kalicube Pro comes in. We look around the web and we look at what Google is looking at for you specifically. And we can prioritize which of these sources Google sees as the most important so we can prioritize which of the ones you need to correct.
[00:38:00] Jason Barnard: Once you have corrected those important pieces of information that Google already has, the fragmented plate and it can kind of put it together and it’s kind of happy. If you’re still not triggering a Knowledge Panel, then we can find the other sources where you are not present within your industry for your geo region, for your entity type, where you need to place the information.
[00:38:23] Jason Barnard: And once you’ve got that, then I like to say it isn’t a question of can you trigger a Knowledge Panel? It’s how long does it take, how much effort does it take, and as long as you’re aiming at the right pieces, correcting the right pieces, or if the piece doesn’t exist. In the case of this industry level question, you create the piece so that Google can fit it into the puzzle.
[00:38:45] Jason Barnard: And as long as you’re doing that, there isn’t a concept of notability here. Google isn’t saying they deserve it or they don’t deserve it. Google just wants to understand, and if Google can understand, it will trigger a Knowledge Panel. Now the next question along is, will the Knowledge Panel Panel trigger when somebody searches your Brand Name?
[00:39:04] Jason Barnard: And that’s a different question. The fact that it doesn’t trigger when somebody searches your Brand Name does not necessarily mean that Knowledge Panel does not exist. If you don’t find it, but you think it does exist, try typing about Brand Name or about Person Name that will tend to encourage Google to trigger the Knowledge Panel.
[00:39:22] Jason Barnard: And if that doesn’t work, then you can also use Kalicube Pro. With Kalicube Pro, we have means to find what I call Sprouts, which are the tiny little Knowledge Panels that just have the company name or the person’s name. But you can’t find in a Brand SERP because Google won’t show these sprouts because they don’t contain enough information.
[00:39:42] Jason Barnard: Bill Slawski writes about how Google decides to trigger a Knowledge Panel in a specific SERP. And a big part of that is do we have enough reliable information to trigger the Knowledge Panel, yes or no? And if they don’t have enough information to fill a Knowledge Panel and Knowledge Panels are judged in terms of enough information according to industry and entity type.
[00:40:07] Jason Barnard: So Google knows how much information it wants. For example, for an American footballer in the US it wants this much. For an author, it maybe only wants that much. So within each industry, we also need to build Knowledge Panel templates to understand how much information Google needs in order to want to show this Knowledge Panel to people.
[00:40:29] Jason Barnard: I’ll come back to the China plate idea as well because the analogy of a child is really, really useful here. Because Google needs to believe that you are telling the truth with your Entity Home with your China plate. And when you have that China plate whole, you explain to Google much like a parent explains to a child, then the child goes and asks the baker, the policewoman, the headmaster, the teacher.
[00:40:58] Jason Barnard: And if all of those people are saying contradictory things or aren’t explaining it in the same way as the parent. The child will be unconfident about that information and won’t really believe it. Google is the same. It needs all of these corroborative sources to repeat the information in much the same way you are giving it on your own site, and they don’t all have to give all the information.
[00:41:20] Jason Barnard: Each of them can give a little bit of information or parts of the information. Some of the information doesn’t matter because you’ve given it the plate to which it can compare it. You are the parent who can re-explain what everybody else has said. So we’ve got two analogies, the broken plate and the child.
[00:41:36] Jason Barnard: And for the child, the Equivalent of the broken piece of puzzle. The piece of puzzle that doesn’t fit is if the teacher is saying something different. And if you can correct that piece of information, the child, Google will become confident that what you have told it to start with is true, is reliable, is factual, and it can, I like to say, go and shout about it in the playground.
Google Cares About Understanding Not Popularity
[00:42:00] Olesia Korobka: Behind you, it’s the Museum of Ukrainian history. Hence the question I’m going to ask you, there is a popular belief that if you are not popular enough, you will not trigger Knowledge Panel whatever you do. Is that true?
[00:42:17] Jason Barnard: No.
[00:42:19] Olesia Korobka: So you don’t have to be popular at all.
[00:42:22] Jason Barnard: No. Well, everybody kind of assumes that Google’s a pseudo Wikipedia, which is foolish.
[00:42:28] Jason Barnard: Wikipedia has a concept of notability, and the idea for Wikipedia, and I agree with them, is what’s the point of filling an encyclopedia for humans with people, entities, things, companies who aren’t notable, who aren’t interesting to people. If people aren’t going to spontaneously search for a person or company, a music group, whatever it might be, there’s no real point in having them in a human searchable encyclopedia like Wikipedia.
[00:42:55] Jason Barnard: Google doesn’t have that idea of notability because it doesn’t have that problem. Google just wants to understand. Google is a child who wants to understand the whole world, and it doesn’t have any particular judgment on any particular part of the world that it wants to understand more or less than another.
[00:43:12] Jason Barnard: It’s just going to try to understand everything, so from that perspective, everybody can get a Knowledge Panel because everybody can be understood. And Google just wants to understand everybody because by understanding everybody, it’s much like it wants to crawl the whole web because it wants to have the best opportunity, have all the information possible in order to give the best results to its users.
[00:43:37] Jason Barnard: So from that perspective, don’t worry about notability in terms of being understood. Notability only then comes into play in terms of is Google going to trigger a Knowledge Panel? And then that comes to the question of when does Google trigger a Knowledge Panel? When you search brand name, it will trigger a Knowledge Panel.
[00:43:56] Jason Barnard: If it thinks that Knowledge Panel will be helpful and useful to the user i.e. It fulfills the intent of the user. So an author in Britain would trigger a Knowledge Panel in Britain. They might not trigger a Knowledge Panel in America because the author is not known in America. So that difference is incredibly important because for an American who doesn’t know who that author is, having a Knowledge Panel would not be helpful and valuable to them because their intent would not be the author.
[00:44:23] Jason Barnard: It would be somebody of the same name in America. Same for a company. Companies in America and the US have the same name, but they’re different companies. So it would trigger, theoretically, the Knowledge Panel for the British company in Britain, the American company in America. And that is good user experience because Google is hoping, expecting and wanting to fulfill the user’s intent.
[00:44:46] Jason Barnard: And the user’s intent is often geo local. The second aspect of Knowledge Panels is a Knowledge Panel can appear and then disappear. And that would imply that user interaction hasn’t been sufficiently high, which indicates users are not actually very interested in this entity, the Knowledge Panel and Google will put it away.
[00:45:07] Jason Barnard: It uses user interaction in the form of clicks particularly to decide whether or not to keep a Knowledge Panel. The last one is ambiguity, and this is where we come into the idea of dominant entities because if you have multiple entities with the same name, Google’s trying to think which one shall I show?
[00:45:27] Jason Barnard: I dunno which one they mean with the particular brand name or the person’s name. And then it will show a Knowledge Panel with C results about for the other entities. How does it decide which one gets the Knowledge Panel, which one gets the C results about, and which one maybe doesn’t show at all?
[00:45:43] Jason Barnard: It’s by dominance of that entity and the dominance comes from notability, confidence, and newsworthiness.
How to Disambiguate Your Company from a Similarly Named Entity in Google’s Knowledge Graph
[00:45:53] Olesia Korobka: We were talking about ambiguity and maybe you have seen examples when another company has a very similar name to my company and my Knowledge Panel has information from that company instead of my company. How can I tell to Google that this is not my company? So I’ve already told about myself. How do I tell them it is not me? So the other case around.
[00:46:21] Jason Barnard: There’s a really, really problematic situation, whereas it’s actually not possible in Schema Markup to say, this isn’t what it is. You can only say this is what it is.
[00:46:32] Jason Barnard: However, in Wikidata, if you have a Wikidata entry, there is a way to say this isn’t the same as the other one, a disambiguation, which I’ve used a couple of times with great success. The other thing, if you don’t have a Wikidata entry and basically you need to have both entities with a Wikidata entry and then say, this is not the same as this to disambiguate.
[00:46:54] Jason Barnard: So if the information that Google has got wrong is information from another company that your company also has, for example, revenue. If it’s taking the revenue from the other company and attributing it to yours, what you would want to do is take your Entity Home that we discussed earlier on and explicitly tell Google what your revenue is. Now, that’s a really good, solid signal if you have the Entity Home or if you’re building an Entity Home. If you are really early in the stage and you haven’t really got your Entity Home sorted out, the best way to do it is a site like Crunchbase, which shows specific information about the different companies.
[00:47:31] Jason Barnard: Create an entry for each of them. Make that information explicit in both of them, and make sure, and this is interesting for companies and for people, the date of creation of the company is the Equivalent of somebody’s birth date. The place of creation of a company is the equivalent of somebody’s place of birth, and that is the most important piece of disambiguating information you can find because it’s permanent.
[00:48:00] Jason Barnard: Google is looking for information that’s permanent on which to, let’s say, the rest of the information. So for a person to disambiguate between two people, there are lots of Jason Barnard in the world. There are lots of Jason Barnard in the UK. There’s only one Jason Barnard born on the 5th of June, 1966 in Leeds in the UK.
[00:48:25] Jason Barnard: That is a permanent piece of information that can never change the Google can rely on, and Google does rely on in order to disambiguate. And it’s the same for companies. The name of the company, the date it was created, the place it was created are things that never change. Whereas, for example, the head office will change frequently, where I live will change frequently.
[00:48:47] Jason Barnard: So you want to make sure that you’ve really got solid in Google’s brain. Those pieces of fundamental information that never can change, that are permanent pieces of information. Once you have that, you can start building the other information on top much more easily. So in our example, it will be saying, if I’m going to state what the revenue is on Crunchbase, I have to make sure that accompanying information is name of company, revenue, date of creation, place of creation, because that disambiguate for Google.
How Notability Influences International Knowledge Panel Presence
[00:49:20] Olesia Korobka: And you mentioned that you can trigger Knowledge Panel in one country, but it’ll not be shown, maybe not shown in another country. What should an international company or a person who wants to have international coverage do in their terms to make sure they are shown as often as possible?
[00:49:39] Jason Barnard: Well, for an international company that actually has an international presence, that isn’t a big problem because Google…
[00:49:44] Olesia Korobka: They have a head office in one country, but they want to have access to clients in other countries.
[00:49:49] Jason Barnard: Sure. Sorry. If it’s an international brand that’s recognized around the world, it will probably trigger. That’s a question of notability. Same for a person. If you want to have a Knowledge Panel trigger in every country, even though you don’t necessarily have a presence in that country, you need to make sure that the probability that somebody is searching for you is reasonably high or at least higher than the entities with the same name in that geo region, and that requires notability. So here we do have that concept of notability in terms of understanding who you are. Google doesn’t care about notability in terms of triggering a Knowledge Panel. Notability plays a great role because notability implies importance for the user and the probability that that user is looking for you and not one of the other entities with the same name.
Understanding the Role of Confidence Scores in Measuring Notability
[00:50:36] Olesia Korobka: How do we measure notability?
[00:50:39] Jason Barnard: Very difficult to do. There is one place where the confidence score in the Knowledge Graph API does come into play i.e. The notability that the confidence score would indicate importance, newsworthiness, notability, whatever you want to call it. So that would be a place where you would think that would be a good idea to build up that confidence score in the Knowledge Graph, because that will increase the probability of the Knowledge Panel triggering every single time.
Leveraging News and PR to Elevate Your Notability in the Knowledge Graph
[00:51:07] Olesia Korobka: Is there any way except for news to become more notable ?
[00:51:14] Jason Barnard: PR. You need news. You need recent news. I had a really interesting example. Google’s Knowledge Graph updates regularly and at Kalicube we track when it updates, the days it updates. And the biggest update we’ve seen so far was in 2019, I called it the Budapest update.
[00:51:35] Jason Barnard: And it was massive, absolutely massive. It changed so much in the Knowledge Graph. We were tracking it at the time, and since then we have never seen anything quite so phenomenally large. And what was interesting there is I looked into entities that I felt were equivalent to look at how that confidence score changed.
[00:51:56] Jason Barnard: Now, Marilyn Monroe is still famous, is still newsworthy, is still talked about a great deal. And her confidence score went right up. She was in a film with Montgomery Cliff, who at the time was just as famous as Marilyn Monroe, but today most people have forgotten him, or a lot of people have forgotten him.
[00:52:17] Jason Barnard: His score went right down. There wasn’t any recent news about him, no authoritative recent news talking about him. So the Knowledge Graph is incredibly sensitive to these, the newsworthiness. And we mentioned John Lennon earlier on. John Lennon’s death anniversary on December, 2020 caused his confidence score to go right up.
[00:52:38] Jason Barnard: Obviously he will always trigger, so the, there isn’t a question of whether or not John Lennon’s Knowledge Panel will trigger, but in the case of ambiguity where you have that problem, this is a great example of how you can get that to work.
Building Google Authority with Niche Blogs Videos and Events
[00:52:50] Olesia Korobka: So do you need to appear on the resources that appear on Google News tab?
[00:52:59] Jason Barnard: Yes and no. News is phenomenally important of course. But once again, at Kalicube Pro, we’ve got this to an art is, it’s not just news, it’s videos, it’s interviews, it’s articles about you on blogs. Its authoritative. Niche Interviews would be just as good as a BBC article if it’s truly niche, if it’s truly authoritative.
[00:53:21] Jason Barnard: And so what we do at Kalicube Pro is once again, identify these sources by geo entity type industry. And it goes from social, the social buzz around the entity, to news around the entity, to videos around the entity. Events are incredibly important. If the entity is involved sponsoring or part of or speaking at an event or multiple events, that tends to be something that really builds Google’s confidence because it understands events.
[00:53:55] Jason Barnard: Because of COVID, Google has got built up very, very quickly its understanding of events because it needed to be able to say, this has been canceled, this has been delayed, this has been pushed back. So events were a very powerful source of information for Google on which it can build that knowledge.
[00:54:13] Jason Barnard: So don’t just think about news, think about niche blogs, think about videos, think about events, think about books maybe. There are an awful lot of different places that Google can get this notability signal from. Make the most of all of them.
How to Connect with Jason Barnard
[00:54:30] Olesia Korobka: Okay, thank you. So Jason, where can people find more information about you, where they can connect and follow you? What are the best places for them to do that?
[00:54:40] Jason Barnard: Well, I’m The Brand SERP Guy, which I didn’t say right at the beginning. The idea of my job is that if you search my name, it tells my life story, it tells you who I am, what I do, who my audience is, and it gives you the choice of where you want to connect with me.
[00:54:57] Jason Barnard: So what I’ve done and what we should all be doing with our personal Brand SERP or our brand company Brand SERP is building up our Brand SERP to represent where we are, where we can be found, where we engage with our audience. So if you look at my Brand SERP, first is my site. Come and visit my site. You learn lots about me.
[00:55:15] Jason Barnard: Second is gonna be Twitter. I love Twitter. That’s why it ranks up there near the top. Then LinkedIn,then my company site, Kalicube. So Google is showing you a prioritized list in my mind of where I like to be interacted with, but it gives my users the choice of how they want to interact with me. My site, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, my company site, it’s up to you.
Kalicube Focuses on Building Tools and Strategies for Online Reputation Management
[00:55:43] Olesia Korobka: So if someone signs up for Kalicube Pro and has some difficulties, do you have the done-for-you service to help them out and sort it on online reputation?
[00:55:54] Jason Barnard: We do some client work. We don’t do a great deal. Our aim is to focus on building the tool, building our understanding, building out a series of techniques and strategies that allow us to control the Brand SERP and the Knowledge Panel and get agencies on board so that agencies can serve the clients directly. And we can really focus on helping those agencies help their clients.
[00:56:20] Jason Barnard: That’s the ideal circumstance for me because I think the value that I can bring and Kalicube can bring is understanding experimentation to get to the bottom of how we educate Google about who we are, what we do, who our audience is, and why we would be a credible solution for its users.
